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Comment by mjohn | Hacker News Reader

Even within cities employers face competition that they need to respond to if they want to compete. There are plenty of employers in London trying to hire experienced software developers or PhD machine learning experts for less than I made 5 years ago as a junior developer, let alone compared to what banks in London are willing to pay.

There may well be a shortage, but that is all the more reason to increase salaries if you want to compete in the global market for software developers.

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This captures it quite well. A "shortage" means that you cannot fill the need regardless of what you are willing to pay. A "pricing problem" means that engineers you can get for your offered pay are incapable of meeting the requirements of the job.

Is real shortage possible? If what I am willing to pay is limitless, won't people catch up, learn the skills and shortage willl be gone?

After some time, yes. But there is lag in the system, while people get educated and while culture changes to value engineers as much as doctors or lawyers were values in the past.

Yes it's possible.

1) The market ain't perfect. There are employers willing to pay but employees don't know about them. They can't get in touch.

2) If there is a very limited supply of people (I believe that's real for a lot of complex stuff), a single person can only be at a single place, it only take a few employers to get all of them and that's it!

It gets worse... because then people can't catch up and train. Training need time and mentoring, time is slow, mentoring is hard because the mentor are stuck in a few selection organizations with impossibly high standards.

I never agreed to use such a definition for "shortage".

> London trying to hire experienced software developers or PhD machine learning experts for less than I made 5 years ago as a junior developer, let alone compared to what banks in London are willing to pay.

numbers?

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