But "this will increase salaries by reducing supply" is the common narrative on HN that one cannot fight.
Reasoning bottoms-up, you are right. This will reduce Bay Area footprint, and will allow good talent to join at lower costs. Couple this with top Indian talent in US not being treated fairly (most Indian immigrants have to wait 4-5 decades before being eligible for a green card even at Google / FB / etc..). The future for the Bay Area may not be as bright as the last 15 years. I certainly hope this isn't the case since I have a vested interest in the Bay Area but I do think longer term this is going to be the outcome though.. :(
Reasoning ground-up is not the faint of hear though. Most people want to extrapolate the world from the recent past based on their personal self-serving biases.
Why is the burden of proof on the poster arguing that India is more democratic rather than the side arguing that US is more democratic?
India is the world's largest democracy, has a multi-party system, has had prime ministers from different religions, and both men and women top leaders. The US on the other hand has only had Christian leaders (4 have technically not specified), and all men. It's also a 2-party system. The burden of proof here for this statement needs to be on the one claiming that US is more democratic.
The greatest challenge for the rise of India is the colonialistic mindset of many (but not all) Indians today. Hold yourselves equal and ask for you what you rightfully deserve.
This is nothing particular to India. On the day Snapchat went public, investors in the US bought the wrong company - Snap Interactive. These were investors, who were putting their money at risk!
Point is, this happens everywhere and people are irrational.
It's really sad how hard it is for an Indian-born migrant. The 10 year wait he cites is the wait time if one had applied 10 years ago. Current backlogs are much much worse:
We're talking of a 25-300 year wait for EB2 applicants born in India. This includes those engineers at the Googles and Facebooks with a master's degree!
This is entirely because of the 7℅ cap on green cards for applicants from any one country of birth. If literally India splits into two, highly skilled immigrants from India would get green cards twice as fast. If instead of being born in India, one we're born in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, it would be no wait times.
Another point of note is that the h1b has no country cap. What this effectively does is allows some body shops to hire Indian born employees at little above h1b min wage (~$60k), sponsor a green card for them, and keep them as indentured labour for a long long time.
For most immigrants from elsewhere, the challenge is getting sponsored a visa and then green card sponsorship. For someone from India (and increasingly China) that is just the beginning of decades long uncertainty!
Skilled immigration in the US is broken beyond despair.
He chaired the committee that ran and organized foss.in - (un)arguably India's greatest open source event.
Held every December, it attracted thousands of students and working professionals from across the country. It helped set the image of Linux and the wider OSS community fairly high in the country.
I remember going to my first foss.in in 2008. It was brilliant and I felt exhilarated that I could meet with people like minded as myself - who had all come to know about OSS via other efforts. It was India's first gathering of like minded "hackers"[1].
I've met some really great people through foss.in - they've all inspired me with their work on Mozilla, PHP, KDE, etc.. I think pre-GSOC, foss.in was the most significant if not the only torch-bearer of open source in India.
I was very upset when they shut it down after 10+ years in 2011 - the team had apparently felt that their job of infusing Linux in the student population was sort of accomplished.
He was a pretty great guy!
[1]"hackers": the way ESR would call 'em if he could. Selfless, extremely smart, lets-get-things-done people, with tens of contributions to the open source world.
Anecdotally (n=1, of course) I have seen and heard tremendous resistance to clisp in the industry I work in 5 years ago. Now, clojure and Scala are being adopted and recommended by even conservative PMs and architects.
The choices are way more today (Almost a tautology given old choices don't really vanish into thin air) and on more reliable platforms with tried and tested libraries.
anyway the spirit with which i meant that statement was that it is far easier to convince "senior management" and others with power to let stuff be done in clojure / Scala than it was to convince them about ml or clisp five years ago.
And I am not even talking about "ivory tower Haskell" (which i love using).
FYI, Simon Marlow is incredibly big in the Haskell community and is the leading expert in Multi core parallelism via STMs in Haskell. Some of the work he has done for the GHC compiler is frankly fantastic.
This is incredibly big news in the Haskell world. The FP community is starting to break boundaries with the industry in the last 5 years with Clojure (and Scala's functional support).
Currently, FB seems to use haskell only for basic lexing and parsing[1]. It would be tremendous to see them using it at FB scale. I think there's going to be gain for both parties - For FB, the publicity and hacker outreach, and Haskell - industrial reliability.
Check out liftosaur as well - comes with a DSL and ability to write programs (pun intended).