Please read footnote [2] in Paul Graham's article. He is against the importation of low-cost programmers. He is only for the importation of exceptional programmers, regardless of where they were born.
Why don't exceptional programmers come in via the O-1 visa program? Obviously if they are exceptional it should be easy to meet the standards set by the government for the visa.
There's no limit on the number of O-1 visa's that can be issued in a year so you don't have the lottery effect that the H1B has. The downside for the company that helps their employee get it is that the visa doesn't indenture the employee to the company, so they are free to quit and find a new job at their own pace.
The standards set by the government for the O-1 visa are more geared towards pure research scientist or professor kind of positions. A PhD is a minimum requirement along with publications in top international journals.
Most of the top engineers and developers don't have a PhD or scientific publications. O-1 is more appropriate for an university professor or NASA scientist position. Not for startup engineer.
5 requires a letter from the company ceo/evidence that you are actually doing something exceptional/useful
6 would be hard
7 is a letter requirement saying that your position is critical, I assume if you are an exceptional programmer it should be easy to get that from your sponsoring company.
8 says you get paid a lot, shouldn't be a problem for any software engineer
So out of the list, 2 of them seem trivial and then you just need to check the box for one other, which if you are in the top programmers, shouldn't be too hard.
7 is not satisfied by a letter from any company CEO. The person writing the letter has to be a distinguished individual in their own capacity. A startup CEO, irrespective of potential, is a nobody. Tim Cook writing the letter means something. Also 1 letter doesn't suffice. O-1 applications typically require 7-8 such letters from distinguished individuals ~not directly related to your field~. At a minimum 3 or 4 are needed.
Remember, US immigration is not an objective process, i.e., you satisfy 3 of 8 points, you are in. It is a subjective process. The sponsoring company hires a lawyer to petition USCIS making a case for the visa. The subjective interpretation of the petition is completely at the discretion of the specific case officer. The recent multi-year trend of evaluating O-1 visa petitions seems to be completely dependent on number of publications in journals, impact factor of those journals, number of citations in google scholar, your work being published in major news media, and several letters of support from distinguished individuals from ~outside~ your primary area of expertise (your contributions are considered valuable if people not in your immediate field have a high opinion of you).
The law offices of Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy LLP, the immigration attorneys that 95% of Bay Area companies retain for filing immigration visas, will not even accept your case if the candidate doesn't have a Ph.D. with several years of high impact publications.
As you can see, this visa is geared towards positions as university faculty, major national lab scientists, or industry research labs of big firms. This visa doesn't help startups. I know of only one startup that successfully got the O-1 visa for a Chinese data scientist. But that person was part of the CERN team that won the Nobel prize.
There is a huge gap between the targeted beneficiaries of the O-1 and H-1B visa. One is geared towards Nobel prize caliber scientists, the other towards run of the mill developers working in body shops and overseas consulting firms.
The prototypical 10X developers that most startups seek do not usually meet the criteria for the O-1, and is at a disadvantage in the H-1B lottery. A lottery treats every application equally. It makes no distinction between an extremely competent individual and an extremely incompetent one. This favors body shoppers and outsourcers since they can mass-file visa petitions for every warm body on their payroll overseas hoping some of them make the lottery. A startup filing one or two visa petitions for a very specific individual is at a severe disadvantage.
It's interesting that the bar is so high for engineers yet seemingly much lower for musicians, models and businesspeople. Perhaps the solution is to equalize that discrepancy. Or perhaps the bar is much lower in the NYC area for those 3 fields and it isn't evenly applied everywhere.
It is simply because the contribution of a musician, a model, and an athlete is more easily understood by peers in other fields. The value of a 10X engineer is not that well understood by "outsiders" and in many instances by "insiders" either.
Most folks think developers are interchangeable cogs in a machine. They don't think the same of musicians or models or athletes. This is exacerbated by the body shoppers and overseas outsources who indeed consider their developers as mere warm bodies or "resources", and who indeed abuse the H-1B visas. Startups are the losers.
The O-1 visa was introduced before the era of startups and wasn't really geared towards the use case of a startup, i.e., a good developer slogging away in a basement to make the next Google.
The sentiment is nice, but the only selection mechanism presented is that "An influx of inexpensive but mediocre programmers is the last thing they'd want; it would destroy them." One only need look at the current H1B situation to see just how eager most tech companies are to add another mediocre programmer at 30% off market rates.
Graham is missing the 99% of the market that isn't fast growing startups. Large companies don't have any way to evaluate "10x" programmers. I'm sure they'll take those kinds of people if they just happen to luck into one.
But big companies will be happy with mediocre programmers who fill a seat and can implement the latest company security initiative on the tiny section of code that's "theirs" as long as it doesn't cost too much.
In principle I agree with him - we should let in geniuses and people with skills that benefit everyone. But that's just the cover large companies are using to push down their labor costs.
> Footnote [2]: it is dishonest of the anti-immigration people to claim that companies like Google and Facebook are driven by the same motives
Profit? Who is being dishonest here?
How is being against an H1-B indentured servant coolie visa being one of the "anti-immigrant" people?
I guess the women's groups who protest that Russian, Mexican and Brazilian strippers are being imported into Tenderloin clubs are anti-immigrant as well.
There are two different classes of H1B sponsors : Cognizant, Tata, Wipro and gang; and Google, Facebook, Amazon and gang. AFAIK, the latter pay competitive salaries. The former, not so much. Conflating the two is not constructive.
