Open Letter Against Tech Nation's Incompetence

From: Art Deco, Node.JS development company in London

This letter is in defence of Mr Anton Dmukhovskiy, an Open Source developer who was subject to abusive treatment from Tech Nation when applying for the Tier 1 Exceptional Talent visa in technology. It aims to establish the fact that the review provided by Tech Nation was not up to the high standard of work required by a competent endorsing body in digital technology sector, that Tech Nation does not understand needs and challenges of the JavaScript Open Source community, does not represent it in any way, and therefore must not be using the name of the community for its own purposes.

First and foremost, the guidance (p.35) published by the Home Office, identifies Promise as somebody who is earlier in their career and is yet to establish a track record in innovation, but can demonstrate the potential to become a world leader via skills and achievements so far. It is crucial that the visa was designed specifically as a recognition channel for young people: at school and the University, one is able to receive positive feedback for his/her attempt at studying hard by receiving good grades and merits; after that at work, one can expect salary increases and promotions as acknowledgement of effort put into making a company a success. However, when a person chooses then to become an independent Open Source developer, there is no official channel through which the importance of his work can be acknowledged. This is why the society invented institutes like Endorsing Bodies that aim to provide approval of innovative contributions to the sector, and establish a reward mechanism to assure young people that hard work pays off.

One of the rejection factors in the review conducted by Tech Nation, was that Anton had to have a community profile by attending conferences. Although there is a number of technology conferences, the bar to be signed up as speaker at one is pretty high, and may be required for the talent route, but not the promise one. The guidance gives a choice of key criteria: one can pick between

• providing evidence of innovation, OR
• having recognition of work outside of immediate occupation, examples of which include exactly conferences attendance as mentioned in the review, and this criterion was NOT picked.

His additional qualifying criteria included

• the recognition of potential to become a world leader. An example of recognition of the potential was described as "leading the growth of a company or product". The factual evidence was presented as
a letter from a colleague who said that his tools for the company are used by staff on daily basis, as well as diagrams of the infrastructure for the company built by him.
• and having undergone continuous learning. Continuous learning never required having any profile either.

It is therefore conclusive, that the guidance NEVER identifies having the community profile as a mandatory attribute of being a Promise, and if such requirement was set, it must had been articulated VERY clearly from the onset, in the same sentence, e.g.,

Applicants who choose to apply under the Exceptional Promise criteria need to be able to demonstrate the potential through their skills and achievements thus far, and they must be known by their peers.

It is unjust to not specify explicitly that one has to have a community profile, and then use it against applicants: if the community profile was really compulsory, then appropriate information had to be provided, so that applicants can estimate their chances of success appropriately, and not only find out about it at the very last moment when it's too late. People are different, some are extroverted, some are introverted (but it's also flexible depending on the task) and a lot of computer programmers will channel their energy into writing a lot of code and building software products and infrastructure, instead of wanting to go out to conferences which bear little significance to their immediate line of work. This is why there are 2 key criteria, and the guidance asks to pick one. Moreover, the Home Office guidance never gives explicit examples for the Promise route, it only says that those applying will have to show skills and achievements and that they are YET TO ESTABLISH track record. If this is the case then why does the review say "we CANNOT SEE track record"?

Additionally, Anton submitted evidence of 62 NPM packages made from scratch and required for functioning of a software development company: a testing framework, a documentation tool, a package to bootstrap other packages quickly to improve productivity, and others. To publish packages on NPM registry already means to have a community profile. Regardless of whether the tools are used or not, they demonstrate the ability to use the infrastructure that is essential as used by all Fortune 500 companies. JavaScript is the most popular programming language on the planet, and receives massive growth year by year. Setting up a full life-cycle process for creating, testing, documenting and publishing packages efficiently and confirming it by uploading 62 packages on NPM, IS a definite track record, regardless of whether such tools are used or not: NPM's search is far from perfect, and takes popularity as a ranking factor which means that popular tools will be more popular, whereas sophisticated software that is only just published, will not receive any exposure.

Due to the lack of official means of submitting her work, the developer has to go out online and advertise it on specialised forums, but there is no way like in academia to submit her research for a high-quality peer review. Presenting work to random people who have their own values (and who might not even possess any qualification) might not be suitable or desirable for everyone. Whatever rules are established by communities online, will never be of the same standard as at professional science research institutes, and are dictated by members of such communities themselves, therefore it's everyone's choice not to participate in online gathering of people without having any contractual rights there. The form of work that Anton has been doing is very similar in its nature to academic research in the field of Web Computing, according to his specialisation as trained Computer Scientist. The difference between academic, and Open Source research is exactly in the fact, that the latter can be conducted freely by anyone without being a research fellow, yet producing results of equally great significance which are then used to grow a startup and affect digital culture in a positive way. This is how all great Open Source companies started that are now worth millions and billions of dollars. Such work thus deserves an opportunity to be appreciated by proper experts, in this case Tech Nation's, and not the community.

Tech Nation is known to provide ET visas to Entrepreneur First accelerator, which invests in startups that build defensive technology. Any startup goes through 3 initial stages: formation, validation and growth. Tech Nation wants Open Source developers to be in a condition similar to unpaid internship: you exhaust yourself by working on products and putting them online for free, so that Tech Nation can make a decision on your application based on how many stars you gathered, however it's not fair either: if EF startups are allowed to create an MVP first, then validate it through marketing and finally grow, why should an independent Open Source developer not be able to do the same? Everyone has the right to decide how and when to take their product to market, and Tech Nation has no right to tell people how to conduct their business.

Ms Wendy Tan, Tech Nation Director and General Partner at EF, in an interview stressed out the following points about picking up and pursuing business activity:

• It's gotta to be business you really care about in an area you're really passionate about.
• You've got to remember, this is a marathon not a sprint.
• Each day is different and it's not always easy and you've got to be resilient and adaptive.
• And the days when you find it difficult you got to remember why you're doing it to get you through that.
• It's about making a difference, really getting great results and working with great people.
• You have to be true to yourself with what you do you can't do things to please other people or to look good.

All of these things are relevant to the application submitted by Anton: he is clearly passionate about packages, software development and quality assurance and is making a difference by improving productivity and developer experience with software tools. Even Tech Nation director is saying, that one cannot do things to please other people, which is in complete contradiction with the review which unlawfully demanded the community profile. It is unlawful, because according to the GDPR, people give their concent to process personal data only to outlined purposes, therefore not respecting the criteria choice of a candidate (which is personal data as confirmed by the Home Office) is not legal.

Some times, governments will ask population on their opinion in referendums. Other times, it is exactly the job of the government to make important decisions themselves, e.g., investments in infrastructure. The same applies to an endorsing body. There's no reason why experts in technology cannot make decisions themselves without having to ask for confirmation from the community — the review however is not based on any technical details and what had been said could be said by anyone without any expertise (especially because it was wrong, e.g., "tools made using frameworks") which means the lack of the community profile was only used to justify someone's lack of expertise and ability to make an informed decision oneself.

Einstein endured 5 months of silence after publishing his groundbreaking work on relativity principle before Planck saw that it was really special. Van Gogh never received recognition during his lifetime, selling only one painting in his entire life. Yet today he is known as the father of modern art. It's not acceptable for an endorsing body to delegate the work of assessing skill on the community profile.

When applying through Arts Council, one can show proof of having won prizes like the Booker Prize, a Grammy Award, which are worth $50-100k and which process involved judgements from established cultural leaders. There's nothing like that in Open Source. Bootstrap, one of the most known and loved web front-end framework, receives only $7k per year in arbitrary sponsorship donations which amounts to $583 per month for all contributors working on it. It's nothing. Open Source is not sustainable, that's why it's essential to build a business that can generate proper revenue. Tech Nation runs many programs for startups that already receive funding. There is absolutely no official support for anyone who is working very hard on Open Source, yet the whole world is powered by Open Source software.

In addition, developers are a really special breed of people who are super-resistant to change. They will stick to their methods and processes to the end and resist any disruption to their established routines. Tools developed by Anton included a testing framework, and a documentation tool. Learning a testing framework is one of the first things that people do when starting to code, which makes existing tools very popular due to the snowball effect as people are constantly writing tutorials about existing tools. When an unknown developer comes in and proposes a new testing framework, not many people will want to use it because of such psychology. This has been proven true numerous times. No matter what advantages a tool brings, one's always working against a strong bias against it. It's really hard to get such essential tools as a testing framework to be used, and it requires another approach.

The approach chosen by Anton was to not advertise his tools one by one at first, but come up with a holistic method of web development, and create a completely new development stack, consisting of testing, documentation and building tools that work together, and it was evident from the application (the answer to the promise) that he was working in this direction at the time of application. Developers are also scared of "technical debt" that arises from the fact that Node.JS packages are dynamically linked and require many dependencies to be installed: e.g., to install a single documentation tool, you might have to pull 30 new packages, which decreases your feeling of security (because each of them could be hacked) and control (because you don't know their purpose). This is also why nobody would want to install new tools by a random developer. However, Anton was able to overcome this problem by establishing a technique to properly compile packages with static linking and reduce the number of dependencies to 0. It's a really significant contribution to the Open Source JavaScript community that will help EVERYONE to overcome the "technical debt" bias in future and promote healthier ecosystem growth which is less homogenous. But to achieve this milestone, a bit of time (1 year) was required. Tech Nation cannot impose double standards on allowing people to receive visas to go to the EF accelerator and take time to develop products which are not even contributed to the wider community, whilst not allowing Open Source developers to do the same. It's an extortion into having to find an investor which is not in spirit of Open Source.

If Tech Nation was presented with evidence that the development of company's products was going full-steam ahead with a concrete and viable plan, they had to use this information to make judgement as to the potential of such company. In the age of innovation and wealth-unlocking in technology, each simplest innovation should be the reason for celebration of potential to become something big, but instead Tech Nation is intentionally stiffening innovation and preventing growth of local UK businesses that could benefit from products by Art Deco. If the visa is given for 5 years, the first two can be used to create the product, next one to gain a profile, and then finally to become the world leader which makes perfect sense. The preparation of work done for this process, i.e. 62 packages, education, work experience and skill, is what constitutes a promise, and not a community profile.

The job of Tech Nation, as an endorsing body, is then to assess the skill level. Starting a company by coming up with a name, establishing the development methodology and setting the direction ("all packages will be committed to Open Source"), is a massive step forward and an achievement already, yet it was never recognised by Tech Nation. Neither is academic record (distinction in Master's from the King's College London) and the senior role. Instead, it stresses the fact that that the community profile (which was never explicitly required) is feasible "even with limited experience" but the aforementioned factors must had been a much stronger and genuine signal. There are people who received the visa who have 4 GitHub commits over the last year, but if Tech Nation checked Anton's GitHub, the link to which was made available via the application form, they would've been able to see 6000 commits. It's plain negligence and falsehood to say that one "cannot see GitHub profile" when it was presented in the application.

Besides, the evaluation of the skill level is clearly done by somebody without professional qualification to do that, as it says that Anton's 62 packages are "a number of tools made using a number of frameworks". This totally inaccurate statement is actually offensive, as he himself created a testing framework which is the opposite of the stated. It's not possible to make software tools using a framework. Tools could use 3rd party packages, however if the expert was to check dependencies of core packages such as Zoroaster, Documentary and MNP, they would find that they all depend on bespoke packages made by Anton personally. Moreover, the "expert" makes a claim that they cannot see the link to the GitHub profile which is unreasonable since such link was a) on the application form and b) is accessible via any of packages in 1 click. On top of that, the claim that "tools are not used by anyone" is also false, as a software tool called node-exiftool that was mentioned in the application 3 times (in the CV, in the personal statement and in the package release log at position 5) had 1500 downloads per week. Although there was no separate evidence of this download count on an A4 paper, if an endorsing company is paid £456 which is equivalent to 4 hours of work at the rate of £100/hour, they can at least do a little bit of fact checking. It's not unreasonable for an applicant to expect that an expert would open packages' pages to see their documentation, source code and downloads count.

The Home Office guidelines set out the requirement to be able to create and exploit technical infrastructure which was proven in the application [confidential - backend+front-end+app engine deployment+quality assurance full-stack diagram], yet it was never acknowledged in the review. In one year after being turned down by Tech Nation, Anton created a fully new development stack that incorporates all aspects of professional software development process, based on the tools that he started earlier and about which he talked in answering why he was a promise. Furthermore, he came up with an innovative way to compile Node.JS packages which is perhaps in top 5 contributions to the JavaScript community in the last 10 years, as only dynamic linking was possible before. He achieved that in a short period of time exactly because of the availability of his tools that made the work process productive and efficient. His context-testing framework indeed stands out from other frameworks as it allows to publish reusable test contexts, which was confirmed by his referee — a professional in Quality Assurance who made a testing framework himself. An expert doing the review would not use language constructs like "needs to prove that what he is doing is truly innovative" when there are no analogues to developer-friendly context-testing. Also the first expert already said "clearly skilled and talented" in the decision in which Anton passed his chosen innovation criterion, so that this area didn't have to be focused on by the review.

The language of used in the review is extremely negative and plain hostile: if Tech Nation is hired by candidates, they must provide a balanced evaluation of all facts from the application, and talk about them in the decision. Instead, Tech Nation made a biased decision which is not based on any true facts without presenting any positive aspects. Such approach is motivation-crushing to any young developer and is clearly aimed at offending the applicant. For example, there was a diagram of a free package release notification system that can display in-browser push messages when new versions become available, that does not rely on the official, paid system from NPM. Similarly, if they claim that context-testing is not innovation, they must provide the comparison of existing testing frameworks that would highlight the existence of similar functionality elsewhere. If Tech Nation is to claim, that such documented system is not truly innovative, they must provide evidence of its analogues, but they clearly don't care about providing fair service to their clients, because they think they are above any law or professional etiquette and can lash out on people without any consequences to them.

A regulated profession, in a reference to Council Directive 89/48/EEC is defined in Art 1d, as

a professional activity, in so far as the taking up or pursuit of such activity or one of its modes of pursuit in a Member State is subject, directly or indirectly by virtue of laws, regulations or administrative provisions, to the possession of a diploma, in particular:

- pursuit of an activity under a professional title, in so far as the use of such a title is reserved to the holders of a diploma governed by laws, regulations or administrative provisions.

The status of an endorsing body implies the ability to provide professional certification services in IT, which is done by a Chartered IT institute called The British Computer Society. The presence of the administrative provision of the Royal Charter itself indirectly makes the title of an endorsing body subject to additional regulations such as being a member of a regulated profession. The purpose of this is to promote and maintain a high standard in the professional field concerned (IT Engineering) and to ensure that members respect the rules and professional conduct which it prescribes. An organisation that hires a single developer in its 50+ team and that does not even follow recommendations of the ICO in regards to the use of marketing cookies on their website (installing cookies without consent, which is illegal) does not have the right to provide such services.

These factors point to the fact that the review was not conducted by an expert in software development but by somebody who supplied the Home Office with inaccurate, incomplete and simply false information. The review process allows to ask for an additional review of new rejection reasons, however when a complaint was made regarding Tech Nation's false review, their response was that the candidate had run out of options and had to find "alternative visa routes". If Tech Nation was doing their job properly and following the process outlined by the Home Office, they had to say the truth, that there was an opportunity to review new reasons, but it is clear that they just wanted to get rid of the candidate after attacking him and his work verbally, knowing that there would be no consequences to them as proved to be true so far.

There were crude errors in the initial decision about letters of recommendation which had to be caught by Tech Nation in the first place, but they weren't which means that Tech Nation are negligent and are not doing their job at all, if not tampering with applications on purpose. Then instead of treating the person with due respect as their client, Tech Nation comes up with insulting lying review that is completely incompatible with actual criteria requirements from the Guidance and truths from package development domain. This letter does not claim there's a fault with the process outlined in the guidelines, but that Tech Nation is an organisation that provides a ridiculously poor service and then instead of acknowledging its mistakes, attacks candidates who raise concerns about it. Finally, the review process was exploited itself as according to paragraph C12, the applicant had the right to object to new reasons, but was not given it which is a form of deliberate psychological abuse that must be investigated and punished appropriately.

To sum up, Tech Nation is not a professional endorsing body that can handle strong Software Engineering applications because it doesn't even know what to look at. This is why they have the panel of experts, which was clearly bypassed with absolute arrogance in this case which is illegal. For some people, especially those applying for Tier 1, skill is very important and bears higher spiritual meaning. To lie about somebody's skill during the Tier 1 decision process is a cruel, irresponsible act aimed at hurting person's dignity and almost religious feelings. Finally, Anton has created truly Open Source company that has contributed more to the sector than any of the current visa holders without any help from Tech Nation which proves that they bear no relation to Open Source and must stop using the "community" factor further. We do not endorse Tech Nation as an endorsing body in digital technology.

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