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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

  I frequently hear startups say [...] can't find 
  a single great candidate for an engineering role 
  no matter how hard they look.

While I agree that offering better compensation is a wise move for individual companies, if the market has 10 job openings and 9 engineers, regardless of how much pay they offer one of the companies won't be able to fill the opening.

Offering more money might fix hiring problems for one company, stopping one person complaining, but to stop all people complaining the only solution is to increase the supply or reduce the demand.

(Increasing the supply doesn't have to mean immigration reform - it could mean training or lowering hiring standards or a bunch of other things)

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If the market has 10 openings and 9 engineers the companies should fight over the 9 by increasing overall compensation, soon another intelligent hard working individual will be sufficiently incentivised to join the industry workforce.

Sure, but if you want to hire someone with nonzero industry experience, your options are more limited :) this is what I mean when I say companies will have to lower their standards - inexperienced people into experienced-person positions, people who've been coding since they were 18 instead of people who've been coding since they were 10, people without university degrees instead of with them, and so on.

No amount of demand can create people with two years of experience in less than two years, or people with four-year degrees in less than four years.

You can also stop engineers from leaving for finance.

You can't go on the interstate with a vespa.

And that engineer will be dismissed as "not a real hacker" since they haven't been coding since 12 years old.

What's stopping the market from bidding up the compensation of a small subset of programmers who have been coding since 12 the same way a small subset of lawyers have in corporate law and lobbying?

As someone who has been coding since my teenage years; I just don't buy that this trait is absolutely essential to being a successful engineer. If it is why doesn't the market reflect this?

"What's stopping the market from bidding up the compensation of a small subset of programmers who have been coding since 12"

Oh.. nothing.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/01/15/apple-google-anti-...

"the market has 10 job openings and 9 engineers" is an assumption that doesn't seem to be true - if it would be, we'd observe a significant growth in salaries as companies would be competing to avoid being the one left out, since (as you say) that would fix hiring problems for that one company. If there was a true shortage, it would be impossible to hide or not notice the effect on pure 'price' of developers.

However, the evidence that we are seeing indicates that it simply isn't true - if the market has 10 job openings, then somehow there are 10+ engineers available, including employee migration, H1Bs, and all that. Somehow the supply is stable and in pace with demand - of course, all the companies would like the supply to be even higher, but that's to be expected.

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