GoKawiilThis 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.
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