Henry Dampier

On the outer right side of history

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December 28, 2014 by henrydampier 8 Comments

Paul Graham, You Can Open a Satellite Office

The other day, Paul Graham posted an especially weak argument for relaxing American immigration laws to make room for more elite programmers to be imported to startups in California.

Graham, unaccustomed to actually being opposed by anyone, opens his essay with a falsely dichotomous straw man:

American technology companies want the government to make immigration easier because they say they can’t find enough programmers in the US. Anti-immigration people say that instead of letting foreigners take these jobs, we should train more Americans to be programmers. Who’s right?

The technology companies are right. What the anti-immigration people don’t understand is that there is a huge variation in ability between competent programmers and exceptional ones, and while you can train people to be competent, you can’t train them to be exceptional. Exceptional programmers have an aptitude for and interest in programming that is not merely the product of training.

My suggestion would actually be to pay those American programmers more, because they are underpaid relative to their productivity. They need more generous stock options packages, higher salaries, and greater compensation for cost of living increases, especially in California. Investors need to be willing to give up more of their capital gains to technical talent.

This is part of what used to make Silicon Valley more competitive compared to alternative employers, but perhaps one of the greatest fundamental shifts in that industry since the last economic cycle is the over-compensation of investors relative to employees, and the shift in importance from the public stock markets to private gangs of insider investors.

It is convenient for California investors to blame Washington intransigence for under-performance, and certainly Washington is to blame for much, but part of the broader problem may be that the modern Silicon Valley-internationalist model is not a terribly good one.

Further, almost no elite programmers can be said to be ‘trained:’ John Carmack was a juvenile delinquent and mental patient. It’s just bad rhetoric to claim that the choice faced by American employers is either to change US immigration law or to magically train geniuses in a way that they have never been trained before.

And since good people like good colleagues, that means the best programmers could collect in just a few hubs. Maybe mostly in one hub.

What if most of the great programmers collected in one hub, and it wasn’t here? That scenario may seem unlikely now, but it won’t be if things change as much in the next 50 years as they did in the last 50.

We have the potential to ensure that the US remains a technology superpower just by letting in a few thousand great programmers a year. What a colossal mistake it would be to let that opportunity slip. It could easily be the defining mistake this generation of American politicians later become famous for. And unlike other potential mistakes on that scale, it costs nothing to fix.

Maybe so, but going back to the Carmack example, he made his own hub by forming a company around himself, and had no particular need to yammer with other geniuses over drinks, because people looking for his advice simply corresponded with the genius at a distance.

Mr. Graham might respond by saying that he’s speaking of merely ‘great’ programmers rather than geniuses, but that is only a difference of degree. While the genius comes up with an advance that is likely to impact multiple companies over a period of decades, you can at least build an entire department around the merely ‘great.’ But they must be selected in much the same manner.

Graham is demonstrating a belief in the Richard Florida theory of economic growth: that hip, happening urban centers chock-full of queers and artists are what generate economic dynamism.

Computer scientists like Jeff Dean do not result from a Richard Florida process. This ‘hub’ theory is ridiculous in light of the small number of geniuses there are, and their life histories. Geniuses are born and then possibly discovered: they can’t be manufactured.

The earlier version of Silicon Valley believed that much of genius was genetically innate. This would indicate that, to ensure an innovative future, you need to be better at producing smart babies, rather than importing them from foreign countries.

So, the real solution is to encourage artificial selection for intelligence, which would mean discouraging the most intelligent women away from the work force and towards the nursery. After all, from one woman, you can only ever extract one life-time of white collar work, but if you put her to having children, you can get her to produce the equivalent of multiple life-times of productive work through the miracle of reproduction.

Graham and his contemporaries will never do this, because they know what happened to William Shockley, himself an immigrant from England, for arguing for it.

My suggestion to Graham would be to encourage portfolio companies to open satellite offices outside of California, and better yet, to move out of California to wherever the talent is. This is not even out of the question for other elite American industries: investment banks in particular are known for setting up extensive satellite headquarters in foreign countries to better serve clients there, and to facilitate foreign recruitment.

This method gives the home country the benefits of foreign trade, without the downsides of importing a foreign population or needing to change domestic immigration laws. It would be a win-win for everyone involved except for lazy California investors, who, almost uniquely among the investing class, expect companies that they put money into to be within commuting distance of their insipid suburban estates.

Somehow, the far larger and more successful investment communities outside the Bay Area make do with first class travel around the world — maybe it’s time for Sand Hill Road to spring for gold club airline memberships like the other grown-ups and learn how to sleep on a trans-Pacific flight.

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Filed Under: HBD Tagged With: Silicon Valley

November 13, 2014 by henrydampier 9 Comments

Kill Whitey: Silicon Valley Edition

From the propaganda offices at Bloomberg News:

That can be part of the bargain for high-tech minorities, the female, black and Hispanic engineers in a business that’s been one of the greatest wealth-creation machines ever for white and Asian males. Medina got the advice Lloyd Carney always gives to newcomers. “I tell women and people of color directly, ‘Don’t you dare advocate for diversity,” says Carney, who’s 52, black and chief executive officer of Brocade Communications Systems Inc. “‘Your career would be over.’”

…

The diversity issue is being dissected and debated as never before, and industry leaders have been broadcasting their dedication to making pluralism a priority. Tim Cook was Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s CEO for three years before coming out as gay two weeks ago. Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella fanned the discussion last month when he suggested women not ask for raises.

The men and women solving the problem — by getting hired and promoted — can be the least comfortable talking about it.

Problem? What problem?

If Silicon Valley is seen as a suddenly new center of nasty science-based racism, this view is incorrect. HBD was widely promoted and discussed by Silicon Valley’s founders.

For the last few years, the unprincipled exceptions granted to Silicon Valley to practice illegal meritocratic hiring procedures have begun to be rolled back.

Meritocracy is actually illegal. Although social justice warriors advocating for equality in hiring may seem to be attacking a plutocratic power center from a position of weakness, they’re actually just agitating for the enforcement of laws that have been on the books and tested by ample precedent in other industries.

We can say that part of the reason why Silicon Valley has succeeded so much relative to the rest of the country is because of this set of unprincipled exceptions, particularly that of using proxy tests for IQ as hiring filters. The rest of the country has to deal with highly regulated hiring procedures that require an enormous HR bureaucracy, and prizes official educational certifications over more direct measures of general intelligence.

As you’ll commonly hear said by executives, Silicon Valley is a big vacuum for all the smart people in the United States and around the world. One of the reasons why it has such strong pull is because of the various exceptions previously granted to it from on high in the Federal government.

When SJWs succeed in cracking the “greatest wealth-creation machines ever for white and Asian males,” it will cease to be a wealth-creation machine. It will become a broken ex-machine; a pile of semi-functioning parts that may blink and whirr, but which no longer generate surplus.

With those legal exceptions revoked, Silicon Valley has no future in California. But something like it might emerge in another place, unlikely within the United States.

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Filed Under: Economics Tagged With: Silicon Valley

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