Dave Tingley

The sheer level of entitlement displayed by San Fransisco tech bros is breathtaking. Let's make this perfectly clear, @jarredsumner. You can hire whoever you want, because the company, and the job, belong to you. You may offer whatever pay you want, because the money belongs to you. The United States, however, does not belong to you. So you may not offer an entry ticket to the United States as part of the pay package. Because it's not your personal United States. It doesn't matter if your rationalization of business need is 100% true or 100% bullshit. If you need foreigners, and they somehow can't code in "zip" without touching magic American dirt, that's a you problem. A need in you does not create an obligation in the rest of us. So hire whoever you want, build an office in Mumbai or Jakarta or whatever, then work on your thing for four years and sell it to Wibble dot com for thirty million dollars, just before they get bought out by Infoslop dot com for two hundred million dollars, which then goes bankrupt because it spent all its operating capital buying useless companies. You might think you "need" to invite the entire world to America to execute this plan, you might even be right, but so what? What's in it for us? Why should we let you hand out tickets to our country? We don't need a faster Javascript installer, or whatever exactly the hell it is you are making. We never even asked for one. We also don't need chatbots that can redraw the Mona Lisa in the style of Studio Gihbli and lie to us about Norse mythology and the Revolutionary War, or robotaxis that only serve twenty square blocks of San Fransisco. What the hell has Silicon Valley actually built in the last ten years that benefits Americans? As far as I can see, your Ubers and Doordashes and Taskrabbits look like nothing more than a sad attempt by a bunch of overfunded manchildren to replace their mommies. And before you tell me I don't understand the problem space, know that I spent twenty years writing low-level performant systems code in C++, before I quit because I got sick of sitting in meetings with human headaches like you. Now I write science fiction, which doesn't pay quite as well, yet, but I am my own master, only answerable to an audience who doesn't hate me for being white and voting Trump, and isn't itching to replace me with an indentured servant who's not allowed to quit. So, yes, I actually know what I am talking about when I say that your code-twiddling code isn't important enough to let you turn this entire country into a clone of the particular circle of hell that you voluntarily choose to inhabit, which I just got back from visiting and couldn't wait to return to Tennessee. We have trees here.