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Comment by aryastark | Hacker News Reader

Yep. This is how backwards our industry is. It wants to pay peanuts for rockstar coders, but doesn't realize that no one is both dumb enough to work for snack food Tuesdays and smart enough to have a PhD in CS.

The problem is exasperated by these companies treating engineers like children. "Toss them another Mt. Dew, and they'll work another all-nighter."

With all the VC and buyout money out there, a true rockstar is going to be a founder or have serious equity in their company. They'd be an idiot for anything less.

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So what are these Ph.D. engineers doing, then? Sitting at home with their degrees waiting for a big enough offer? I think not. They are employed somewhere, which means that actually they are not counterproof of a shortage.

Raising salary always comes up as the "answer" to the talent shortage, but it's a highly localized answer. Sure a company can fill all their openings by raising their salaries--they'll do it by recruiting currently-employed engineers from another company.

That doesn't "fill a hole" industry-wide. It just moves it to another company. If there are more holes than qualified engineers, there's a shortage.

To make the case that talent shortages are caused by low salaries, you'd need to show me a lot of people who are qualifed but currently willfully unemployed, waiting for the right offer. I'm not aware of many engineers who fit that description.

They aren't unemployed, they entered industries other than engineering, like finance, medicine, or law, because they expected higher pay there.

Well, don't work for those companies. There's plenty of companies around that actively discourage hero coding by anybody (aside from exceptional circumstances) because it illustrates a deeper flaw in their system.

> Well, don't work for those companies.

That's not a solution. That's the issue. Smart people don't work for those companies. Then, said companies turn around and complain that there is a shortage of talent*

*willing to work for $80k in the Bay area.

It is actually difficult to find talent, though. The fact that idiots are claiming this for the wrong reasons doesn't mean that smart people can't also think so for the right reasons.

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