Hacker News Reader

How is something not a shortage if noone can afford to buy it? When people talk about shortage they usually speak of some cohort's inability to acquire something, not simplistic assessments of inventory levels.

I'm all for the wage argument.... yes if you raise wages high enough they will come... but why take it to such extremes?

SV has done this to itself. It clusters around tiny, restricted geographic locations, which push out the locals, gentrify entire cities, and then these companies have the gall to complain about the cost of labor, which they helped to define the high prices of. More consideration is placed on proximity than prurient economic interests, because Business Interests Always Come First.

> How is something not a shortage if noone can afford to buy it?

It's just expensive. It means that some low-value projects aren't profitable and all projects are higher risk than we are currently expecting them to be.

> SV has done this to itself.

I'm sympathetic here. But if we let wages in urban centers rise, companies will be more willing to set up offices in other parts of the U.S. Or virtual offices even.

And for the record we've felt the engineering shortage too. Our last hiring run brought in all sorts of weirdos. Not everyone can afford to send a fleet of recruiters to the various Ivy Leagues to secure workers. Something needs to be done about that -- just not increased immigration. California doesn't need any more people.

My naive reading of the headline implies to me that 42% of Californian STEM companies should have opened offices outside of California.

I once interviewed for a company who was opening a new Nashville office because they had tapped out the talent pool around Ft. Campbell, Kentucky. It turned out they were still trying to pay Ft. Campbell salaries there. They forgot that bigger talent pools have more competition.

You can either throw small bait into a thousand small talent pools, or invest in some serious tackle to fish in the ocean. You either spend money on sending recruiters out to the dark, untapped reserves, or you spend enough to compete with the entire rest of the world on salary. If you really need the talent, and you can't afford the price tag, you have to settle into a niche that is just big enough for your company, and not worth the effort for someone bigger than you.

If you need cheap engineers, you can get them from any town or city that doesn't already have an 800-lb gorilla employer in it. But you have to go to them. If you move them to you, they stop being cheap, because your competition can snap them up as easily as anyone else.

That's the something that can be done about it. If you can't compete in California, stop trying. Go somewhere else with weaker competition. People follow the jobs. If you don't believe that California needs more people, they need to start exporting those job opportunities to places with less severe population pressures. Otherwise, the people will keep coming.

Very cogent, I agree

You are exactly right. That was my entire point.

The definition of a shortage is "prices are to high".

My post was countering the dumb meme that I always see which is "there isn't a shortage of devs, companies just don't want to pay high salaries".

Is there any situation that you would consider a "shortage"?

The above claim that there aren't food shortages seems simply false for any normal definition.

Obviously common use just means "an insufficient amount under these circumstances", but if we wanted to be very strict we could say "a situation where not all the players can simultaneously satisfy their demand at any price". A shortage is a situation where supply is inelastic and below demand.

Everyone hiring programmers could fill their roster simultaneously if they could pay enough - if not today then certainly soon. In a lot of famines, there are X people sharing food for <X people - price is no longer a reflection of desire, because no one voluntarily leaves the auction.

I do think it's important to distinguish insufficient demand from a simple lack of supply, but the latter definitely exists.

There are certainly short and medium term shortages as prices adjust to supply and demand realities. Salaries don't tend to swing wildly.

There are also situations where the supply of employees is kept artificially low (security clearance, taxi medallions, etc.).

Opposite. My post wasn't clear.

My definition of shortage is "prices are to high". And I think that it is always a good thing to drive prices down.

Obviously bread costing a thousand dollars is bad. That's why I used it as an example.

Similarly there is nothing wrong with trying to solve the dev shortage (meaning prices are too high), by importing more devs.

I was about to make this point myself (maybe with different wording). It's a good point. Would the people downvoting care to explain their objections?

Because it is fantasy, and simply disobey how the market works? Kick out all the competitors won't hike your salary forever. Companies aren't that stupid, and human resource cost is definitely on their radar and there is a budget for that. 1 million? I say once average developer costs over 200k, companies will start move jobs to other places that are still cheap.

Ugg, maybe my post wasn't clear.

Obviously it is ridiculous to pay people 1 million dollars. In the same way that it is ridiculous to pay a thousand dollars for bread.

> I say once average developer costs over 200k, companies will start move jobs to other places that are still cheap.

Seems like a feature not a bug to me.

Paying people 1 million dollars a year does not make more Geoff Hintons appear. It will increase supply, by taking it from other industries over time as people choose to go into these fields, but there is a lot of truly specialized work out there where it is just impractical to wait for the people to get years of experience. It is a gross, gross oversimplification, and a dangerous one.

The United States has well less than 5% of the worlds population. We are extremely lucky to attract the top talent from the other 95% and we need to defend that pipeline.

"42% of California's STEM workforce" aren't Geoff Hintons.

I don't see anyone arguing that exceptional talent shouldn't be welcomed into the U.S.

And I think the U.S. tech workforce is more elastic than you give credit for, especially for software skills. It's just most organizations want employees they don't have to train for their stacks, which I don't think is particularly reasonable.

This feels like an argument about definitions. When supply is decreased prices increase. That's basic Econ.

Now, another point to make would be about possible output versus labor costs. Ie SV will employ labor in close relationship to the output of that labor and the cost of it. Once those two values equate there is no more (efficient) demand for labor available.

That's Econ theory land though. I think this is much more about profit margins and market inefficiencies.