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Comment by ThePawnBreak | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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".

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