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A comment on Large Companies Game H-1B Visa Program. Parent comment

Re:Large Companies Game H-1B Visa Program by gnaritas on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @11:35AM (#10540324)
> Not everyone has the money to pay market salaries

Then they can't compete in that market. Market salary is not a high bar, it's the expected fair wage. If you can't pay market salary, you don't belong in business.

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Re:Large Companies Game H-1B Visa Program by sumedh on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @07:55PM (#10543977)
What if the company is in the Midwest where I am assuming the market salary would be much lower than SF, so they cannot get the talent they need.
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Re:Large Companies Game H-1B Visa Program by gnaritas on Wednesday November 11, 2015 @02:45AM (#10545312)
Midwest programmers don't cost as much; market rates vary per market. And if they can't pay what midwest programmers demand, then they should rightly go out of business.
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Re:Large Companies Game H-1B Visa Program by dasil003 on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @12:23PM (#10540701)
Market salaries are currently distorted by the easy money available right now. The fact is most companies who pay market salaries can not afford it either, they're just placing a bet with investors' money and they will go out of business sooner than they could have in a more sane market.

I think it's shortsighted to just throw up your hands and say "because free market" in this kind of scenario. The fact is if "market" salaries for software engineers are based on unicorn thinking and the salaries that Apple, Google and Facebook can pay, then there won't be much of a long-tail of interesting companies, we will all end up working for mega corps.

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Re:Large Companies Game H-1B Visa Program by gnaritas on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @01:09PM (#10541099)
That is the nature of business, those salaries are not distorted, they're what's in demand. Those companies pay that because they must to capture the amount of dev supply they require. If they blow up because they can't afford to maintain it, it'll correct the situation and release some supply back into the market. Salaries are high because supply is low, not because there's too much easy money.
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Re:Large Companies Game H-1B Visa Program by vonmoltke on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @02:19PM (#10541653)
Supply of developers that meet the high (whether justified or not) bar of those companies is low.
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Re:Large Companies Game H-1B Visa Program by x0x0 on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @02:54PM (#10541952)
Not at all.

Supply of developers that both meet the high bar and are willing to accept poorer economic futures (see eg housing costs that have doubled in the last 5 years, expensive childcare, etc) is low. My experienced mid-career engineering peers keep moving to Austin, Seattle, and various cities in the midwest because being able to get a house for $300k, $500k, or $250k, respectively, massively changes their financial outcomes.

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Re:Large Companies Game H-1B Visa Program by learc83 on Tuesday November 10, 2015 @01:05PM (#10541068)
If anything market salaries are artificially low because of the power imbalance between employers and employees.

All the current H-1B debacle does is increase that power imbalance even further.

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