How Paul Graham Is Wrong

&gt;Use WordPress and P2, use Slack, use G+ Hangouts, use Skype, use any of the amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline.<p>I&#x27;ve been a 100% remote worker for 5+ years but I think we have to be honest here. All those teleconferencing&#x2F;videoconferencing&#x2F;virtualwhiteboards&#x2F;etc are <i>not as effective</i> as everyone sharing the same physical workspace. Yes, they do help mitigate many issues of isolation and they do help collaboration but there&#x27;s still some &quot;bandwidth loss&quot; when people are not in the same room or even down the hall from each other.<p>I&#x27;m not advocating an open floor plan with noise and distractions. Even a set of private offices that share a common corridor to facilitate spontaneous conversation with a side conference room for group brainstorming, is superior to keeping Skype windows open.<p>Yes, there are the common examples of virtual remote workers at basecamp, Automattic, github etc. Those are not billion dollar companies. A lot of startups have ambitious goals and very hard technical challenges and you can&#x27;t compete with a team made up of 99% remote workers. I see no evidence that this has ever been successfully done. Small scale modest businesses, yes, but not big ones.<p>Maybe you can hire a 5-person 100% remote team to launch a new web magazine. Journalists and editors by their nature seem to fit the remote work paradigm quite nicely. At first glance, it seems programming also fits, but only for modest projects.<p>Yes, the remote workers themselves will insist &quot;I&#x27;m 100% just as effective offsite as onsite -- in fact, I&#x27;m more productive because I&#x27;m not interrupted by office nonsense.&quot; No doubt they feel that way but <i>the whole team</i> isn&#x27;t more effective.<p>Remote workers even with today&#x27;s fanciest collaboration technology is not the answer to finding the best talent.

Programmers, if they have a choice, like remote or at least some remote.<p>Managers + VCs, if they have a choice, prefer all in the office so they can keep power but this actually makes them less competitive and more susceptible to physical disruptions: moving an office, an employee moving, time, office politics, commute, distractions, over meeting and more.<p>The PG essay on this was glaringly overlooking that you can be a US based programmer and be good or great even if you aren&#x27;t in SF. Tech companies have a responsibility to not be so monoculture and they currently have a single point of failure in Silicon Valley, which from an engineering perspective is poor distributed design and very little redundancy.<p>There are benefits of being in one place, the ability to meet physically and be on the same page but we all know the real work gets done back at our desks in our solitary focused modes when it comes to programming and making products. Then we open up for feedback and iteration, then again back to work.<p>The work part should be setup so programmers perform their best. Just like some of the best scientists, writers, etc, they need their lab&#x2F;office where they can get somewhere with the problem at hand, not an open office in SF.<p>Glad Ma.tt mentioned this as he is a leader in the right kind of tech leadership we need: spread it around, live better, work hard, deliver solid products, from anywhere...

Meh. Here is the tradeoff.<p>If everyone is co-located, you have inconvenience and higher productivity. If everyone is remote, you have an inherent overhead, but enormous flexibility. If some people are co-located and others are remote, you naturally tend towards a divide where people who are co-located without thinking about it wind up networking with each other and excluding the remotes.<p>If you are a small startup, the productivity difference really can be the margin between success and failure. Hence the pressure to co-locate. But conversely the availability of better talent in theory can allow for a better workforce which might outweigh the productivity overhead of remote work. But when there are just founders, by definition you can&#x27;t assume that there are better people available. And the need for close working at the initial stages gives strong pressure to co-locate.<p>Therefore there is a natural tendency for startups to co-locate. And once the seed of the company is co-located, switching to a remote model is going to involve crossing a difficult cultural barrier that not everyone will succeed in. Thus the continuing pressure to co-locate.

The article assumes its conclusion:<p>&gt; amazing technology that allows us to collaborate as effectively online as previous generations of company did offline<p>That&#x27;s a huge claim, and it&#x27;s disputable. For example, I&#x27;ve worked both ways a lot and find remote work to be dramatically less effective.<p>If you accept the claim, then sure, the startups PG was writing about are missing the obvious, and for the most ironic of reasons—technical backwardness. That&#x27;s possible. But there&#x27;s also a lot of wishful thinking and saying-makes-it-so on this subject, which comes up on HN all the time. A lot of people just really, really want this to be true. That alone doesn&#x27;t make it true, and I think it&#x27;s at least as possible that desire is distorting the analysis. (Which, as someone whose whole career has been plagued by an unsolvable constraint problem of family, work, and geography, I can easily understand.)<p>Fortunately, we&#x27;re going to find out. If all those startups are doing it wrong, then there&#x27;s a gigantic market inefficiency and we&#x27;ll soon see a new wave of smarter, less backward companies doing much better.

I just finished a remote job search. I&#x27;m in Los Angeles, and most of the companies I talked to were in SF. I had previously worked remotely for a company in New York (Etsy), and I was honestly really surprised how hostile SF companies were to the idea. I was mostly going through personal connections, so I assume that I was getting the gigantic break of having a solid recommendation that most people can&#x27;t get. (I feel bad about this, but it is what it is.)<p>I have been on both sides of remote work, so I totally get that it&#x27;s not a slam dunk. It works a lot better for companies that have a strong culture established in a home base, and it works a lot better for experienced folks than green college hires. I have shut down the interview process myself when I felt like working remotely wouldn&#x27;t work out at particular companies.<p>Even given all of that, I was pretty amazed how quickly some of the conversations got shut down. No remotes, we don&#x27;t care who you are or what your experience is. I didn&#x27;t talk to any companies outside of SF that were that quick to say no.<p>FWIW I landed at Stripe, which in fairness is probably one of the companies pg had in mind when writing his original article. I agree with the spirit of this, and I also don&#x27;t really agree with a lot of things in pg&#x27;s essay. But the particulars here might be totally wrong. At least one company in his network is really remote friendly.

I am still convinced that before anyone can confidently determine if a talent shortage really exists, they must first fix the transportation issues. I&#x27;ve made this comment a few times already, but if I had a magic wand and made a BART-like bullet train materialize that connected San Francisco to San Jose, Danville, San Ramon, Mountain View, Palo alto, Cupertino, Foster City, the &quot;out-of-reach&quot;&#x27;ish areas of SF like where SF Zoo is and where the House-Of-Air is located, and the Persidio... we&#x27;d would be having a very different conversation.<p>In short, I believe it&#x27;s the commute that engineers don&#x27;t want causing a big part of all this gentrification and talent shortage talk. Personally, my Linkedin says I won&#x27;t take any job that I can&#x27;t walk to from a BART station. Google is an exception though; the whole GoogleBus at MacArthur BART situation.

PG ignored current trends and recent history to an absurd degree in his recent blog post.<p>Not factored into the equation: An actual, provable, verifiable history of illegal salary-fixing. The experiential reality that most immigrant programmers get a lot of mistreatment, both from racism and from their own incompetence - and the related experiential fact that a lot of immigrant programmers are utterly incompetent.<p>The rhetoric of these arguments talks about 10x programmers, but companies really seem to prefer importing 0.1x programmers or even -10x programmers.<p>Meanwhile, tons of companies have immense success with remote work, and the wage changes associated with the last ten years are not at all commensurate with the increased value of programming work. (See aforementioned illegal salary-fixing.)<p>Is remote work easy? No. But is PG&#x27;s business about doing easy things? No.<p>I literally just ran grep -c &quot;table&quot; against a text dump of this comments page. The count was 122. 122 uses of the table tag. Since that includes &lt;&#x2F;table&gt;, 61 tables.<p>This whole argument is as up-to-date as the HTML on this page.

So much this. I have pretty much stopped clicking on the HN posts from HN companies looking for employees, because almost none of them offer remote work. Which is too bad, because there are quite a few HN companies that I would love to work for.

The idea that remote work is a solution to immigration is also a meme on Twitter. I&#x27;m not sure I understand it.<p>A San Francisco tech company can employ developers in Krakow to work remotely without dealing with visas. But those developers either need to be 1099 contractors, or loaned out from an outsourcing firm.<p>Both options are poor. Outsourcing firms for obvious reasons (introducing a middleman that serves no purpose whatsoever except to serve as a legal fig leaf). 1099 because (a) it creates a second class of employee and (b) because it&#x27;s technically unlawful to classify full-time employees as contractors.

I have completely 180&#x27;ed on this topic. I used to think to be a successful startup, you all had to be in the same room, ideally at a big huge desk etc.<p>After working at my current startup, I realize I was wrong. We are an entirely remote operation, and have been since day 1. A few of us are in Austin, and rarely meet for a face-to-face, but it&#x27;s more of a &#x27;oh yeah, you actually exist&#x27; meeting rather than a hash-it-out sort of meeting.<p>I think the reason we have been successful is because being remote has forced us to write things down, in our wiki (in the form of product specs) and in JIRA (in the form of specific features and bug fixes). With just those two forms of written communication, we&#x27;ve solved 95% of our communication needs. We almost never skype or use video conferencing... it&#x27;s just not needed.<p>The other reason we are successful is due to experience. We&#x27;ve all done startups before, so we know the drill. I can&#x27;t emphasis how important this is enough, but does deserve more explanation. (unfortunately I can&#x27;t muster the amount of typing atm).<p>IN the end, we can focus on getting work done... without the distraction of office chatter, commuting, long lunches.

For argument&#x27;s sake, if remote work isn&#x27;t the solution, how about taking the middle ground? I don&#x27;t see a lot of companies setting up offices in other parts of the world until much later on the growth curve. Is there a fundamental reason for this? Is it simply cost? Seems to me that SV companies can do great things by even opening up 2-3 person shops elsewhere in the world. You then have the compromise situation of having a few people collocated, which should cut down the need to continuous remote meetings, and at the same time provide simultaneous access to new growth markets. In effect, you have remote offices as opposed to remote employees, which seems like a much more efficient organization of resources.

If you do this right, there&#x27;s no &quot;remote&quot;, there&#x27;s no &quot;overseas&quot;, there&#x27;s no day-to-day distinction in how someone works between whether that person happens to live in the country the company was founded or not.

Isn&#x27;t there a tremendous upside to being physically co-located? Even if the teams are remote, are the founders not usually located in a &#x27;tech hub&#x27; city (SF, NY, etc.)?<p>Matt says to let people &#x27;live someplace remarkable&#x27;, but for most of the world that want to work in technology SF <i>is</i> someplace remarkable.<p>The benefits of using group collaboration tools are still available, but you have other people working on overlapping problems on your doorstep, support and service companies, and access to intelligent finance.

It&#x27;s worth repeating that I absolutely believe we should improve and dramatically open up immigration in the US, and applaud PG&#x27;s and other&#x27;s work there, but in the meantime you don&#x27;t have to handicap your company because of the current politics around this issue.

There are companies like teleport <a href="http://teleport.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;teleport.org</a> that try to visualise this potential with data.<p>Also recommend this YCombinator startup school talk by Balaji Srinivasan on this topic: Silicon Valleys Ultimate Exit <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A</a>

Spot on! Seems the &quot;shortage&quot; isn&#x27;t in labor but in deference to employees as people. Wouldn&#x27;t you want a horde of folks willing to work 80+ hours for Ramen? &lt;&#x2F;cynic&gt;

It&#x27;s interesting how many commenters read &quot;remote&quot; as &quot;contract&quot; or even &quot;overseas&quot;. There are lots of developers outside of SF, NYC, Chicago, etc. that would relish the opportunity to still live their suburban&#x2F;rural lifestyle and avoid a lengthy commute.<p>One advantage for companies in big cities is they can usually hire these remote employees at a discount. It can get a bit hairy when two remote employees doing the same job are paid differently, but that is already the case in many situations.<p>The other obvious advantage is that companies that hire remote employees have an almost unlimited candidate pool. Even if a company chose to limit hires to their own country, the only group they cannot hire would be candidates unwilling to work remotely. Based on my discussions with thousands of programmers over the years, I&#x27;d suspect this is a very small group.

This is where I think Paul Graham gets it wrong:<p>&gt; Exceptional programmers have an aptitude for and interest in programming that is not merely the product of training.<p>This is the old &quot;you&#x27;re either an exceptional programmer or you&#x27;re not&quot; myth. This is one reason why diversity in tech has regressed since the 80s.<p>I agree that geopolitical boundaries should matter less in the software business. However, I strongly disagree that this is the solution to programmer scarcity. Expanding your source of resumes to the entire world only delays the inevitable. Why focus on removing the dependency on the passport variable, when we still have such a strong dependency on gender and race?

I find this post and many remote-advocacy posts like it are overly optimistic about the problem of timezone differences. A critical flaw is that most of the &quot;solutions&quot; mentioned assume you&#x27;re all working at the same time. (Skype, G+ Hangouts, chatrooms.) That may be ok for workers living in less expensive parts of America or the western hemisphere, but that certainly doesn&#x27;t hold true for overseas workers, which is what Paul Graham is mostly talking about with immigration.<p>An 8-12 hour timezone gap is not something easily bridged by chatrooms and videoconferences. To even have a conversation with the remote worker&#x2F;team, one or both of you need to schedule time at very early or late hours and even then you only get a little bit of overlap. For the most part you are left to collaborate by email or blogs -- which is a <i>significantly</i> degraded way of collaborating, much moreso than just not being face-to-face. Without an easy way to have a realtime conversation, closing the loop on an issue can take 24 hours.. or several <i>days</i> if there is a lot of back and forth.<p>This style of working can be very difficult in a highly dynamic, less structured, fast moving startup environment. It is not magically solved by &quot;modern communication tools&quot; or high-latency asynchronous working styles. The fundamental issue is.. daylight and human sleep schedules.<p>I wish all conversations about remote work would qualify which context they&#x27;re talking about -- near or far timezones -- instead of just lumping it all together as &quot;remote work from anywhere&quot;.

I&#x27;ve worked both onsite and remote as a software dev &#x2F; data engineer. I started out onsite. There are major disadvantages to remote work:<p>* Amount you learn from the office community is orders of magnitude lower than onsite. If you&#x27;re good at pushing yourself to learn new things, that can help, but your knowledge will almost certainly end up less diversified living remotely. You&#x27;re just not exposed to the company&#x27;s tech challenges as deeply, yet that&#x27;s usually one of the main reasons for working at the company.<p>* You don&#x27;t necessarily get top projects, but rather perhaps good projects that fit remote work. Taking a remote role almost certainly hurts your career if you want to compete with traditionally onsite roles.<p>* You likely don&#x27;t get to participate in hiring or shaping the culture in a substantial way.<p>* You&#x27;ll have a much harder time building the network needed to get access to key resources (e.g. data, people, etc).<p>* Your company better have a nice VPN or you&#x27;re going to be doing a lot of systems-oriented stuff for yourself. It can be fun but can slow you down.<p>* You&#x27;re probably more likely to be laid off.<p>The company I worked for started offering remote much more frequently due to recruiting and retention problems. I don&#x27;t think the net result had a very positive impact on the Eng org. In particular, a lot of junior people were allowed to go remote for retention reasons but they didn&#x27;t end up doing much in that role-- they would have been much better off just joining a different company (either local to them or one with a much much stronger remote culture).<p>Agree with the poster that PG&#x27;s essay has some holes; seems orders of magnitude less polished than his older essays.

This is a great how to article on remote management. The tools he lists are all there. The author mentions Skype, Slack, G+ Hangouts, and then surprisingly WordPress. Would the author care to discuss how <i>he</i> specifically has used WordPress to remote manage a team? I think the issue is that most managers don&#x27;t want to remote manage which makes me wonder, &quot;Why?&quot;

It&#x27;s all been tried and people know the tradeoffs, and there are tradeoffs no matter what you might think. The drive and culture that can develop when a small focused team spends every waking hour together can become almost cult-like. This culture is what VCs want to foment. It&#x27;s also why they like hiring 22 year olds that can be more impressionable.

Under jasode&#x27;s thread, you can see that people are missing Paul&#x27;s point. He&#x27;s not saying that working with close proximity is the &quot;best&quot; way of working. Yet most people here are debating which type of work is. Each company, market, vertical, team, etc. will vary in manifold ways.<p>What I believe Paul is asking for is that companies have the option to choose. Right now the option is available to anyone to hire remotely in one way or another. This is not the case with physically hiring into the country. Almost every startup I&#x27;ve worked at has had issues trying to hire exceptional people from another country. In almost every case, we lost those hires to the system and were forced to start the search again.<p>If a small, remote, international startup grows fast enough and they decide that working together under one roof in the U.S. fits their new needs, they should have the freedom and choice to do so.

The topics of remote work and of immigration reform seem unrelated to me.<p>A better immigration system would be better for the U.S., in that it would allow the best programmers to come here if they want to. That is clearly better for the U.S. as a whole, since it would make it easier to raise the national technical talent level relative to other nations. These new Americans would hopefully become citizens, raise families, vote, sit on school boards, run for elected office, start companies, etc.--improving the nation from within over time with their perspectives, talents, desires, and hard work (as past generations of immigrants have).<p>Contracting with foreign workers through the Internet does not achieve any of those long-term national goals.<p>Once new workers are legally within the U.S., I agree that they should have the freedom to choose remote work if they want to, or colocating work if they want to.

Paul Graham is deferring to his portfolio founders&#x27; words and actions. Does author believe all these smart and highly incentivized founders are wrong, too? I hope he realizes how strong that claim is and that by doing so he should accept the burden of proof.

I would <i>love</i> to have remote work, but I am honestly unsure about whether I&#x27;m good enough at my job to enjoy it. My concern isn&#x27;t with performing my current job, but every promotion&#x2F;job change I&#x27;ve had has been because of the things I learned in some free time from somebody sitting next to me. It&#x27;s so nice to be able to wander over to a smart person and ask about some random problem I&#x27;ve been having in an area in which they&#x27;re an expert. I have no doubt I learn more in an office than I would in my living room.<p>...then again, that&#x27;s probably why remote workers say they&#x27;re more productive.

The problem with this argument is that it lumps all versions of &quot;Remote&quot; together, but that&#x27;s not really true. There&#x27;s a huge difference between the guy who is remote because he has a long commute, vs the guy who is remote because he lives on the east coast, vs the guy who is remote because he&#x27;s in china or london.<p>The common theme of all that is: timezones matter a lot. It&#x27;s hard to collaborate with someone really far away because they&#x27;ll tend to be asleep when you&#x27;re awake. Programmers like async communication for a lot of reasons, but real-time is important too.

I would be interested in reading a PG essay responding to this very point.

Meh. Keep the barriers high and the labor market tight for as long as possible. Let companies compete for workers like the good ol&#x27; days. Let startups use more of that VC cash on its workers and also help keep rates up for IT workers across the country.<p>I know we Yanks get no sympathy from the rest of the world, but labor here has taken a beaten long enough.<p>And, I say this as a dev-turned-founder who would presumably now want to see low rates and a bigger pool. I guess I just appreciate more a little &quot;economic justice&quot; from time-to-time!

Let us assume a company where everyone works from home and meetings are held in Starbucks or airport lounges. Such a company would save many thousands of dollars per employee per year, maybe tens of thousands. No real estate, no receptionist, no cleaners, no equipment to buy or IT dept to support it...<p>Such a company would probably pay less than market rates, due to the &quot;perk&quot; of allowing remote work? But where&#x27;s that money going? If you are an engineer considering remote working, make sure YOU get a slice of the pie.

It is clear various tools can be effective or ineffective for companies and individuals – this is a <i></i>very<i></i> subjective topic. However, since many tech companies, who have subjectively decided they want to have all of their employees in the same physical location, have a talent shortage problem, it would seem only beneficial to modify our immigration policy to allow more of these highly skilled individuals to work in the US. There outcomes of making such changes are almost exclusively positive.

I was part of a virtual team many years ago, before all these tools existed. I was the only one on the West Coast, not in a position to meet others face to face -- at least not more than once, for a conference I attended -- and was the newest to the group, younger than most of the others, etc. There were several dimensions in which I was an outlier for the group. Ultimately, it ended on something of a sour note. I was basically accused of being a &quot;traitor&quot; for doing my actual job. I and the person at the top had very different ideas about how things should be handled and my domain expertise was not really respected. (After my departure, the project that had benefited the most from my input kind of died back down again.)<p>I spend a lot of my time online and I have taken a lot of online college classes. When I had a job at BigCo, I got in the habit of emailing my questions to my immediate boss, whose role included answering technical questions. For various reasons, I was unable to master the art of catching her at her desk or whatever. Emailing worked better for me.<p>I and some of my teammates got transferred to a new team that initially did not have someone in the technical role she filled. Until the new team got their own technical lead, we were all still assigned to our old lead. Other teammates of mine who were used to having face-time with our lead were incredibly frustrated. My transition was quite smooth. I rarely needed face-time with her to get good results. I just continued emailing my questions as usual. I also was not particularly &quot;likable.&quot; I was quite ill at the time and not at my smoothest socially. I also just come from a more formal cultural background than the people I was surrounded by. I was not interested in being too schmoozy. In the short run, this seemed to hurt me a bit. But once I got transferred to a new team, it was to my benefit: Getting my questions answered had been a purely professional function, not something rooted in being friendly or whatever.<p>So I think there are good points on both sides of this argument. I see several really good comments here falling on either side. And I think the disconnect probably has to do with some social thing that can be fostered remotely but many people aren&#x27;t good at it. As we develop more online&#x2F;virtual&#x2F;long distance cultural practices, I think this will become less of a divide for some people.

Great points. I&#x27;m actually working on a longer piece with actual numbers as a follow up to remote working as a solution to the talent &quot;shortage&quot;.

Just to jump on the point of being physically co-located: I&#x27;ve done both. There are pros and cons to each. What I&#x27;ve found is: it all depends on the people in the company. Some work best when they&#x27;re right next to you, able to share a drink after work to decompress. Others want to run to the beach to go surfing right after a meeting. Both can be equally talented, but vary significantly in their modus operandi.

For entry-level people, I&#x27;ve really found an office helps with mentoring and culture assimilation in a way that fully-remote cannot even remotely reach.<p>I still don&#x27;t feel there&#x27;s any reason you need to physically exist in the Bay area though. Open an office somewhere that&#x27;s both attractive and affordable for people to live and you enable the best of both worlds.

If my business pays for a great programmer, I want that programmer&#x27;s knowledge, experience and attitude to diffuse to the rest of my team (... not that I have a business, just sayin&#x27; :-). Much harder to do this if that great programmer isn&#x27;t in the office.

I’ve written an article on this issue recently as well.<p><a href="https://medium.com/@sarperdag/how-to-thrive-as-a-digital-talent-wherever-in-the-world-you-are-6b558ddef519" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@sarperdag&#x2F;how-to-thrive-as-a-digital-tal...</a>

My $0.02 all here <a href="http://blog.learningbyshipping.com/2014/12/30/why-remote-engineering-is-so-difficult/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.learningbyshipping.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;12&#x2F;30&#x2F;why-remote-eng...</a>

The next question is what happens to people who want to work <i>in</i> the US?

This is my inspiration to create <a href="https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-remote-job/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;lukasz-madon&#x2F;awesome-remote-job&#x2F;</a>

As I work remotely, it is the best. I think it is up to the individual. If the individual does not want to work, he or she does not want to work regardless at home or at the work place.

The author is forgetting that this is very unattractive for remote developers. Maybe not so bad if you live in a country without decent health insurance and retirement, but for others you&#x27;d lose these benefits by becoming a contractor.<p>EDIT: being more explicit I was specifically thinking of remote workers from other countries when writing this statement. Obviously, remote work within the U.S. wouldn&#x27;t make you a contractor. But how would this work for non us-citizens?

Remote workers present challenges.<p>Which is worth more a company with 5 employed engineers or 5 oversea contractors?<p>Managing developers across time zones can be a big problem. If the developer in the Ukraine has a question for a manger asleep in California, he has to wait.<p>There is no casual connection between people - no going to a bar to talk things over, no stepping away from the computer to talk. All communication is filtered down through the pipes.

I read the PG article as a &quot;grass is always greener&quot; argument.

Muhannad0147@hotmail.com

&gt; In a region that prides itself on disruption and working from first principles, San Francisco’s scaling problem is pretty humorous if you look at it from the outside: otherwise smart and inventive founders continue to set up offices and try to hire or move people in the most overheated environment since there were carphones in Cadillac Allantes<p>This is the best rebuttal to the more-immigration-so-we-can-haz-programmers I&#x27;ve read in a long time. And its so true. The way the current work visa (h1-b) is setup makes it far more likely that good programmers get tied to stodgy plodding firms and not smaller innovative ones that tech needs them to work for. Remote work and rewriting the current h1-b laws to make it so that h1-bs can more easily transfer their work permits and work for whoever they like, whenever they like ... remotely as well ... just like their American contemporaries would open up lots of supply.<p>but what the big firms really want is more pliant programmers who will work within the rigid confines they set up. Thats why we&#x27;re not talking more about the mechanics of the work visa and the green card process which is currently set up pretty restrictively.

Oh dear sorry to rain on your parade experience shows that the way to get the best performance is collocated teams of developers ideally coloacted with the end customer.<p>I know this isn&#x27;t what a lot of HN readers want to hear but I bet Paul and many other VC&#x27;s would bear me out.

Hey Matt, I&#x27;m so glad you felt it necessary to include that DHTML snowstorm. My laptop fan really needed the exercise and I have your ~500-line JavaScript workout to thank for it!<p>Of course, I closed the tab pretty much immediately after noticing it so I didn&#x27;t read the article. Can&#x27;t wait for unnecessary js to go out of style.