The premise is that if you’re a budding entrepreneur with viable investment money on hand, you should be able to freely come to the US as a nonimmigrant to start your business. Hitherto, the only ways to come to the US without having been born here have been through a buffet of non-immigrant visas or being able to secure work in the country. The latter has always been classified as a dual-intent visa that allows you to also apply for permanent residency through employment based green cards. Notice the importance of intent. If you’re a student and you give the guy at the consulate the impression that you’re going to find a job after graduating, there are grounds to reject your non-immigrant visa.

This becomes an important issue to consider when you realize that MOST of the successful companies in the US were started by people who first came to the US on these student or other non-immigrant visas. Statistically, most successful startups are also conceptualized and governed by people in their late 20s or early 30s. Also, quite a few, if not all, entrepreneurs work for a while IN THE USA before they think, ‘Hmmm, I should start a business doing this’.

MISTAKE 1: Emphasis on intent

Now, once you’re in the USA, you complete your education from one of the top schools in the world. Even though you hardly have any American students in your Algorithms class, you are optimistic, and you get that degree. But wait, you get one more just because you love being in school. And here you are, one of the brightest people around, have a potential career, have a strong head on your shoulders, are optimistic, etc. What next? You apply for a job! Yey, right? No. Because…you’re now a potential immigrant, are suddenly a bad guy because you’re trying to reduce wages, and worst of all, you aren’t American. You are in line for a work permit.

MISTAKE 2: Treating international graduates like first time immigrants

But, before you get a work permit, you have to be worthy enough for a company to spend more than $3k on lawyer and application fees for you. On top of that, thanks to the xenophobia and immigration backlash, they have to contend with the fact that the other employees might link your getting hired to their kin losing jobs. I know it’s ass backwards, but bear with me. In the quest to get a work permit, who wins? Half of that $3k figure is actually lawyer costs. In a country where the insurance company makes more than the doctor this doesn’t surprise me one bit. Compare this to Canada, where just like healthcare, you don’t need a middleman to file your paperwork.

MISTAKE 3: Making it hard to actually get a visa

Now you have a visa, a job, and are making some money. You’re being a good non-citizen – paying more taxes than citizens (you can never avail a lot of benefits reserved for citizens), contributing to the society, making kind donations for the needy, obeying the civic laws, etc. Then, you realize that you’re actually good at what you do, and there’s a lot of sense in starting a business. Well, welcome to America! You can start a business but you cannot work for it! We like passive investment, but you cannot do anything more than putting in money. Which means, you’d have to have a full time job, worry about keeping it, all the while as you struggle to start your company and make it profitable. You have a choice – move to Canada or Chile while you’re still young or live the American H1B dream.

MISTAKE 4: Wanting the best but doing nothing to keep them here

So you eschew the idea of starting a new enterprise until you are a legal permanent residence and don’t have to worry about being employed all the time. Well, there’s an app…err I mean paperwork for that. And, if you are a citizen of China or India, you are looking at almost 6-7 years of patiently waiting before getting anything back out of that paperwork and large amounts of attorney fees. Depending on when you file for your permanent residency, you could all but forget about marrying that girl you knew back home, because she could marry you but not come back with you. Splendid.

MISTAKE 5: Making timely legal immigration some sort of a pipe dream

Once you get that ever so elusive green card, you’re fed up, tired, old, and the torture you faced has made you an immigrant hater yourself. Then, there’s the added pressure of hearing about all those successful peers that went home when there was time and made big bucks. So, what do you do with that green card? Well, you use it to help your retired parents spend the rest of their life with you here in America where you nearly got everything you wanted when you wanted.

There was a time when people actually went through all this effort, because frankly, there was no better place to work than in America. Things have changed A LOT since then. There’s a mass exodus of young non-immigrants from the US to other countries. These people came here, got educated, loved working hard, met great people, but they don’t want to toil away for a piece of paper that still wouldn’t release them from the xenophobia that they so wanted to overcome.

So, where does the Founders Visa fit in? Some say it should be an entirely new visa that looks at you as a capable entrepreneur, gives you a few years to prove it, and requires some amount of backing by established investors. If you fail, you leave the country.

Are you fricking serious? I am sure that’s so enticing.

Some argue that it should be an extension of the EB5 permanent residency category. The category that lets you come to the US, no holds barred, for a mere amount of $1,000,000 ($500,000 through a rural investment). That’s really it. Invest that amount of money and you’re guaranteed a happy retirement in the United States of America! All it takes is 2 months of paperwork and lawyer fees. Splendid again.

You know why the Founders Visa proposal sucks?

IT IS STILL A VISA AT THE END OF THE DAY

You are not inviting any talented people to the country by making such an entry conditional on their being successful. Are you serious? Do you ever go out during the day? Do you have a social life? How do you explain the pressure on these entrepreneurs who have to compete with undocumented immigrants (who, by the way have it way way easier)?

How many entrepreneurs would come to the US just to take a risk when Canada would simply look at their education and give them a permanent resident status? Do you think they would leave their families behind?

More importantly – How do you define success?

The Founders Visa suffers from all the mistakes mentioned above. Congratulations, you didn’t provide any solution.

IT IS STILL A VISA

Addendum: I realized later that my post might come across as starting off with the mistakes in the new proposal. That is not true. The main reason I list the problems with the current policies is that I believe they should be addressed before we start baking a second layer of our cake. Also, I believe that if the intent of the visa is to attract people who have never been to the US before, the facts that it is still a temporary permit and that it banks heavily on the beneficiary being successful are also the flaws of the proposal.

If the intent is to keep the bright people from leaving, then the mistakes listed need to be addressed. There’s just too much hard work involved in being successful, and the headache of worrying about a stable US presence just makes the proposal not worth it.

This Wednesday, I got the chance to debate just this with the CTO of an iPhone startup here in Washington, DC. While I am short on the person’s technical background, he did mention that his previous programming experience was doing website development using Flash and Dreamweaver.

The seed for the debate was laid last week when I met with their co-founder and while going over my experience with the SDK, briefly mentioned how elegant the app development workflow on the iPhone was, thanks due in large part to IB and the way it stores object information. I was then told that the company only believes in handcoding every single UI element for an iPhone app, and that it should be good reasoning out the benefits of each approach (hand coding vs. designing using the IB) with the company’s smartest person.

Having moved to Cocoa from a Java background, I can understand why a developer would not like the elegance and, arguably, added development steps mandated by the Interface Builder. Almost every programmer has been badly burnt by such tools in the past. And, almost all of these developers are only just now making a foray into Mac development because of how hot the market is right now. Every other programming framework has taught developers that it’s not the design that matters, rather the end product. Very few developers adhere to the keep it simple principle, and countless volumes have been written on why too much abstraction is actually a bad programming practice. While reusing code is a novel concept, there is a tradeoff with simplicity.

In the Mac world, such a conundrum does not exist. The tools for development are provided by the company that also happens to be the only company working on the Mac hardware and software ecosystem. They have a vested interest in making sure that development is consistently a wonderful experience for both the programmers as well as the testers. And, with a company that has such an academic backdrop of excellence, as Apple, chances are that they have spent a good amount of time in making sure that the development toolkit adheres to best practices in development.

Below are the points raised by the person and my reactions.

Interface Builder makes the project unwieldy and hard to understand.

This is absolutely not the case if you’re a good developer. One of the best practices I mentioned above is that application design is a separate task from application coding. Interface Builder lets you do the design work without worrying about what the code is going to look like. In almost all instances, it also provides you with a good way to enumerate the object and view interfaces that you would like to expose to other classes in your application. Design comes before coding, and by mixing the two, you’re absolutely laying the groundwork for making your application a terrible failure prone to App store rejection from the get go.

The reason your apps are difficult to understand is that the developer did not follow established norms when it comes to using IB. From Apple’s own documentation: ‘A very simple application might be able to store all of its user interface components in a single nib file, but for most applications, it is better to distribute components across multiple nib files’. The mainwindow.xib should be just that…the main window minus any views. This way, you minimize load times. Also, I follow the convention of having every view complex or custom view in its own nib. The formula I follow says that an nib should only have views that are needed at that particular application lifecycle state. This way, I know which nib to look at if I want to clarify some connections.

Basically, IB would only make the project unwieldy if a bad developer worked on it.

IB cannot do most customizations needed by apps

This argument lacks a backbone in 95% of the cases. You can perform almost all kinds of customizations using IB. Want a bunch of labels inside a UITableViewCell? How about a combination of labels and images? How about controls inside a UIScrollView? All this can be done using just the IB. Well, there are a lot of cases where you might want to handle customizations by code (complex composite cells for example), it doesn’t negate the fact that, even then, in the interest of keeping the design process consistent, you’re better off having an NIB before you customize. In fact, Apple recommends doing so because there is a lot of framework code that stands the chance of being over-ridden if you decide to do everything from container allocation to adding to a view programmatically.

That said, I would argue that over-customizing almost always leads to bad application sales. Almost all the best-selling apps for the iPhone maintain the signature look and feel of the preliminary pre-installed applications. There are no performance or behavioral gains from using non-native UI elements.

IB is for newbies; you learn with it, but give it up

Not unless you want to enforce bad design principles for the lifetime of all your subsequent Mac projects. As mentioned earlier, IB is a design as well as coding tool. It serializes objects in a file that is lazy loaded in a perfect order and with well-tested memory management in place. Also, doing so involves the use of a lot of frameworks that not only make life easier, but also reduce chances of code defects.

We have used design tools in the past, and UI development using code trumped all

This is just the side effect of using bad tools for a long time. Such thinking has to go. Apple developers have been working with IB for a few years now. The toolkit keeps on expanding and getting better. Don’t let your previous bad experiences let you make bad design decisions. Do it the right way. This is not an Adobe framework.

I am very interested in doing a followup to this post on a more technical level, but I really wanted to share with other fellow iPhone developers the importance of working with the IB, not against it. The tool is there for a reason. Learn to use it. Apple recommends IB for every project.

Remember, when it comes to software engineering, it’s not always the end result that matters, but also how much future proof that solution is. Being engineers, we’re also designers – software architects, and it is upto us to engineer something beautifully, or make our product look like a patchwork of sorts.