If you're worried about San Fran being the next Detroit, start looking at that fact that you and other hackers depend on a specific region to sustain their salaries and arguably inflated sense of self worth. Beyond physical networking, where you are doesn't matter like it used to.
I know that's not what you meant, but it's the same syndrome that contributed to the downfall of Detroit auto workers. They all said "But this is Detriot, the home of the Big 3! United States Auto Town, we can't fail" Meanwhile the rest of the world was busy building cars cheaper and better everywhere else while the folks in Detroit tried to protect their salaries without improving the product.
Find a place where your rent is cheap, your staff is cheap and you can build something fantastic (and then pay everyone more) without worrying about what the next 'hot' place to live or have an office is.
I suggest you read up something about the raise and fall of US automotive industry: Detroit used to be no less "startupish" than SV is today: thousands of engineering startups have flourished and vanished over relatively short period of time. The history of Detroit is one of several reasons why I don't take Paul's views on special role of SV seriously: Valley isn't something we haven't seen before. If anything, it is declining:
Valley startups no longer represent the cutting edge of computing innovation at large [as they did in the 80s], they have mostly escaped competition by hiding in relatively narrow niche of "English-speaking consumer Internet" very much like Detroit has been hiding behind big SUVs. And "release early, release often" web sites are no different from body-on-frame SUVs: their tech is so well understood and simple that Chinese can produce cheaper and faster copycats of facebooks and twitters in a matter of months within an original launch.
When they'll learn to market them properly, they will build their own data centers in San Antonio, TX and the similarity with Detroit will be complete.
Detroit became entirely dependent on a centralized system powered by a few massive companies. Silicon Valley has some of that, but for the most part is highly distributed. The thousands of startups that feed off the big auto companies can't exist without them. Silicon Valley doesn't die if Google and Yahoo fail to innovate.
That English speaking "niche" currently represents the vast majority the potential revenue. It's a lot harder to innovate than it is to internationalize your software, which virtually every successful company does.
The idea that the value of Twitter or Facebook is in the 5,000 lines of Ruby or PHP that it took to create them is seriously mistaken. Anyone (Chinese or not) can easily clone Twiter or Facebook. Just like almost any competent artist can clone a great painting. That's not the hard part.
Yeah? How about a 30% cut, all your benefits, and a clause in your employment contract where you lose your apartment (wherever it may be) when you quit?
That 6% number --- which is misleading on its face --- also ignores the fact that many H1Bs are FTEs for body shop firms that lease them to big companies.
What a fatuous comment. Automobiles didn't themselves lock foreign workers into abusive contracts. H1-B worker visas aren't an evolution of the market; visa and foreign labor terms and conditions are as old as foreign relations.
that's a reason why abusive contracts are bad, not a reason why allowing foreign workers into the united states is bad.
we should allow more foreign workers into the united states for the same reason we should let automobiles overtake horse and buggy - it's more efficient.
You're arguing with a straw man. Nobody is arguing that foreign workers shouldn't be allowed into the country.
It's a market inefficiency for companies to be allowed to "capture" employees and artificially suppress their wages by keeping them off the open employment market under threat of deportation.
I don't understand your assertion -- the deportation thing is BS, but working conditions seem to be favorable enough that people are willing to leave their families behind and work in the USA.
I don't really want to argue about immigration on here. Suffice it to say I welcome any skilled people who want to contribute to the GDP and body of technical expertise in my country.
The point I was hoping to make is that even if a glut of talent depresses salaries it's worth it in order to stay globally competetive.
It's impossible to extract the deportation thing from the debate. If immigrants were working on a level playing field with natives, this would just be about xenophobia and protectionism. But they aren't. They work under unfair terms that depress their wages and, by extension, the wages of the entire field.
It's not simply that a Bulgarian or Thai developer will do the same job for less money; it's that the system is rigged so that they essentially have to work for less money.
If that were the equation, I'd be on board with that point of view. The problem is that the H1B is increasingly used to outsource jobs rather than bring talented engineers to the US. Seven of the top 10 users of the H1B visa are India-based outsourcing companies, and even many of the US-based users are really there to facilitate outsourcing. These companies use the visa to cycle someone through the job in the US for a few years, do "knowledge transfer" where an American is allowed another 6 months of employment and a severance under the condition that they train their replacement, and then move the job and worker overseas.
SO in this case, you'll get your 6% pay cut and the outsourcing of an industry - all under the guise of making sure that talented foreign engineers are allowed to come to the US and create wealth (which is an indisputably wonderful thing for the US and would be possible without all this abuse if the system were reformed).
Wow, I had the exact same thought (ie. comparing hackers to Detroit auto workers) when I read the article. Though, I thought I was being profoundly pessimistic.
So, to add more pessimism (for fun)... we don't have the bargaining power that the UAW had, and I don't think we have any members of congress that will consider software professionals to be a serious constituency. So, without legislation, we would definitely spiral down faster as an industry.
I have no desire to see San Francisco become the next Detroit.