This story started with a rage-bait comment from British tech entrepreneur Paul Graham:
I believe the most qualified person should get the job.
There are many ways to approach this statement, which lives passive-aggressively inside the context of tech hiring and immigration. American tech titan Palmer Luckey grabbed hold of this thread and spent the next few days throttling the life out of it.
Graham took the position that if Luckey hires even one foreign employee, this means that Luckey is betraying his “American firms should hire Americans” stance.
You can read the back-and-forths in voluminous detail. I want to address Graham’s question about “qualified” hiring with a story from my family.
John, the Tool Engineer
John Johnson was drafted into the Army the day before he married Irene. This was inconvenient. A month after his wedding, he took a train from Chicago to Missouri for his basic training.
As part of his Army intake, he filled out many forms. One of them asked if he had any experience with high temperature material work. In between his tool engineering classes at the local community college, John had been working the night shift at a heat treatment company. He marked on his form that he had experience with high-temperatures and, after basic training, he was sent to Huntsville Alabama and assigned to Army Missile Ordinance.
John was to work on developing materials that would survive tremendous heat. Though he was not informed at the time, the goal of this project was to produce materials that would withstand the heat generated during re-entry from space. This was early research into what would become the Apollo heat shield. To test these high-temperature materials, they set a rocket burner horizontally and burned the materials with the rocket blast. John became the military personnel in charge of burner facility 164 HT working alongside German scientist Erich Ball.
It was in this role that John found himself working under Wernher von Braun. His first encounter with Von Braun was when the legendary German scientist wanted to view on of the burner tests to simulate re-entry. von Braun arrived too late and, when he requested to view the test, John (a lowly Specialist 3rd class) followed the safety protocols and denied him entry to the facility viewing bunker. Impressed with John’s bold adherence to the rules, von Braun began calling him “Colonel Johnson” to the annoyance of John’s peers and superiors.
In the ensuing years, John excelled in his role developing re-entry materials. He continued this work as the role evolved from Army Missile Ordinance to the NASA manned space program where he worked as a contractor with Avco. John helped develop heat shields for the Apollo re-entry capsules and the Space Shuttle. When the Apollo 17 launched in 1972, he was the keynote speaker for the Smithsonian Society regarding the mission.
“Most Qualified Person”
The question that Paul Graham is inviting us to ask is “Was John the most qualified person for this job?” The answer is “of course not”. John was 22 years old when he got this job. His had one core qualification (high temperature experience) that put him in this position but there were certainly dozens or even hundreds of more experienced, more qualified engineers from any number of countries who could have taken this position. John didn’t know anything about rockets when he started that job, but he picked it up quickly. He had a core competency, he was eager, he was trainable, and he was diligent. In the course of his work, he impressed the very father of rocket science.
John might not have started as the “most qualified person” but, with a little training and a lot of hard work, he became the most qualified person for the job.
This brings us to Wernher von Braun. If we can take a kid from Chicago, draft him into the Army, and turn him into a lead engineer at NASA, why can’t we develop our own von Braun? Perhaps, given a few decades, we could have. But scientists like von Braun and Erich Ball had irreplicable expertise in the field of rocket science. They didn’t score a few points higher on an aptitude test, they had already built a full rocketry pipeline in Germany and brought with them all the theoretical and practical knowledge that allowed the United States to accelerate our space program.
Importantly, these German scientists were not working in isolation or only among other German scientists and technicians. They were training the next generation of American experts like John. It was never under consideration that we would continuously bring in German factory workers with high temperature experience simply because they had been on the job a year longer than an American worker. The presumption was that the experts we brought in could work alongside American counterparts in order to train up an American workforce to meet the intellectual and engineering demands of manned space flight.
The H-1B program was started with the vision of finding von Brauns across other industries and bringing them into the US. H-1B (supposedly) requires expertise in a specialty occupation in which the applicant has both theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge. This isn’t a description of “the most qualified person”. This is a description of a uniquely qualified person who can offer a leap forward in a specialized field.
Any technical job is going to require some amount of on-the-job training. Every good employee will improve in their role as they become familiar with the organization and the product they are working on. The goal of bringing people in through the H-1B program should include the transmission of expertise and knowledge to the rest of team. An H-1B hire should not simply be marginally better than an American counterpart. They should provide such a leap forward in capabilities such that the rest of the company is elevated in their own knowledge and expertise.
This is why I have so much disdain for Paul Graham accusing Palmer Luckey of duplicity. Graham sees the American economy as something that belongs to the world. He thinks that all businesses (and specifically tech businesses in the United States) are global enterprises that they have no responsibility to train up the next generation of US talent.
Palmer Luckey understands that there is plenty of international talent that can and should be leveraged in the appropriate places and the proper ways. There are many instances where you’re going to want to hire a leading expert in a technical field. But most jobs, the qualifications are a core technical and subject competency combined with diligence and a willingness to learn. There are thousands of young John Johnsons out there who are eager to excel in these jobs. We need to encourage a corporate mindset that believes in the importance of building up the American talent pool to tackle not only the challenge in front of them but the array of challenges that the future will bring.
This is a good steelman of a crux of disagreement. I for one think that Graham is right, but I explicitly identify as an open borders globalist and see no reason why state power should, or even ethically can, be used to force companies to train up 'Muricans rather than productive people from the rest of the world, since the people from the rest of the world are no less valuable as human beings than 'Muricans and deserve no less freedom of movement and employment. I recognize this is an unpopular view and frankly doubt Graham himself fully shares it, but I think it is much more common among those who agree with him on this issue than among the general population.