Schmidt on federal policy

Eric Schmidt testified before Congress on its technology policy, and he tells the Washington Post that he is not happy.

Much of the issue he blames on age. For example:

And inevitably what happens is everyone says ‘yes,’ yet inevitably on the Hill you have an older gentleman or lady. The staffers—and the staffers are young—the staffers get it. They’re 25, 30 years old and they all get it. So that’s what we depend on. And of course we’ve hired ex-staffers as well. They all know each other. So that’s how it really works. And I believe what we’re doing is extremely defensible if it’s around ideas. I would have a lot of trouble if we in our industry started following the other kind of lobbying.

I'm not sure I agree. I know a lot of younger people that haven't thought through the horror that search neutrality will be if it goes through. I think there's a more fundamental problem computers are changing quickly. Search engines didn't exist twenty years ago, and twenty years from now, they will be completely different. How is it realistic for Washington to regulate something that completely changes every couple of decades?

I admit I appreciate his suggestion about how to improve the state of IT in the U.S. even further:

A classic example is H-1B visas. Now, the following arguments are so obvious, it’s hard for me to believe that anyone would believe that they’re false. These industries are full of very smart people. There are very smart people who don’t live in America. They come to America, we educate them at the best universities, they are smarter than I am, and then we kick them out. If they stayed in the country, let’s just review: They would create jobs, pay taxes, have high incomes, pay more taxes than the average American, and generally increase the GDP of the country. I hope my argument is clear, and if it isn’t I’ll start screaming about it. It’s the stupidest policy the government has with respect to high tech. So you have this conversation and people say “yes,” and you say, ”This is the single thing that you can do that will lead to innovation occurring in our country, and the future economic wealth of our country.” And then they don’t act.... It’s stupid. So my point is that if you want to get a sense of how to screw this up, to put it negatively, then make it harder for us to bring in the world’s smartest people.

Tell 'em, Eric!

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.

Universities behind borders

Ronaldo Lemos has a written a thought-provoking article about the role of non-Brazilians in a Brazilian university. He interviews Volker Grassmuck, a German professor working at a Brazilian university, who feels that the result is intellectually insular:

People read the international literature in the fields I’m interested in in. But without having actual people to enter into a dialogue with this often remains a reproduction or at best an application of innovations to Brazil.

That is what I would expect. Academics want to work with other academics in the same specialty, and you aren't going to be able to build such units if you can only hire from the immediate locale. The people you really want will be elsewhere, and the people you get will spend their time trying to emulate them.

I feel that the U.S. is currently too strict on foreign workers for our own good, but we seem to be better off than in Brazil. In the U.S., once they finish groping you and finish making sure you aren't going to take a job in manual labor, you can do as you will. In Brazil, they make you redo your Ph.D. examinations, much like American states do with professional certifications such as dentistry and accounting.

It all seems very dirty to me. If you want a good intellectual atmosphere, you need to admit people from all over.

Maintaining an intellectual nexus

It saddens me to read the comments about Scala Days on scala-lang.org. The only two comments are from people who won't be coming because of U.S. border inspections. It's not possible to tell how many people really avoid the conference because of this problem. What we know, however, is that potential attendees are weighing it in their decision.

Paul Graham has written a great essay describing the conventional wisdom about the intellectual nexus that is Silicon Valley. One aspect he emphasizes is immigration:

I doubt it would be possible to reproduce Silicon Valley in Japan, because one of Silicon Valley's most distinctive features is immigration. Half the people there speak with accents. And the Japanese don't like immigration. When they think about how to make a Japanese silicon valley, I suspect they unconsciously frame it as how to make one consisting only of Japanese people. This way of framing the question probably guarantees failure.

A silicon valley has to be a mecca for the smart and the ambitious, and you can't have a mecca if you don't let people into it.

I've written before that the effective workspaces I've seen all involve a mix of workers from all over the world. Making people work with only people who look like each other and have the same accents is much like only allowing marriages within one's own clan. You get better matchups if you let people date more widely.

The same is true for conferences. Ideas feed back on each other, with multiple sparks contributing to starting the fire. It often takes more than one good idea to make progress on something. Any of those ideas alone doesn't get you part of the progress. It gets you none. Concentrating people together is an essential ingredient to having a productive conference.

Unfortunately, border control, xenophobia, and general empowerment of the police have increased with every U.S. president since the fall of the Berlin Wall. You wouldn't know it from the news or from the talking heads, but if you do some brief web research you can verify it is true. The current president brought us airport gropes and is also responsible for the line, "Because of recent circumstances, the underwear was taken away from him as a precaution to ensure that he did not injure himself". I don't detect any trend in a positive direction.

I'm spitting into the wind here in the hopes that any change must start somewhere. Xenophobia is not just wrong, and it's not just unpleasant. It's making us dumber and poorer.

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.