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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

No one is claiming there is a shortage of programmers. The shortage is of really good programmers. These tend to be people who have an innate love of and aptitude for programming. It's orthogonal whether they happen to major in CS in college. (I didn't.)

If the people with the greatest innate love of and aptitude for programming are evenly distributed among the world's population, 95% of them are born outside the US.

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Programmers evenly distributed among the world's population? That's almost certainly untrue. I can't imagine that Africa or South America or Central Asia have nearly as many programmers per capita as the U.S. or Europe. I doubt that even China or India (where about a third of the world's population resides) have as many programmers per capita as the U.S. or Europe, since large parts of those countries are still engaged in subsistence-level agriculture.

> No one is claiming there is a shortage of programmers.

Since no one else is challenging you on that assertion, look at the graph on page 3 in the paper published by Microsoft:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/download/presskits/citiz...

The lead sentence is:

"The United States faces a growing economic challenge — a substantial and increasing shortage of individuals with the skills needed to fill the jobs the private sector is creating."

The second sentence of pg's post is:

> The shortage is of really good programmers.

From your quote:

"... individuals with the skills needed"

Compatible statements, no?

Given the graph on that page, I wouldn't interpret it way way. At best, it's highly misleading.

I support immigration reform for top talent. I just have a low tolerance for BS.

The lead sentence is: "The United States faces a growing economic challenge — a substantial and increasing shortage of individuals with the skills needed to fill the jobs the private sector is creating."

This is a position paper from one of the greatest users of H1b visas on immigration reform. It's worth about as much as the fox giving advice on how to build henhouses.

That's true. Companies, and startups in particular, have increasingly realized that they want really good programmers.

Anyone who has ever sat in a hiring commitee at a not-so-good university will recognize this as only half of the truth: they may want A-class candidates, but will they come?

An A-class candidate will get offers from plenty of places, and they will demand good wages, generous startup funds, a job for the wife, access to equipment and so on. If they find the employer distasteful, they will leave because they can, and then all this investment will have to be written off, and there will be another search.

Consequently, there is some wisdom in inviting B-class candidates, because the chance is greater that they will come and will stay. A failed search is expensive as well, someone will have to pick up the teaching load, and there won't be a grant application that year.

This is a big problem for 5% of the employers.

The policy pressure will be just as effective for the other 95% of employers that are interested in keeping salaries as low as possible.

I find the crux of the issue is employer expectation. If it was lowered to 'have you used a console before?', there would be no shortage. If it was raised higher to say (junior level, mandatory 10 year experience), it would be exasperated.

So the real question is, are employers current expectations reasonable or not? I would guess that hiring a less than best engineer that can produce you wealth would be better than hiring no one and thus produce no wealth. It's a simplistic model, granted, and a less than best engineer may end up decimating your wealth with crap code but...who knows?

There is no shortage of people who have an innate love and aptitude for programming. There is a shortage of companies willing to offer training.

"If the people with the greatest innate love of and aptitude for programming are evenly distributed among the world's population, 95% of them are born outside the US."

care to back up that anecdote?

This is not an anecdote, it is a simple application of syllogism. 95% of the world's population is born outside the US.

US population is ~5% of the world population?

300 millionish * 20 = 6 bil. Pretty close.

So another way to frame Microsoft, Facebook and Google pushing for immigration reform - would be that they want to import all of the 10x programmers from the rest of the World?

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