The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything

I have been reading alot about BitCoin lately and it has led me to a series of questions that make my head hurt. I am far from the expert on BitCoin, but I will try to briefly summarize the premise. An anonymous individual or small group of individuals created a standard/protocol for a new form of money on a peer-to-peer network that is not controlled by any government or central bank. Servers plug away at algorithms to “mine” for BitCoins and new BitCoins are released every ten minutes. The miners are rewarded in BitCoins and maintain transaction logs which keep the whole system running in a distributed but organized state. The total number of BitCoins that will ever be released will be limited to 21 million. BitCoins are actually traded in secondary markets for real currencies. Since BitCoins exist outside of governments and banks; it can be used for international money transfers with no fees, used by tin hat conspiracists that do not want to have bank accounts, and/or they are the perfect currency for trading for all kinds of illegal things since user identities can remain anonymous.

Until February of this year, BitCoins have traded for less than $25 USD per coin. Suddenly, the price of BitCoins have spiked to over $200 per coin in the span of two months. There are all kinds of arguments for why BitCoins are or are not a bubble. One of the arguments for BitCoins rapid appreciation is that there will always be a limited supply. This argument is eerily similar to the argument for gold or the gold standard. Except, as Warren Buffett likes to point out, gold doesn’t do anything. It has no intrinsic value except that we, as a species, have decided that gold is good. Even though gold is a finite resource with no intrinsic value, it is still there. Although centuries of alchemists attempted to turn lead into gold, no one was ever successful at it. However, there is nothing to stop a new protocol from being established and thereby minting BotCoins or BitPoints or whatever. All mining computers are essentially creating strings of numbers that are then stored in transaction logs. These numbers have no value except, like gold, the value we decide to give it.

Just as I was trying to get my head around why anyone would buy BitCoins, I started thinking about fiat money. Once upon a time, the currency of the United States was on the gold standard and dollars were redeemable for some fraction of gold. Since carrying around bars, or even flecks of gold in vials, would be a huge pain in the ass, gold was placed in vaults in Fort Knox, Kentucky and kept under armed guard. The US Mint then printed out paper money that served as a proxy for the gold sitting in Fort Knox. No one really saw the gold but everyone believed that it did exist. People went about their lives trading paper dollars that represented gold up until President Nixon took us off the gold standard.

To “gold bugs”, or people who really like the idea of the gold standard, August 13, 1971 was a very bad day in America. We left the gold standard and ushered in a few decades worth of high inflation. The gold bugs would point to this and say, “See? I told you.” Except the period of higher than average inflation was then followed by two decades of relative price stability which supposedly ushered in a new paradigm of economics and was called “The Great Moderation”. That is until 2007 when the shit hit the fan. Then gold bugs came out and said, “See? I told you.” Except the data shows that tying a currency to gold doesn’t stabilize prices either.

Gold keeps prices stable! Oh wait, it doesn't...

So, if we are not on the gold standard, what do we have? We have a money supply controlled by the Federal Reserve. The purpose of the Federal Reserve is to create asset bubbles. I’m kidding, but it seems like that is the net result. The Federal Reserve controls the money supply and now that we are not on the gold standard, the money supply is literally money printed by the US mint. Except, just like gold a hundred years ago, I rarely deal with physical money. I get paid electronically. I purchase goods and services on credit cards and then pay those bills electronically.

As far as I know, there are transfers of physical bundles of cash between various banks as money goes in and out of my account and that is why BitCoins sort of make sense. Since BitCoins are purely digital, why go through all the bother of moving worthless money around? Why not move equally worthless bits around? Further, BitCoins are not controlled by a central bank and there are plenty of central bankers around the world who are not fans of Ben Bernanke at the moment. Since 2008, our central bank has literally been creating money out of thin air and then calling it “quantitative easing” or QE because saying, “I’m going to print money out of thin air,” sounds stupid. The purpose of QE was to fight deflation because to economists, the only thing worse than inflation is deflation. By and large it has worked.

Printing money is going to cause hyperinflation! Well... TBD

I noticed in Australia that the exchange rate of the Australian Dollar against the US Dollar is a point of national pride. When the AUD broke through parity, it was celebrated. The US played the role of the sucker to perfection, bowing our heads in shame as our dollar fell. Except... the dollar falling in the foreign exchange markets had no effect on an American who was not travelling. Suddenly our exports and labor costs got lower internationally and that has helped to bring back some American jobs. Meanwhile, in Australia, the already high labor costs got even higher. Tourism got cost prohibitive as people such as myself took a look around and said, “Holy fuck this place is expensive.” The one area that should have got better for the average Aussie, purchasing imports (and almost everything is imported) didn’t budge because the retailers collude and price fix, but to combat this Australians are slowly learning of this new invention called “the Internet” where goods can be purchased overseas online and shipped to their homes which, of course, has the local retailers crying, “Foul!”

Now, a few years later, instead of celebrating the high Australian Dollar, the high dollar is being blamed for a lot of the economies ills. Central bankers around the world have caught on to the US secret of trying to make their currency worth less. Today, it’s a game of if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em, except we, the United States, got a five year head start on the game.

I hate to delve into tinfoil hat wearing conspiracy theory waters, but, the way the Federal Reserve has handled things the last few decades makes me realize that some of the anger towards Wall Street is well deserved. Most of the GDP growth at the beginning of the ‘00s was illusionary (Australia, per always, is behind the times but will soon find out). Big investment firms made horribly bad decisions and created derivatives that didn’t really benefit anyone except themselves. When things were good, they kept the money. When things got bad, they got bail outs at 100 cents on the dollar. To many, myself included, Wall Street does not produce anything. For an industry that does not produce anything, they are wildly overcompensated. Because they are overcompensated, they have a ton of influence. It seems that the financial sector is controlling, or at least, influencing the most important aspect of our government - the money supply. As much as I love capitalism, the status quo isn’t working.

So what’s the answer? In an ideal system, the reward for entrepreneurship should still exist. I don’t begrudge the Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world (to name a random few) who created new companies and led to the employment of millions of people. Their entrepreneurship was a huge benefit to the entire nation and produced real gains in a sustainable manner. This type of behavior needs to continue lest we become a society without innovators and dreamers who come along and disrupt everything. At the same time, I would like to see an end to the class warfare where people begrudge the “1%”. I would like to see a system where whenever an entrepreneur succeeds at creating something that can be sold and exported, everyone wins. I would like us all to have a little skin in the game. I was thinking about this for a long time when I randomly mentioned it to my friend, Juan. Out of the blue, Juan thought about it for less than a minute and responded, “The money supply needs to be tied to GDP which is the problem with the gold standard as it does not increase or reward increased productivity.”

I was dumbfounded. I had been thinking about this for years and Juan answered the problem, shrugged his shoulders, and then went back to work. It seemed so obvious, but there had to be problems, right? The biggest issue I had was that the GDP numbers for the US in the mid ‘00s looked phenomenal. Except there were no productivity gains or innovation. It was nothing more than an illusory sugar high funded by consumer debt from a housing bubble that was about to implode and take the entire economy down with it. Rewarding short term quarter to quarter measurements could lead to a desperate desire to keep propping up asset bubbles which are little more than Ponzi schemes (are you listening Australia????). I was stumped again as it seemed that Juan had figured it out and I had just poked a hole in it.

Then I did a little research on GDP and discovered it was created by Simon Kuznets for a US Congress report in 1934. Except he explicitly warned not to use this new fangled measure to determine a country’s welfare.

Kuznets was very aware of the limitations going so far as to say:

“The valuable capacity of the human mind to simplify a complex situation in a compact characterization becomes dangerous when not controlled in terms of definitely stated criteria. With quantitative measurements especially, the definiteness of the result suggests, often misleadingly, a precision and simplicity in the outlines of the object measured. Measurements of national income are subject to this type of illusion and resulting abuse, especially since they deal with matters that are the center of conflict of opposing social groups where the effectiveness of an argument is often contingent upon oversimplification. [...]” (God bless wikipedia)

Or paraphrasing, the concept of GDP is really hard to measure and by measuring it people are going to try to manipulate the criteria or mechanism for calculating it in ways that cannot be predicted and this will be disastrous. I have worked at Microsoft long enough to see what happens when someone creates a KPI and Mr. Kuznets is very right. Regardless, the world ignored him and adopted the formula:

GDP = private consumption + gross investment + government spending + (exports - imports)

At first look, the only thing needed to consistently increase GDP is to encourage private consumption and government spending and that’s working out pretty well for China right now, but it’s not sustainable. The fix to the formula that has the potential to solve the economic equivalent to life, the universe, and everything was provided by Professor Steve Keen.

I first learned of the professor when I took an interest in the Australian housing market. Professor Keen’s voice seemed to be the only one in agreement with me that all was not fine. It turns out that he has famously predicted a housing crash of 40% and lost a bet to a member of Australia’s vast and powerful housing special interest group. In the loss of the wager, it is important to note that the professor stated a loss of 40% in REAL terms, not nominal and his specified timeline was much longer than when he paid it off. I would also like to note that almost all housing gains are in nominal terms and most people don’t know the difference between real and nominal. Although Dr. Keen paid off the wager and lost all credibility, he stipulated the reason he lost was due to massive government intervention that completely distorted the market. Again, I agree.

The good professor went on to publish a book, “Debunking Economics”, which provides a pretty strong case that economics is a pseudo-science and that it’s biggest problem is that modern day economists ignore debt. Since economists ignore it, that is why they are always wrong. Professor Keen is so intensely disliked in his native Australia that even though he is a tenured professor, his university is doing away with the entire economics department just to get rid of him. Anyway, with a stroke of the pencil, he fixed the GDP calculation to subtract out the change in debt. If this formula had been used in the mid ‘00s in the US, we would see a much different GDP number as the private consumption would have been cancelled out by the increased debt. Problem solved!

Modern economics has been based on the idea of money changing hands in exchange for goods and/or services. This idea has to continue, yet implementations such as the gold standard, fiat currency, or BitCoins are not working. The gold standard or BitCoins are finite and do not reward productivity gains. Fiat currency puts power in the hands of a few and have been behind the epic boom and bust cycles we have been experiencing over the last few decades.As much as I initially was flabbergasted by BitCoins, they have inspired me in a way. Power can be taken away from the few and democratized. If the right measurements are in place, the system can exist and be self correcting. The proposed system still rewards risks, entrepreneurship, and innovation but still lets everyone win during periods of increased productivity. It seems insane; but no more insane than trading worthless pieces of paper, bars of metal with no real purpose, strings of numbers, or hoarding land in a country that has nothing but land (are you listening, Australia???). My proposal may not be perfect, but I think with some more eyes and brains on it, the answer may be revealed.

Fork the Language

In software development, teams of people work off of a common base. Hopefully, but not necessarily, some kind of version control is used. Under version control, individual developers can freely modify the common base and then check back in their code. If everything works, great! If not, the modifications can always be rolled back. Whenever there is an upcoming release of production code on a larger software project, it is usually necessary to create separate branches or fork the code. One team works to get the production version as stable as possible while a different team works on a separate branch trying to put all the features that got pulled from the upcoming release without jeopardizing the release altogether. At some point, a merge will happen before the code is forked again.

When it comes to the English language, I realize that the language has been forked. I knew there were some differences between Australian English and American English, but I didn’t realize just how many differences there were. No one prepared me for brekky, spruiking, footy, reccos, the arvo, snags, barneys, utes, blokes, sheilas, or my favorite word in the Australian language - bogan. There is bogan pride and bogan love. Expressions exist like, “That’s so bogan!” and none of it made any sense to me. Slowly, by using context clues, Julie and I started to make sense of it all, but that was not before my greatest misunderstanding of all happened.

I was minding my own business getting a glass of water in the kitchen. The new guy, Jonathan, walked in and we had a quick conversation. During the conversation, he said something about him and his partner. In American English, the word “partner” can be used in one of two ways. The first, is for a business partner, as in, “My partner and I are looking to expand a bit. We should probably find a bigger office.”

The second use of the word partner is by the gay community. Since, as a group, they have been prohibited from marriage but wanted to convey a sense of seriousness about their relationship with their significant other. Gays have used the word “partner” to convey a higher level of commitment than the words “boyfriend” or “girlfriend” would imply.

While gays in America are fighting for marriage equality, it seems that Australians have somewhat shrugged their shoulders at the concept of marriage. I sat next to a girl who has been engaged for six years. I remember when she told me just how long her engagement had been lingering, I failed to suppress my jerk reflexes and simply said, “If you wanted to be married, you would be married by now.”

“That’s not it. I just have a lot going on right now.”

“Really? What’s going on that you don’t have time to get married? Are you religious and do you want a church ceremony?”

“No, neither of us are particularly religious.”

“OK then, all we need to do is find a suitable venue and an officiant. This will be a piece of cake. We probably should give your guests a little notice, so we can get this done next month if you want. Start sending out save the date emails now. If worst comes to worst, we can have the ceremony at my house. We need to get you a dress, order up some food, and tell your fiance to wear a suit. It’ll be awesome.”

By now, my victim had turned a lovely shade of red and politely declined my assistance. Now, almost a year later, she continues to live in sin with her partner. And that’s the Australian use of the word “partner” - used by heterosexuals to demonstrate a serious commitment on par and equal to marriage, but not involving, you know, getting married as the act of getting married is truly a calorie burner. I hate to sound like a crazed right-winger, but I have come to appreciate marriage a lot more after being in a society that does not value it. I am glad that Carson and Zoe will know that mommy and daddy gave it some thought and decided that we really liked each other and got married. It was not a case of we were living together and daddy didn’t want to look for a new place and then mommy got pregnant. The simple act of planning a wedding showed some commitment on our part and this is not an accidental life we are living.

Back to Jonathan... To make it worse, his partner’s name is Barbra. Of course, he shortened her name frequently to Barb. Yet to my American ears, the name “Barb” sounded an awful lot like “Bob”. My takeaway, Jonathan was in a very serious homosexual relationship with a nice bloke named Bob and was completely comfortable with it. Since he was comfortable with it, I thought I should be comfortable with it too. I filed away a mental note that Jonathan had a boyfriend named Bob and then didn’t run into Jonathan for quite a while.

The next time I did talk to him, I tried to impress him by showing that I was really listening during our last conversation. “Hey, Jonathan, how’s your boyfriend, Bob?” I smiled. Jonathan stopped smiling and I heard some crickets chirping. Yes, it was all a misunderstanding and it got funny pretty quickly, but this is just one small example of how the root language has been forked to the point where there was a pretty substantial misunderstanding.

As there is no form of entertainment worth watching besides American television and films, perhaps it is time to merge all these different branches of the language. Americans can take the good words like bogan and, in turn, give words like boondoggle and then we can go back to speaking the same language and avoid future mishaps until the language eventually forks again.

Offshoring and Immigration

What it's like to work on an offshore project

I have seen some articles that suggest that the trend of offshoring IT projects is coming to an end. I celebrate this end but want to be clear that this is not because I am racist, xenophobic, or fear competition for my job. I am happy to see it end because it didn’t work, in my humble opinion; based on my own experiences with multiple companies, in multiple countries, and over the course of several years. That combined with common sense dictates that offshoring was never a good idea.

It seems like a lot of ideas are like a swinging pendulum. The pendulum goes out a certain direction, seems to pause, and then goes swinging the exact opposite way. For most things, the ideal position would be in the middle, but the pendulum swings for a long time before it eventually settles there, going too far in both directions for too long a time. So, why did anyone think offshoring was a good idea?

Once upon a time, I worked for Big Consulting. I really had no qualifications that made me useful to a client, but for some reason, they hired me anyway. On my first day on the job, I was handed a phone sheet with everyone’s name, phone number, and bill rate. Seriously, our bill rates were right there in plain view! Why we should all be aware of our bill rates - I don’t know. I had a BS degree and no practical experience and Big Consulting charged $140 an hour for my time. I was paid a pittance off of that bill rate, but I was in my twenties, happy to have a job, and was getting some experience.

On my first project for a healthcare company, I did nothing. I wanted to do something because I was all about getting some experience, but this was a “bill first and ask questions later” kind of project. We were given a directive straight from the lead partner from the Big Consulting firm that we were to work a minimum of seventy hours a week. Peon analysts, such as myself, would spend hours crafting decks to take to meetings with other peon analysts simply because we had way too much time on our hands. “This is bullshit!” I thought. And then I planned my escape.

I had heard rumors of people making $100 an hour doing SAP work. “I could do that,” I thought, “programming is easy!” Except simply saying I can figure it out wasn’t going to get me a higher paying job. I needed the stamp of Big Consulting’s legitimacy on me. I had some orientation coming up and some training time, if I pushed for it, and I decided to make the leap out of the healthcare project. I set a daily task and called (this was back before email was the main form of communication) a Senior Manager at the firm asking him if he would put me on his SAP project. For weeks, I left the same basic message. “Hi, this is Evan Zlotnick, and I am an analyst with the firm. I am currently on a healthcare project, but I have been hearing nothing but great things about the project you are managing for the utility company. Coincidentally, there is an SAP programming class coming up through the firm. If you would take me on your project, I think it would make a lot of sense for Big Consulting to make that investment in me and I promise I won’t let you down!”

I was relentless. Just when I almost gave up, I received a voicemail. “Evan, this is the Senior Manager. I get it. I would like for you to come on the project. Now stop leaving me the daily voicemails!” I was so happy. I literally jumped up and down in my girlfriend’s living room while I played the message on speakerphone. My evil plan was all coming together. I got myself off the healthcare project billing lots of hours for making PowerPoint presentations that were not needed or read by anyone and got myself enrolled in a class that would give me some mad skills. For my efforts, I won an all expenses paid trip to Foster City for a month.

Located somewhere between San Francisco and San Jose, Foster City is not the greatest place in the world, but then again, it’s not the worst. Big Consulting paid my salary and I went to four weeks of training to learn SAP’s proprietary programming language, ABAP. Our instructor was horrible at teaching and simply read PowerPoint slides to us. All of my bad habits from college came out. I walked into class each day, read the lesson plan, did all the programming exercises, ignored the instructor, and was done by noon. It was awesome.

I got myself on a project and picked up a whopping six months of experience as an ABAPer. I wrote some conversion programs and saw a project through to the first go-live. Then I bailed. With one month of low quality training followed by six months of writing some conversion programs, the market saw fit to pay me for a specialized skill set. Except ABAP is not as specialized as everyone thought it was - it bares a striking resemblance to COBOL. At the time, there were plenty of COBOLers out there who could have been converted to ABAPers in about a week for a fraction of the price.

I had my foray as a professional developer and it was cool, except I kept coming to the conclusion that the coding was not really the hard part. Understanding the business needs and priorities and getting the “real” requirements was the challenge. Also, the times were a changing and the market rates that were so high for SAP pre-Y2k slumped. Now companies were looking for a different trendy set of skills and I no longer had Big Consulting to fund my training excursions and throw me on projects to gain experience. I wandered out of the developer wilderness and into project/program management.

Meanwhile... The dual shock of the dotcom bubble had collapse and the 9/11 terrorist attacks had the economy of the United States in pretty bad shape. A lot of companies reacted to decreased demand with cost cutting. After years of paying Big Consulting and its brethren several hundred dollars an hour for consultants to do systems integration work, a lot of companies decided to try something new - offshoring.

Now, instead of paying someone $200, $300, or more per hour; a company could pay someone in India, China, Vietnam, or Thailand $20 - $40 per hour and cheaper is better, right? Except here’s the thing, for each programmer/analyst that was working onshore, they were replaced with four or more offshore resources. Then the projects took significantly longer. Even worse, if a system actually did get delivered, it was usually unmaintainable unless you forked over a lot of money in change requests.

This is not a racist rant. I have worked with a good many Indian and Chinese folks. The vast majority are extremely hard working and very intelligent. There is absolutely no reason that good professionals in another country cannot do quality work. Except here are some of the factors that prevent it:

1. Language Barrier. I grew up speaking English. I may be semi-coherent and inarticulate, but English is my first language. I took several years of high school Spanish and managed to satisfy my foreign language requirement at my university, but there is no way I could sit in a business meeting held in Spanish and contribute. Reading Spanish requirements would take me significantly longer. I would get frustrated and contribute less. Americans, British people, Australians, New Zealanders, and Canadians all have tweaked the English language a bit and we all have different accents. However, we can all understand each other’s accents - idioms and slang aside. Part of the offshoring myth was that Indians speak English. While some do speak English with a high degree of proficiency, there are a lot that are sold onto projects that do not. This is not racist. Again, I could not perform on a Spanish speaking project even though I have a few years of Spanish under my belt. Functioning in a second or third language is extremely difficult.

2. Geography. We live in an awesome time. I have worked with people across town or across the country and shared my screen and the distance did not seem to make much of a difference. We were able to have an extremely productive conversation, look at the same information, and make informed decisions using technology. It’s not really the distance that makes offshoring a colossal pain in the ass, it’s the time zones. Mumbai is 12 and a half hours ahead of the West Coast of the United States. No matter what time a meeting is scheduled, someone is miserable. I left a contract role at Microsoft because there were three weekly meetings that I was leading scheduled for 5AM. In order for me to function at 5AM, I had to wake up at 4:30AM. In order to get up at 4:30AM, I had to go to bed at 9:00PM. At the time, “Lost” was in its last season and I remember going to bed thinking, “I’m a grown man and I can’t stay up until 10:00 to watch ‘Lost’?” Due to the geographic distances and the lack of overlapping work hours; there are calls in the early morning to catch the offshore team as they finish their day, then there is work all day long in your own time zone, followed by calls in the evening to catch the offshore team as they start their day. It turns every work day into one long, unproductive drag with the same information being disseminated and rehashed over and over again. It invades every spare moment of your personal life. Spouses feel neglected, but even worse, kids need to be on a less flexible schedule and the morning and evening calls really cut into family time. Everything is out of synch. Decisions are made and the offshore team runs with them as best they can, when it’s 3:00AM and no one is around to ask questions, the offshore team starts making assumptions. Sometimes the assumptions are brought up the next day, but often times they are not until it’s too late. I worked with SAP China based in Beijing when I was in Melbourne. The time zone differences were not nearly as much of a problem because Beijing was only two hours behind Melbourne. We had a lot of overlapping hours during the day and I knew that I could schedule meetings with them throughout the day on a moment’s notice.

3. Travel. Wait, wasn’t offshoring about cost cutting? With SAP China, I spent a few weeks talking to them on the phone. My extremely direct style was a bit baffling to them at first. Then, the entire team assigned to us came out to Melbourne for a week. We spent the better part of every work day locked in a conference room off of St Kilda Road. Amazingly, our calls, emails, and updates got a lot better. However, this improved communication did not come cheap. Five people got on airplanes in China and stayed in hotels in Australia. There were taxi rides, meals, and incidentals. While we did manage to get together in person, hug, and sing “kumbaya”; the good feelings would have eventually tapered off which would have necessitated another trip every six months or so. That’s part of human nature. Even the most vocal supporters of offshoring advocate doing some kind of joint kickoff in person. Do these non-trivial travel costs get considered when talking about overall project savings?

4. Maintainability. With offshoring, IT is treated like a commodity. No one questions anything so long as the software delivers what it supposed to. Little things like design get thrown out the window to do things as quickly and cheaply as possible. Developers are under enormous pressure to get things working and really bad designs like hard coding get thrown into systems and products. If the business changes their mind later on? Then new projects have to be created to find all the hard coded lines, change a few things, and then thoroughly retest and redeploy everything. If a little thought, design, and review were put into the system; there would be much lower maintenance costs and headaches going forward.

5. Culture. Again, not trying to be racist, but... We have different ways of doing things here in America. This is neither good nor bad, it simply is. However, in the States, we want to know the truth. In India and China, there is a tendency to not want to deliver bad news. I have been successful in getting real information out of offshore teams, but I had to learn how to ask the right questions. I have never had information volunteered to me and I had to develop a script to ensure that I asked each question, the right way to continue to get quality information.

6. Blended Rates. Here is a little Big Consulting trick... Most clients don’t like the idea of spending several hundred dollars an hour for a consultant. So for every manager billing $300 per hour, Big Consulting throws on a heap of junior developers offshore billing $20 per hour. Then they present the client with a “blended rate” which takes the manager’s $300 bill rate and the offshore resources much lower rate and averages it out. Why anyone should care about the average rate instead of the total dollars spent per hour is beyond me, but this “blended rate” is talked about quite a bit. When I worked for iSoftStone (Chinese offshoring company), we had an offshore team of 20 people who did little to no work, but there sole purpose was to bring down our average rates so our “blended rate” looked better. All the real work was done right here in Redmond by higher priced, more experienced onshore resources.

It’s not that Americans are somehow naturally better coders (although we, as a people, are pretty awesome), the real problem is that there is a constant push, pull, and communication rhythm between developers and the business that is completely disrupted by the offshore model. There have been plenty of top-notch Indian and Chinese folks who have come over to the US and done a fantastic job. I have the utmost respect for immigrants. It takes a lot of courage to say, “I’m going to move halfway around the world and drive on the right side of the road. I’m going to take my family away from my support network, make all new friends, and figure out everything all over again.” Seriously, it’s hard. This country was built on immigration. Personally, I am only the second generation in my family to be born in this country. My ancestors were kicked out of every decent nation in Europe before arriving on these blessed shores.

My children’s classrooms are filled with the sons and daughters of immigrants and it makes me proud, as an American, to know that so many people want to be here that they will make that level of change. I’m happy that my children are exposed to this level of diversity and have a greater awareness of the world around them, unlike my upbringing in Arizona where I never spoke to a black person until I was in college.

Lots of companies currently say, “We need more immigrants. We need to increase the quotas on H1b’s!” And here is where I have a serious problem, because as much as I love immigrants, I hate the H1b program. What is not discussed when companies scream about needing more H1b’s is the way the program works. Big companies pay a decent amount of money to sponsor an H1b. The visa is then attached to the company that sponsors the immigrant. The immigrant is then tied to the sponsoring company. Should the immigrant be fired, they are then deported back to their home country. Here’s the worst part, the immigrants are often times paid significantly less than their American counterparts. If they had a green card or citizenship, they could look for another job if they felt like they were getting a bad deal, but legally, they can’t as an H1b. It’s nothing more than indentured servitude. Big companies love it because they get cheap, very loyal labor that will do whatever they say or face deportation. It’s not cool to the immigrants who come over and it distorts the market in the labor pool.

Here’s an alternate approach. Eliminate the H1b completely. Set some kind of limit on sponsoring immigrants and charge a boatload for it, say $50k per sponsorship. Then give the immigrant full work rights similar to a Green Card. If a company truly needs an immigrant with a very specialized skillset, they will still pursue this path. However, since the immigrant will have work rights and not be deported or have any issue changing jobs, the company will be forced to treat them pretty well. Their pay will be commensurate with their skillset and will not artificially depress the labor market.

My personal take is that it will force companies to invest more in their own people. From my example of spending a month in Foster City to learn ABAP, that tiny investment paid huge dividends. In tech, things are not as specialized as they seem. A good programmer with experience in C# can be productive in Java in days - it’s practically the same damn language. A little training and/or a little coaching would go a very long way. It would end the exploitation of immigrants through our existing H1b program and it would still allow us to welcome some of the best and brightest into this country. Meanwhile, I am hoping some sanity will be placed into cost cutting initiatives. The focus of cost cutting should not center around dollars per hour, but the overall cost of systems development. Offshoring makes no sense when it increases the amount of resources on a project, takes longer to deliver, often cuts corners and uses worst practices, and injects a huge amount of risk into an industry that is usually risk averse.

Game Over

With the United States Supreme Court set to rule and likely overturn the pointless, discriminatory, and stupid 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA); many FaceBook users have changed their profile image to indicate their support for marriage equality.

Even though I have been a vocal supporter of gay rights for twenty years or so, I did not feel compelled to personally change my profile image. Things have changed so much over the last few years that I think the United States has now reached a tipping point and my support is no longer required. In fact, I have come to the conclusion that the whole issue of gay rights has been a smoke screen that prevented us from focusing on real issues - a costly and ongoing unnecessary two front war, escalating healthcare costs, and out of control gun ownership. I am sincerely happy for all three of my gay friends that they can marry whoever they see fit, but I think now is a great time to reflect a bit on where we have been with this issue, understand how it has been used, and figure out where we are going to spend our energy going forward.

A few years out of college, I was going to be in Chicago on business. I called up a friend and asked if I could spend the weekend at his place before going to a hotel that I could expense back to my company. He said his roommate was, coincidentally, out of town and that we would try to recreate the magic of college. He had just bought his place and was excited to have an actual guest. His strategy for real estate? Follow the gays! He purchased his unit walking distance from “Boy’s Town” in North Chicago and was convinced that the influx of homosexuals was going to drive his property price up. He is not alone as there is real evidence of this trend. Name one other minority group that can descend upon a neighborhood and demonstrably show radical improvements resulting in higher prices? So why hate gays?

Sadly, once upon a time, homosexuality was considered a mental disorder. Due to this classification and a constant state of fear and paranoia throughout the Cold War, there was a fear that gays could not be trusted. Their sexual orientation could be used against them as a form of blackmail and therefore they could not care for state secrets. It’s obviously twisted logic as simply declassifying homosexuality as a disorder eliminates the entire problem, but that’s the way it was from the end of WWII to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Homosexuals were lumped right in there with communists as enemies against America.

Additionally, there are some scattered sections of both the Old Testament and the New Testament that condemn homosexuality. Speaking just for the Old Testament, though, the same book (Leviticus) that advocates the death sentence for gay sex also condemns tattoos and piercings, working on the Sabbath (Saturday), prohibits eating pork and shellfish, and expressly condones slavery. Since most people don’t go stoning people who work on Saturday or exchange in the slave trade anymore, it should be obvious that even the religious pick and choose which verses they want to take literally.

Understanding the whims of the religious right is extremely difficult to do. I once took part in a conversation where a fact was cited - gay people have a higher incidence of suicide and depression. Now, there are two different ways to interpret this fact. The insane way - that this is evidence that the gay sinners know they are violating God’s law and therefore depressed and/or suicidal about it. Then there is the sane version - that bible thumping assholes have somehow made gay people feel bad about themselves and even excommunicated their own sons and daughters to the point where some became isolated, confused, depressed, and sadly even suicidal. Ironically, it was the atheists who were arguing for compassion and acceptance instead of labeling homosexuals as sinners and treating them like lepers. Just as mainstream Christians somehow changed their minds about the bible passages legitimizing slavery, it seems that the homophobic rhetoric is increasingly a thing of the past. Mainstream Christians have always been picking and choosing certain sections of the bible but are now choosing to enforce the passages outlawing homosexuality with the rigor they enforce kosher laws.

With the Cold War a thing of the past, in the early 90’s, President Clinton vowed to allow gays to serve in the military. He came up with one of the worst compromises in the history of compromises allowing gays to serve, but not to let anyone know they are gay under the policy of “don’t ask, don’t tell”. Although homosexuality was no longer classified as a mental disorder and the threat of communist infiltration and blackmail was now gone, it has taken us another twenty freaking years since the “don’t ask” days to legitimize gay marriage. However, gay marriage was never really the issue.

When you think about it, maybe 5% of the population is gay. Then some minority population literally interprets the bible in a homophobic way. So one small minority has been oppressed by another small minority while most of the country hasn’t been affected in any way. It took a lot of activity and awareness raising to get people like me, with no skin in the game, to start caring and stand up against the religious right in an activity that the religious right does particularly well - voting. Getting gay rights approved should have been a no brainer. This should have happened twenty years ago, but it didn’t. Gays wanted to stop being second class citizens and their opponents were irrationally afraid. If anything, gay marriage strengthens the notion of marriage.

A few years ago, a Millennial asked me how old one should be when they got married. I didn’t think long when I responded, “You ever go out to a club and see an old guy there that doesn’t belong? Don’t be that guy.” It was an off the cuff response, but I stand by it. I literally know nothing about the courtship rituals of homosexuals. I literally know next to nothing about the courtship rituals of heterosexuals and consider myself to be extremely lucky to have found someone who was patient enough, nice enough, and gullible enough to marry me. However, I have to imagine that there is a settling down clock on gay people just like there is for straight people. Sure, going out and having relationships with various people is fun, for a while. But at some point, don’t we all want that special someone? So if two dudes want to settle down, buy a house, and look forward to watching movies together on a Friday night instead of going out - that denigrates my marriage how? It just shows that, at some point, settling down is a part of the maturation process as we get older regardless of one’s sexual orientation.

This country’s attitudes towards gay marriage have completely reversed in the last twenty years with a solid majority now in favor of common sense. Part of that gives me hope that, as a society, we can change our attitudes and grow up. However... there is a part of me that wants to put on a tin foil hat and believes that gay marriage has been a smoke screen. It was controversial enough to start heated arguments from both sides of the political spectrum... Meanwhile we are spending as much on our military as we did in the Cold War, we have tried and spectacularly failed to mold Iraq and Afghanistan in our own image at an extreme sacrifice in terms of lives lost and debt, we do not have health care for all citizens and the cost for those who are insured is skyrocketing, and we seem to be the only OECD country that thinks that guns for all is a good idea. I’m really happy that common sense has prevailed and that our culture has changed over time. It gives me hope. Now can we move on to all of our other issues?