Brad on foreign CEOs

Brad Templeton describes a good way to explain the current distribution of nationalities in the tech field:

I gave him one suggestion, inspired by something I saw long ago at a high-roller CEO conference for the PC industry. In a room of 400 top executives and founders of PC and internet startups, it was asked that all who were born outside the USA stand up. A considerable majority (including myself) stood. I wished every opponent of broader immigration could see that.

I agree with Brad that, at least in the software field, we benefit tremendously from foreign workers.

I suspect most observers would agree if they thought about it. You don't have to look just at executives. Walk into any software shop and you will see a large fraction of the workers who were born abroad. Futhermore, talk to any software developer about the job market, and it's not like they are hurting for work. If we sent all the foreign workers home, it's not like we'd have more American programmers at work. We'd simply have less total computer work being done.

It seems that software is getting swept up in laws and regulation that were developed with other fields in mind. If you follow the political discussions on the topic, it is always about lower-skilled jobs in fields where it is tough to start a new company. This depiction simply does not match computer science.

It's the same sort of thing that happens with research oversight. Research oversight is driven by the needs of medical research, and it just doesn't match the ethical issues that computer researchers face.

Visa restrictions strike again

The band Incognito is not visiting Atlanta this year:

We did all I could to make this happen, but my band and I were not given the deposits that were agreed and after much toing a froing severe delays to our arrangements and our visa applications has made our deadlines impossible.

American visa requirements are holding hostage all sorts of beneficial social activity. It stops economic, intellectual, and in this case cultural improvement.

Fay and I had a wonderful time hearing Incognito play in Switzerland. They are an extraordinarily international band, having members from several different continents. Maybe they'll have better luck next year getting past the American border control.

In praise of foreign workers

It's election season in the U.S., and the television is filled again with advertisements discussing foreign workers.

This is a large subject, but let me emphasize one thing: the ads have it backwards for software jobs. I want foreigners working with me. They are valuable members of the teams I've been on, and they create as many jobs as the take.

Whenever one of my coworkers has visa trouble, it's a real harm to the team. We lose lots of time, often days if not weeks, just due to the person filing papers, making phone calls, and travelling to offices. The national offices involved are far from friendly about the whole thing, either. They often keep bank hours, and they sometimes require presence in person. If you make any little mistake, the letters don't say, "You seem to have forgotten to file form IS-1042-T. Could you please resubmit it?" They are more like, "Get out, you rotten terrorist scum! If you aren't gone by tomorrow, your assets will be seized." This all leads to a situation where the person isn't in the best frame of mind to do good work.

Supposedly the point of this is to protect American workers. The economics behind that doesn't apply to software, however. Most of the ones I've worked with have a backlog of 5-10 times the amount of work they are doing that would be valuable to do if only they had a clone. When a foreign worker comes to the U.S. to work on computers, they don't knock someone else out of a job. They do one of those things that was previously being left on the table.

Moreover, having more people in the industry means that we all get smarter. They enrich the intellectual community. Smarter programmers are more productive, and more productive programmers make higher wages. Without foreign workers, we aren't as capable as we could be.

In short, I truly wish that most all barriers to foreign workers would be dropped in my industry. They're based on xenophobia and bigotry, and I'm embarrassed every time one of my coworkers must deal with it. If someone can get a computer job in the U.S., then let them come. They expand the pie by far more than they consume.