The topic of H1-B visas is very much in the news, so I wanted to chime in.
The picture below is from the year 2000 or thereabouts. It is the entire staff of my little company Prophet, which I started in 1992 with a war chest of $3,000. Everyone picture here is ‘mericuhn with two exceptions: the chaps wearing eyeglasses (center of picture and extreme left).
Prophet would have failed without them. One was from Canada, and the other from Ukraine. I’ve written about the Ukrainian before, including this “Best of the Best” post from many years ago. The photo below is from an amusement park where we had a fun day together, featuring me when my hair was pure brown (before you people turned me old).
At its peak, Prophet had twenty-one employees. Others had come and come in the thirteen years we were around before we were purchased. Some were U.S. citizens and were outstanding. Others were U.S. citizens and sucked. Others were from overseas and were vital. Others were so bad – – including one named Hare Krishna, whom we fired within two hours of his arrival – – who were not U.S. citizens.
The point being that whether or not they HAPPENED to be born here didn’t define whether they were positive for the company or not. Let’s face it, some Americans are so dim they probably shouldn’t be left near heavy machinery or even pointed objects, and the same holds true for those outside these borders.
The main argument against H1-B visas these days is that there are people overseas willing to work for less than ‘mericuhns. Well, DUH. And, as an entrepreneur, I will happily spend LESS to get the SAME (or better) service than I would have with a fellow citizen. If I got $50 million in funding, sure, I guess I could wear a red white and blue suit and just hire anyone who came through the door with a U.S. birth certificate, but I’ve always had to watch my pennies, so my objective was to get the BEST talent for the LOWEST price.
Were it not for the danged for’ners that I hired, there would be no Prophet, and there would also have been no Slope. The lives of dozens of people would have taken utterly different pathways. Indeed, in this little thought experiment of ours, had Prophet failed, the ONLY thing unchanged in this world of ours would be the net amount of revenue Gonnabesick had tendered in his lifetime toward my efforts. Besides that, Earth would be unrecognizable.
The world of 2025 is utterly different than the one Prophet knew, which is why what used to require twenty-one people now takes…………one. Those that I do hire for work are all overseas, because the ones I’ve found in the U.S. have been a combination of (1) much more expensive and (2) whiny/entitled/less talented. Not exactly a winning pair of attributes. This is not germane to H1-B visas, of course, since I’m not bringing physical bodies here into this once great land of ours, but the point is vaguely related.
In any case, what’s done is done, and what’s happening now is going to happen irrespective of anyone’s opinion. I can only express gratitude to the past, since it allowed me to get the people that I needed, at a price I could afford, to allow me to make my dream a reality.
