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Comment by pps43 | Hacker News Reader

> I think of it more as they need more engineers to get more work done.

They can easily get more engineers by simply increasing salaries.

Let's say I'm a bright student deciding whether to study software engineering or plumbing. When I graduate, my salary will be driven by supply and demand. As a software engineer, I will be competing for jobs with other software engineers, many on H1B visas coming from countries where education is less expensive than in the US. So those software engineers can comfortably accept a lower salary. No such problem with plumbing, so it is rational for me to chose plumbing.

Now Zuckerberg and co can justifiably say "look, there is a shortage of software engineers, let's lift H1B cap".

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In the short run, increasing salaries will only get you a greater share of the existing engineers. Importing workers solves the labor scarcity issue today.

I love how imply that foreign engineers have some sort of advantage over you because schools are cheaper where they come from, ignoring how much poorer those folks are. But actually that's nonsense - if you really wanted to pay low prices for foreign schools (out of yours/your parent's American income), you would have. Plenty of foreigners do attend Indian colleges, it's pretty straightforward to do.

It's quite popular among Africans. From what I'm told, African colleges are terrible, UK/US colleges are expensive, so India is a great middle ground.

I'm not implying anything, but speaking from first-hand experience. As a foreign engineer who got decent education outside of US for free and then came over on H1B, I did have clear advantage over my US counterparts. I had no student loans to service, so could afford to accept a lower salary and get the same disposable income.

There is no labor scarcity issue. I switched fields away from software engineering but if you pay me enough, can switch back just as easily. It's not rocket science.

Of course there is scarcity - not everyone has as many software engineers as they want. That's true even if people who left software come back.

Again, you ignore the fact that if an Americans wants a cheap foreign education, they can buy one. The difference between $0 in loans and $5000 in loans is negligible.

Scarcity only exists at a price. When the prices is higher, the scarcity goes away. If I only want to pay $10,000 for a new car, and I can't find any, then is it fair to say that I am facing a shortage of Mercedes?

You are conflating the concept of scarcity and shortage. They aren't the same thing.

Scarcity = not everyone who wants something can have it. This means that some sort of rationing mechanism must be used (e.g. price) to distribute that thing.

Shortage = the price of a good is $X but not everyone willing to pay $X will receive the good.

Shortage is a market condition, usually a symptom of a broken market. Scarcity is just a fundamental fact of counting. It is not fair to say there is a shortage of Mercedes, but it is fair to say that Mercedes are a scarce resource.

> In the short run, increasing salaries will only get you a greater share of the existing engineers.

That's how the market works. If you are Google or Facebook and you need 10000 more engineers, just pay enough to attract them. You'll get them from lower paying companies, which in turn will raise their salaries as well (but not as much), and so on. At the end of the chain, the companies which are the lowest paying and cannot hire anyone anymore will simply remove those positions. In time, more and more people will train to be software engineers, and salaries will shrink.

And in the short run valuable software engineering work doesn't get done.

I understand that your primary goal is avoiding economic competition with people vastly poorer than you, but lets not lose sight of the fact that the economy as a whole suffers when valuable work doesn't get done.

> I understand that your primary goal is avoiding economic competition with people vastly poorer than you, but lets not lose sight of the fact that the economy as a whole suffers when valuable work doesn't get done.

Actually, I am Romanian, I was in the US for 6 months on a J1 visa at a top company, and now I'm looking for a job in Europe since it's so difficult to emigrate to the US.

I just disagree with the principle that if you study philosophy, it's your fault that you can't get a job, whereas if you're a company and want to hire a software engineer for $70k and you can't find any, it's the government's fault, not your own. I would prefer to let the market do its thing.

Also, I think that if suddenly there would be only 100 visas per year allowed, companies would learn to deal with that, either by opening remote offices or being more remote-friendly.

Of course it's the government's fault - they are threatening you and your prospective employer with violence if he actually hires you. You would find a job in the US if it wasn't for (potentially) violent actions by a third party.

In contrast, no one wants to hire the philosophy major. There is no one else to blame because no third party is preventing him from behind hired.

>I understand that your primary goal is avoiding economic competition with people vastly poorer than you, but lets not lose sight of the fact that the economy as a whole suffers when valuable work doesn't get done.

You aren't wrong. But one does wonder why technical professions must be maximally subjected to "competition with people poorer than them" while lawyers, doctors, teachers and government workers seem to exempt from such competition.

> At the end of the chain, the companies which are the lowest paying and cannot hire anyone anymore will simply remove those positions.

Don't forget: they will also whine incessently about how there's a "shortage of engineers".

Or by spending money to train engineers engineers.

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