America's Genius Glut

I was shocked to read this as well. This summer I went to meetups where after talking with somebody new for five minutes, they would say, "By the way, we're hiring...", to which I would reply, "Yeah, so are we!"

About half of my classmates (in a Statistics PhD program) are foreigners. These are literally the brightest statisticians of their year from their respective countries, and making it even the least bit hard for them to stay in the US is a big mistake. We could use their talent!

There shouldn't be any problem getting good programmers if you are willing to pay more for them, train them, and entertain the possibility of remote work.

Without naming places and companies outside SV: it is not actually necessary to bring in H1Bs, put all their paperwork which must legally be displayed in a locked glass case and pay them a "prevailing wage" near the bottom of what people are making in the area for similar work with similar tools. It is also not necessary to hire people as "temporary contractors" to pay less tax while demanding a permanent commitment to a job done under close supervision. It often isn't necessary to require 10 years experience with all the exact tools you use even for junior positions. This stuff is not fiction, it's totally ordinary and it's happening all over the place.

I understand why someone with vested interests would want to bring down wages with increased supply. But this isn't a crisis of low supply, when everyone insists on having "the best" or on getting a great bargain. There is no good reason to report a shortage while there are smart and skilled people unemployed or working menial jobs all over the place.

> And I know many startups that are eager to get visas for people they want to hire, and would have zero interest in having employees that felt trapped at their company.

The problem is not that an employee would feel trapped but the nature of the visa means that there is also potential for exploitation of an employee. Working in an at-will employment state on an H1B is always inherently risky: If a green card holder or a US citizen gets fired, there is no big deal: You spend a week or two and find a job in this market. A H1B holder immediately goes out of status once they get terminated or laid off (or hell if the startup goes under.). I see tons of VCs/startup founders talking about making the visas easier for people they want to hire but there is little or no talk about strengthening the rights of the employees they want to hire. (I realize that they are guest workers and have little or no rights in this nation but still..)

I remember graduating out of school and finding it surprising that most if not all of the foreign-born students who graduated along with me flocking to large companies. Now that I have spent a year in industry, working in startups, I don't actually find that that surprising: I have seen enough people who worked at startups getting fired (sometimes due to incompetence and other times because team fit didn't exist and the fast moving nature of a startup means that firing is sometimes a better decision than not) and having to scramble around trying to find a way not to uproot their lives and family and move suddenly back home.

According to the editorial: "Salaries in computer- and math-related fields for workers with a college degree rose only 4.5 percent between 2000 and 2011. If these skills are so valuable and in such short supply, salaries should at least keep pace with the tech companies’ profits, which have exploded."

This is where a citation would be helpful. I might click through to Mr Eisenbrey's website a little later to see if I can find one.

"And I know many startups that are eager to get visas for people they want to hire, and would have zero interest in having employees that felt trapped at their company."

I agree. I think that there are two alternate universes to the H1B. Many of the good startups and large company have no interest in this kind of power over other people's lives - they use the system because it's the only way to get someone they think is talented into the country. They are often shocked to hear about the extent of the abuse in the underbelly of this visa. There seems to be universal agreement that the best approach would be to provide the visa or green card directly to the immigrant, with full mobility. Many of the easily circumvented protections (such as the prevailing wage requirement) would be unnecessary if the worker is allowed to quit his or her job without jeopardizing residency rights. If 90% of PhD grads who want to stay are finding a way to do so through a patchwork of (somewhat indentured) work visas anyway, why not just grant them direct residency rights? Unfortunately, there is so much bitter disagreement on other issues that it is hard to make progress on the areas of common ground.

On another front - I have linked in the past to a RAND study concluding that the American aversion to PhD programs "in science" is rational and market driven.

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

This paper convinced me that we probably shouldn't base public policy on the notion of a general shortage of scientists. I'm not saying we shouldn't grant residency rights (I actually think we should place a greater emphasis on skilled immigration in general), I just don't think we should do so on the notion that there is a shortage in these fields, as the evidence doesn't support that claim.

The RAND study lumps together such diverse fields that it may not be useful in evaluating the needs of high tech employers (computer science may have as much in common with marine biology as it does with non-science humanities fields in terms of the overall job market). However the recent Senate proposal isn't about the narrow band of degrees related to silicon valley, it is for all grad degrees in "STEM", so in this case, I think the data in the RAND report is relevant here.

I really hope this is the case, but the feeling is that the war is only for the top 5%-10% talent, and that the less than rock star developers will have a real problem in the future. I have read an article that had a recent "study" on this (we all know how those studies are accurate), but can't find the link in any case, so it remains just my opinion. (I'm a non citizen on a temp work visa, so I'm all for getting easier immigration paths, but still I think the risk to the local job market is not just giving more visas, the risk is better offshore / remote options in the not so far future, like faster bandwidth allowing 3D video conferences, remote presence robots, and simply growing improvement in offshore talent offering, this might sound funny now, but I'm sure a few years from now, YC will even fund a few companies that do it)

"(I had to go and investigate what the Economic Policy Institute was. Apparently it's funded by a consortium of labor unions. Odd that they would bother about this, since few to none of the jobs involved are union jobs.)"

Labor unions are trying to prolong their existence by moving upstream into hi-tech jobs, since their traditional base is disappearing. This is part of a long term strategy to unionize programmers, engineers, scientists, etc. It's really sad to compare the good unions did in the US in the early 20th century to their raison d'etre today.

This is an excellent point. There are enough engineers out there who reach a certain stage in their life (kids, family, bored of stupid "benefits" like xbox, free lunches and worthless stock options) basically say fuck you, pay me. It is not that startups can't find people at any price, it is just that really really good people could work on your interesting problem but they could also work on another interesting problem that pays them a market rate.

> Currently these "lotteries" are unwilling or unable to increase their payouts. Unless you can create a glut of customers/engineers that are somehow constrained from starting their own lotteries, I don't see why the lack of engineers willing to work at startups would change.

I don't know whether you made this point unknowingly or not: However, the whole deal with the way an H1B is designed right now is that it is close to impossible to start your own lottery. You have to sponsor your own visa which the way nascent startups work is close to impossible.