Comment by tikhonj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tikhonj | Hacker News Reader

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The problem is that just paying higher salaries would not necessarily correlate to increasing the supply of good developers. The sort of developers who only come in because you're paying 200k rather than 150k are usually not the sort Google wants to hire.

So the supply will increase, just of lesser developers. Additionally, I think it is possible to pay developers too much: I recall some study about how a salary beyond a certain point can actually make developers less productive. (I could very well be mistaken on this--I'm too lazy to go look right now.)

Basically, trying to hire great developers is complicated and just having more random people go into software is not the answer. Software is already one of the best paying "hacker" jobs around anyhow; you're not likely to attract true hackers based on more money.

> The sort of developers who only come in because you're paying 200k rather than 150k are usually not the sort Google wants to hire.

A listed-company with a market capitalization of USD 100+ billion cannot count only on its employees' passion anymore. If it pretends like it's doing so is disingenuous.

The money would affect people at the margin. The extra 10K a year might be the tipping point for a great developer to move to a different coast (or country) rather than stay put. That then opens her old job for someone else to move up. New developers can enter at any level to fill the gaps.

Not that I'm saying it's a perfect market, but if prices are being artificially stifled then the theory suggests that it'll reduce the supply, as people find better things to do with their time.

If you can't differentiate between developers of different skill levels then you've already got a problem (and a broken market).

It's up to each company's interview process to weed out the people who aren't likely to add value. Offering more would simply increase the company's available pool of employees. Put another way, the set of people who would work for you at $x is a subset (generally) of the set of people who would work for you at $y > $x

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