The talented Mr Green: How FWD.us lost the tech moral high ground

http://pandodaily.com/2013/05/29/the-talented-mr-green-how-fwd-us-lost-new-york-elon-musk-and-the-tech-moral-high-ground/

by georgeflanit • 13 years ago

48 46 13 years ago

pandodaily.com

wavefunction2• 13 years ago

FWD.us is about depressing wages and playing domestic labor against foreign sources, while treating H1-B employees like indentured servants. I'd rather compete on actual merits than the artificial ecology created by the H1-B system.

We already have O and L1 visas, but apparently those limited requirements are too much. I used to wonder about getting contacted by a recruiter wanting to know if I was interested in a 2 month contract on the other side of the country for peanuts when I obviously have a history and apparent preference for FTE. Then I wised up.

jacoblyles10• 13 years ago

It's clear that a limiting factor on the growth of Silicon Valley is the availability of high-skill laborers. The labor shortage out here is insane. There are no unemployed competent computer programmers, and few unemployed incompetent programmers. Those that have jobs receive new job offers daily. On the flip side, founders find it very hard to stand out amidst the deluge of job offers to attract workers to their companies.

More high-skill immigrants would probably lead to more available jobs for natives, as more companies could find the labor they need to grow.

A low-skill immigration increase isn't necessary, and may hurt the Americans without a college degree who are already suffering in this economy from high levels of unemployment. But it is likely the only way to get Democrats on board for high-skill immigration reform.

sirkneeland• 13 years ago

Sounds like that is something the Democrats need to fix about themselves and their special interest groups, not that we have to fix about what's right

wavefunction2• 13 years ago

Real immigration reform would be adopting a point system like Australia or New Zealand. Various criteria are assigned a point value (which can be changed as needs change) and if the points threshold is met, the candidate is admitted.

But that takes away the power from the big FWD.us donors and puts it directly in the hands of the skilled individuals we're supposedly trying to attract.

We can't have that, can we?

mikeyouse• 13 years ago

Even the premise of the high-skilled laborers is flawed.. It would be great if small NextBigThing Co. could hire the talent, but more likely, there will be thousands of dubiously skilled 'coders' working at one of the many H1B factories. Look at the list[1] of where the Visas end up. The vast majority are at code-farms specializing in overcharging small businesses for poorly implemented frameworks. The rules and regulations around hiring are onerous and slanted toward established companies who can both pay 'market rate' (often based on misreported job titles) and who can navigate the paperwork. I seriously doubt that expanding these programs will have a positive impact on the ecosystem.

Now on hopefully a more productive note, if they revamped how the Visas are allocated to provide each company who applies with 1 H1B before offering 18,000 more to Infosys, there's a good chance of actual net benefit.

[1] http://www.visasquare.com/top-h1b-visa-sponsors-2012/compani...

MagicWishMonkey• 13 years ago

Engineers are seriously underpaid in todays economy. From a business perspective, quality engineers are dirt cheap (relative to the value they create) so there's no reason not to hire as many as you can as long as you have can keep the project pipeline full.

A few months ago I read that the average google engineer creates something like $50k/month in value for the company. He might get paid $150k/year if he's lucky, that's insane.

jiggy20112• 13 years ago

Skilled programmers being in demand and having options for employment for them sounds like a feature not a bug to me.

What is wrong with the guy who has spent years of his life honing is craft demanding a fat salary?

Programming seems to be one of the few professions where a junior employee is expected to turn up and be productive from day 1.

If the programmers available don't have the skills you need, invest in training them or mentoring them. Offer attractive wages and get applications from all over the country. Talk to the colleges about your requirements and see if they can work that into the curricular.

That eats into profits? Good, give the money to people with a higher propensity to consume and spread that love around.

CleanedStar4• 13 years ago

"the growth of Silicon Valley" - real meaning, "the growth of the profits of the heirs who own the majority of tech company stocks, are the VC limited partner financiers etc."

"There are no unemployed competent programmers". This has two meaningless adjectives - unemployed and competent. People working at McDonalds are "employed". Competent is a completely arbitrary concept as well, some people consider only 1% of programmers comptent. So this sentence is double meaningless.

My experience with HR at companies - if you dropped out of college in your senior year you're SOL - they want someone with a Bachelors. Sometimes even a Masters. They want an unbroken history of jobs going back to leaving college - if you decided to take a summer off and travel, god help you. Before you have even sat down to talk, they want references from your former 3 bosses, so you have to beg them for a favor to give you a recommendation - to a company which you might not even be working for. The interview happens during working hours, so odds are you'll have to take a vacation day just to interview at the place.

Then there is specialization. Knowing how heaps work or other elemental CS and programming concepts does not matter to the interviewer. Knowing Python in and out does not matter to the interviewer. Having a pretty good grasp of the Django web framework does not matter to the interviewer. What does matter is that they, unlike your company, use multiple databases with Django, so they will drill you on that. Oh you don't know how to select different databases in a QuerySet? That's it for you - next. Of course, you can go out of your way to learn this specific part of the framework, but then it will just be another specific part of Django you don't know. Or maybe they run CherryPy.

The real thing is companies used to actually train people. Now they won't wait a week for someone to get up to speed with some sub-specialization. So they leave the position open until they find such a person. This is not a shortage of people, it's a lack of desire to invest by investors.

thaumasiotes• 13 years ago

I have a (programming) job and live in San Francisco. I'm not receiving job offers on a daily, monthly, or yearly basis (or, indeed, at all).

What's making the difference here?

geebee• 13 years ago

You've put forward a standard defense of the program. It generally goes like this: there is a meaningful shortage, salaries for talented people are extremely high, the reason Americans are avoiding these jobs is lack of good education, not rational, market based preference for other options, these workers create jobs, they don't take them away.

Interestingly, everyone agrees with you, until you start talking numbers. Even Norman Matloff (google him if you don't already know) supports 10,000-15,000 visas for talented people.

The problems start at scale, which is when you have to start asking if the visas are displacing or deterring rather than simply enriching. Just keep in mind, almost nobody is actually arguing for no visas.

I think the best, most sober argument that displacement is occurring comes from the RAND institute (which is historically devoted to truly rational analysis of public policy questions). Their study was at the graduate level, but they concluded that the American aversion to STEM fields is a rational, market based response to poor pay and prospects relative to the other things well educated people can do provided they already have US citizenship (or a green card, something that allows free movement within the labor force).

http://www.rand.org/pubs/issue_papers/IP241.html

Here's a quote from one of the study's authors:

"The diminishing share of degrees awarded to U.S. citizens suggests that science and engineering careers "are becoming less attractive to U.S. citizens," said RAND, "or, alternatively, that U.S. citizens encounter more competition (from foreigners) in applying for a limited number of desirable spots" at research institutions, where foreigners have helped reduce research costs by holding down wages."

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/science/2009-07-08-scien...

No question the US workforce is enriched in many ways by high skilled people from overseas. But based on the objective research, I think it's pretty clear that we've done this at a scale, and implemented it in such a way, that we're causing meaningful displacement and deterrence for US citizens in STEM fields, especially at the higher (graduate) level.

In the long run, I think it would be terribly destructive to close to door to top talent from overseas. The part that frustrates me is that the FWD.us types don't seem to appreciate the reality and danger this kind of displacement and deterrence could have on the US. We need a healthy pipeline of domestic labor, and we need to keep this in balance. If you kill off the domestic workforce, you can't revive it on a dime if (and I'd say when) they day comes when we can't just wave the magic wand and get people from overseas.

CleanedStar4• 13 years ago

Of course you're right.

There's no debate over this question, like say, physicists getting together to debate quantum mechanics, in a desire to all get to the truth together. This is a fight, a struggle over how the pie gets divided up. Any statement someone makes is basically just a declaration of how there bread is buttered - are they a worker, a programmer, a creator of wealth? Or are they some parasite heir who collects dividends from Intel, or are a limited partner for some VC? Or worse a flunky for one of those types.

There's one question to ask, really. WHO came up with this law? Was it the programmers, DBAs etc. getting together pushing for these laws? Was it even the H1-Bs - who are chained to companies like a slave chained up at a plantation? Of course not. Whose faces do we see on the fwd.us page? Mark Pincus - fresh off of ripping his workers off of their options. Keith Rabois, Khosla partner - he was bounced from Square because he was playing grab-ass with one of his underlings who he was porking - the underling filed a lawsuit. Mr. Lace Curtain political mover and shaker himself Ron Conman - Conman is lace-curtain Irish, meaning he takes the dishes out of the sink before he pisses in it. Blah blah blah, VCs, "super-angels", incubatorers, current/former CEOs (Bill Gates) blah blah.

Really we don't even see whose pulling the strings. They love to shove some 20/30-something techie CEO like Zuckerberg or Drew Houston on there. But really it's all for the people the CEOs got their money from. Which is not even the VCs, because they're front men too. It's the heirs who give money to the VCs, the limited partners we never see. They're the kind of people Nixon said on his tapes that hung out at the Bohemian Grove, the San Francisco heirs whose hands he felt like washing after he shook it. Even Nixon felt disgusted by these heirs.

jacoblyles10• 13 years ago

Most of the bad press seems to be FUD against Keystone XL which works because of the rich California liberals who don't care much about energy prices. Is the lesson that no Silicon Valley PAC can ever come close to a conservative cause?

HistoryInAction2• 13 years ago

Right, most of the bad non-tech press seems like FUD. Liberals organizations used the controversy to build their email lists and raise money—that's how the system works.

But the issue was not the liberal anger. I assume that was reasonably expected and included in the calculus of making the ad strategy.

What wasn't expected was how such a proudly political strategy in the name of tech caused such a rationalist backlash against the 'crooked, dirty, corrupt' nature of the political system on the part of tech. Folks like Spolsky, Khosla, Miller—they weren't angry because of Keystone. They were angry because the ads didn't even bother to make the case for immigration reform. That we didn't have an argument capable of winning people over, so don't even try. That pissed people off, from what I can tell.

chalst• 13 years ago

I think the lesson is that, while you can have a bipartisan lobbying outfit, a bipartisan lobbying outfit that sweetens some of its membership with partisan campaigning against the views other members is going to land itself in trouble.

jongraehl3• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure that skilled immigration is a net positive for the economy (even below-median coder H1B, as opposed to the many awesome H1B working at top companies).

But it seems a tautology that increasing skilled immigration quotas will depress my salary. If quotas are decreased, then the spots will be filled with only the best immigrants.

That said, most of my favorite technical peers are foreigners. So my ideal, selfish scenario would be for my company to have the ability to easily bring in H1B or similar, while our competitors can't :)

Minimum wage immigrant labor, on the other hand, absolutely must not lead to full welfare-state benefits (if I've not been mislead about the lifetime cost of Medicare), or the U.S. will be impoverished in the long haul.

It's unfortunate that the lobby for increasing H1B spots (which is probably a net positive for the whole U.S., in spite of my selfish doubts listed above) is politically allied with increasing unskilled immigration.

hkmurakami2• 13 years ago

I was thinking something similar. On one hand we have wage depression of our domestic peers. On the other hand we have improved wages and opportunities for many of our peers abroad. We may complain about some of the things bigco does against us, but it is also true that many of our hacker peers are subject to much worse.

guelo• 13 years ago

You are wrong. Data shows that hard working unskilled immigrants are net payers into the social system. And they are a big positive to the economy overall. America became the world's superpower on the back of unskilled immigrants.

iSnow2• 13 years ago

They are a net positive not least because they are willing to work for less thereby depressing average wages. Great for the economy, even better for employers. Not quite as great for employees.

jacoblyles10• 13 years ago

It's not necessarily pubic programs that are the problem. Unemployment among low-skill workers is still high[1]. I don't see how increasing competition for unskilled jobs is good for those already struggling workers suffering from a low-skill labor glut. And intuitively I'd expect high-skilled workers to generate more complementary jobs than low-skilled ones.

Today's economy and the economy in 1920 or even 1960 don't much resemble each other. For starters, the costs of labor regulation and employer mandates sets a pretty high price floor on labor. That creates a much more difficult market for workers with relatively low marginal productivity to find work.

Also, the population has a far more top-heavy age distribution than it used to have. This country is going to need a very productive labor force to maintain the welfare state at anything close to the current tax levels.

[1] http://c4.nrostatic.com/sites/default/files/YL%20chart.jpg

jongraehl3• 13 years ago

I won't bother to call "[citation needed]" on this since I'm sure there are biased analyses out there on both sides, but consider lifetime cost vs. working years remaining. Maybe we're economy-positive on an 18 year old unskilled laborer, even. But most pro-immigration policy changes involve a lot of older folk coming along with in the long run, and not everyone who comes and stays makes enough to be a net positive from a tax POV (not even considering the retirement/medicare time bomb).

natrius3• 13 years ago

If I were Elon Musk, I'd abandon FWD.us too. Lots of people buy Tesla vehicles for environmental reasons, so funding ads touting policies that are perceived to be harmful to the environment would be a bad idea.

That doesn't mean the strategy is a bad one for FWD.us. Mark Begich will never oppose ANWR drilling. Lindsay Graham will never oppose the Keystone pipeline. The ads only serve as good PR for them to counter the bad PR they'll likely get for immigration reform.

The article cites Josh Miller's editorial that criticizes FWD.us. Here's another quote:

"...given that Mark Zuckerberg and the other technology pioneers who are behind FWD.us have risen to prominence by spearheading disruptive innovations, reverting to such traditional lobbying tactics seems like a missed opportunity for meaningful change. Technology companies live and die by how innovative their products are, our organizing and lobbying tactics should be no different."

How is that not textbook naivete? It's not a logically sound argument at all.

hkmurakami2• 13 years ago

The article title's reference to The Talented Mr. Ripley is strangely apt, having read the plot summary.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Talented_Mr._Ripley

josh2600• 13 years ago

Slightly tangential, but, holy shit, that's not a blog post, that's gold.

I have to wonder though about the ROI. That's a hell of an article and could easily be in the New Yorker or Rolling Stone. Even if it gets 1M hits, it's unlikely that the ad revenue will be anything like what Rolling Stone gets, right?

If you had content that was this good, what would be your monetization strategy?

tosseraccount• 13 years ago

Salon's take on billionaire lobbying : http://www.salon.com/2013/05/16/billionaires_partner/

"In April, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg unveiled FWD.us, a quasi-dark-money outfit created to give Silicon Valley a greater political presence in Washington. It has already raised $25 million."

Sailor's take : http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/05/mark-zuckerbergs-save-bil...

"I mean, if America's tech billionaires and mere centimillionaires (hectomillionaires?) can't lower programmers' salaries immediately, what possible economic incentive will they have to continue to be rich? It's Econ 101, people!"

The talented Mr Green: How FWD.us lost the tech moral high ground

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