A similar issue exists with respect to illegal immigration and low-pay, low-status jobs such as crop picking, meat-packing, and janitorial services: if there aren't enough Americans willing to do the job at prevailing wages, then aren't prevailing wages too low? Sure, my tomatoes would cost more and cleaning services might be 200% more expensive, but that's just the cost of doing business.

Or for another "white-collar" example: the alleged "pilot shortage" in the US. There's no shortage of trained, qualified pilots; there is a shortage of trained, qualified pilots willing to accept the wages and working conditions that are typical when starting out with a US-based airline. That one ends up draining in the opposite direction: instead of working for airlines in the US, those pilots go overseas where the offered pay and working conditions are better, and end up flying for Asian or Middle Eastern airlines.

But who would be served by that?

With immigration Americans get cheaper tomatoes and unAmericans get comparatively better jobs. It's a win-win.

Exactly. If a company were to announce they were going to bump dev salaries up by 75K/year, they'd be flooded with people wanting to interview.

> why aren't they simply offering large enough compensation packages to attract the existing pool?

Well, they are. Compensation packages at the big tech companies are ridiculous. I know someone that got $100k signing bonus (cash, not stock) without a degree at 21 years old. He's not a genius either.

At a certain point, don't you think it's better to share some of that opportunity with smart foreigners? How many Teslas does an American twenty-something need?

>Well, they are.

Clearly they aren't. Say an engineer can make a company $1 million per year. They are only willing to pay $200k per year in total compensation, but they complain that they can't hire enough engineers. Obviously they aren't paying enough per engineer.

>At a certain point, don't you think it's better to share some of that opportunity with smart foreigners? How many Teslas does an American twenty-something need?

So it's not the multi-billion dollar companies that are being greedy, but the engineers making $150k a year?

Companies want to import foreign workers to depress wages so that they can save money, and your instinct is to blame the workers who don't want lower wages?

> They are only willing to pay $200k per year in total compensation, but they complain that they can't hire enough engineers. Obviously they aren't paying enough per engineer.

Engineers are not created from money. You might be able to fill your positions by paying more, but not all of the positions in the entire country. Not without immigration or higher graduation rates.

> Companies want to import foreign workers to depress wages so that they can save money, and your instinct is to blame the workers who don't want lower wages?

How do you justify that the location of birth should be the main determinant in whether an engineer earns $150k a year or $30k a year? That line of reasoning is a lot more disgusting to me than corporate profit-maximizing.

If there was really a shortage of engineers, then engineer salary would be very close to the value the engineer adds to the company, because the competition to hire would drive the price as high as it could possibly go. Salary is nowhere near close to the value an engineer adds to the company, so most likely there is no shortage.

The shortage is a manufactured problem to justify an attempt to depress wages.

>How do you justify that the location of birth should be the main determinant in whether an engineer earns $150k a year or $30k a year?

If we take that to it's logical extreme. No one makes $150k a year. We allow an unlimited number of software engineers in until the average salary drops down to a level where it's not worth it to immigrate here. Maybe that's worth it to you, but if global income equality and globally open borders are your goal, argue for that.

Stop with this false argument about an engineering shortage that doesn't exist.

> Salary is nowhere near close to the value an engineer adds to the company, so most likely there is no shortage.

I think it is more likely that the marginal value added by an engineer to a company is much less than you think it is.

If Google currently earns an average of ~$2m per engineer that does not imply that they will earn an additional $2m upon hiring another engineer. In fact I'm confident they could fire at least 500 engineers tomorrow without negatively impacting their profit at all.

>In fact I'm confident they could fire at least 500 engineers tomorrow without negatively impacting their profit at all

That makes no sense. If they can lose a significant chunk of their engineering team "without negatively impacting their profit at all" then why did they hire them in the first place.

If your assertion is true, they must have significantly overestimated their staffing needs. If they did, it's likely everyone did, so the engineering shortage crisis doesn't really exist after all.

That was the least important part of my comment. If you're arguing there's no shortage because wages are much lower than the marginal value of hiring an engineer, it's on you to come up with evidence supporting this supposed (much) higher marginal value.

Everything I've seen points to a real shortage and desperation on the part of the employers: interns making six figures with free Manhattan penthouses, nonstop recruiter spam, 22-year-olds negotiating stock packages on their 8 fulltime offers before they finish school, fresh grads buying Teslas with signing bonuses before their first day of work, countless job listings that never ever go away, $10k+ referral bonuses, websites where employers apply to you...

> it's on you to come up with evidence supporting this supposed (much) higher marginal value.

There's no more onus on me to prove a higher marginal value than there is on you to prove a lower one. You've attempted to shift the burden of proof by arbitrarily deciding that your assumption is the correct one.

I will say that most of the people I've read trying to determine the marginal value of software engineers, think that it's a good deal higher than what you seem to think it is. When you consider that there are outliers who will make or save companies tens of millions and not very many who are going to have very large negative impacts, the average is going to trend pretty high.

>Everything I've seen points to a real shortage and desperation on the part of the employers: interns making six figures with free Manhattan penthouses, nonstop recruiter spam, 22-year-olds negotiating stock packages on their 8 fulltime offers before they finish school, fresh grads buying Teslas with signing bonuses before their first day of work, countless job listings that never ever go away, $10k+ referral bonuses, websites where employers apply to you...

None of that is at all even remotely normal. The vast majority of software engineers don't experience anything like that. None of the people you're talking about are close to average. Average programmers don't pass Google style interviews. I went to a fairly average state school, and I've done a lot of tutoring and interview prep. I'd be shocked if 1% of the students I graduated with could pass a Google interview.

It's hardly shocking that the top 1% of engineers are making large salaries. Top law firms start associates out at $200k a year, do you think there's a shortage of lawyers?

If there really was a shortage, Google and other companies would relax their interview processes, and invest more in training. If anything, the real problem is that everyone thinks they need to hire the top 1%, but they don't want to pay for it.

$150k in silicon valley is equivalent to about $90k a year where I live, so I'm not interested in moving. If someone there offered me $300k, I'd go in a heartbeat.

So we've been disagreeing the whole time on what it means to be a 'qualified engineer'.

The employers don't consider someone who can't pass an AmaGoogTwitBook interview (with some practice, of course) to be a 'qualified engineer', and there is indeed a shortage of such people.

Companies have arbitrarily set a very high standard that can only be passed by x% of engineers, and then argued they can't find enough. You could do the same for any industry. Here's an example (also keep in mind this next example would work the same even if the bar isn't set arbitrarily):

Let's say I run a cleaning business, and I decide that I only want to hire janitors who can run a 4 minute mile. I think that they are the best people for the job, and no-one else will do.

Let's also say that I only want to pay them $50k a year. Some time goes buy and I'm having a really hard time finding people. Now I could raise what I'm offering to $100k a year, and find plenty of candidates who would move here from other states, change careers, move from management back to working as a janitor, come out of early retirement etc...

Or I could relax my requirements--take people who show the potential to run a 4 minute mile and train them.

Or I could lobby the government to increase the visa cap so I can import qualified people who are willing to work for $50k.

This doesn't sound so bad when you think about it. I wasn't willing to offer more than $50k a year, so wages weren't increasing anyway.

However, if I didn't have the option of raising the visa cap, and I really believed that only janitors who meet my qualifications would work, I would have no choice but to offer a higher salary.

Therefore, importing more workings depresses wages for qualified janitors.

Now you might be thinking $50k is plenty for qualified janitors. They can live with less. But here's the important part. You didn't increase the visa cap for only qualified janitors.

You increased the visa cap for all janitors, who are making at least the prevailing wage. And it's based on a lottery. The number of extra visa spots aren't proportional to how much a company is paying. Every company who is willing to pay the candidate at least the prevailing wage gets the same shot at these visa slots. Since, most companies don't have sub 4 minute mile requirements for janitors, the prevailing wage is much lower than $50k a year.

Now the market is flooded with janitors willing to work at average companies for $20k a year, and you've driven down wages for all janitors not just the top 1% of qualified janitors. Even though the shortage is only for the top 1%.

Average software developers aren't making $150k a year and buying Teslas, and they are the ones you're going to hurt with visa cap increases.

I'll agree that there is a shortage of top 1% programmers. There is a shortage of the top 1% in nearly every industry almost by definition. However, until you develop a system for only importing enough top 1% programmers to meet demand, you're going to hurt everyone who's not in the top 1%.

There are several systems for doing this. The easiest to implement probably to use an auction instead of a lottery (this comes with a set of its own problems though).

..because the engineers have created things that the company can continue to profit off. They're not factory workers, they don't need to be there on the day-to-day to add that value, so it's a little disingenuous to suggest the impact would be seen "tomorrow". Still not having those engineers 6, 12, 24 months down the line might not look so happy, though.

You wouldn't attribute much of the value created by a Boeing 747 to the mechanic the maintains it, so why would you do so with the mechanics that maintain the AdWords money machine built ten years ago?

I'm not really sure what to make of this analogy. Are you suggesting that the mechanic maintaining a 747 is on the same level as the design and fabrication team who built it?

The design and fabrication team who built AdWords years ago are rich. The engineers they're hiring today at 150-200k are akin to the mechanics hired to keep it running.

Just to be clear on your last point, I don't object to immigrants pursuing engineering, at all, provided it was a choice they made freely, that the immigrants were also free to choose not to become engineers as a condition of entering the US. I do object to empowering employers to coerce would-be immigrants into studying engineering (or any field for that matter) or working as engineers as a condition of gaining access to the US labor market, as I believe that this produces harmful market distortions and is an affront to personal freedom.

Generally speaking, immigrants (about 1.2 million annually to the US) are free and full participants in the labor market, free to pursue the degrees and skills they wish, in response to salary, working conditions, career longevity, personal interests, and so forth. They may wish to open a sandwich shop, sell real estate, or write software. Just like people who were born in the US.

It turns out that, like those born in the US, these immigrants don't go into engineering in numbers that high tech employers feel they should. Personally, I think this is a sign that perhaps high tech employers need to sweeten the pot a bit - if people (immigrants or otherwise) who are free to choose aren't choosing you, that's the market's answer. It's not them, it's you.

Employers have responded by lobbying for what I consider to be a wildly self-serving and coercive visa that gives them the power to bestow and revoke US residency and work rights under the notion that there is a "shortage" of engineers. This enables them to say - we'll let you in if you study computer science and agree to write code for us for the "market rate" salary that fails to attract those with the freedom to choose their careers in sufficient numbers. We won't let you in if you don't take our tech test, and if you try to quit your job and open up a sandwich shop, we'll have you deported. You know, free labor markets.

I'm opposed to a system that allows employers to bestow (and revoke!) US residency and work rights on non-citizens under the condition that they study what the employer says they should study, work on what the employer says they should work on, live where the employer says they should live, and so forth. I think this position is very consistent with pro-immigration attitudes and personal freedom.

> You might be able to fill your positions by paying more, but not all of the positions in the entire country. Not without immigration or higher graduation rates.

There is not set number of "positions", the number depends on the number of developer willing to work for the wage offered. If you would consider an employer who is willing to pay $50 per month for a developer to have an open "position", then the number of positions would be an order of magnitude higher.

> if there are companies so desperate to hire engineers that they're turning to immigration law to try to increase the supply, why aren't they simply offering large enough compensation packages to attract the existing pool?

I don't get this argument. If there are 100 open positions and 80 eligible candidates, 20 (at least) positions will remain vacant, regardless of compensation. Not saying that this example reflects the real world, just that the argument is not sound from a logical/mathematical standpoint.

Your math is wrong, or rather irrelevant. The pool of eligible candidates is not fixed. It constantly changes based on the offered compensation and other factors. For example there are plenty of people qualified to do engineering work who aren't working in that field right now for whatever reason, but could be enticed to take an engineering job for enough money.

I disagree, the pool of candidates basically only changes via immigration and as people retrain or teenagers choose different college majors (very slow).

> For example there are plenty of people qualified to do engineering work who aren't working in that field right now for whatever reason, but could be enticed to take an engineering job for enough money.

Like whom? How can you be qualified to do software engineering if a) you've invested so much in a different career that you already make more than SV salaries and b) you presumably haven't done software engineering in years?

That's just flat out wrong. I know people who were formerly software developers and who stopped their careers to become stay-at-home parents. If you offered a salary of, let's say, $300K they would be happy to reenter the workforce. It's not that hard to catch back up.

As for past investments in different careers, those are sunk costs and irrelevant to decisions made now.

> I know people who were formerly software developers and who stopped their careers to become stay-at-home parents.

The population of people who consider $150k a year not to be sufficient incentive to get a job is vanishingly small.

> As for past investments in different careers, those are sunk costs and irrelevant to decisions made now.

It's not irrelevant if they did those things instead of learning/doing software engineering. You can't study medicine or law or banking for 8 years and just become an engineer at Google overnight because the Google starting salary had (hypothetically) risen to $300k and it's now a better deal.

The argument is that there are thousands of eligible candidates who simply haven't chosen to apply for your company because they are happy at their current position, and Apple/etc are choosing to focus on increasing the pool of candidates rather than increasing their attractiveness to the existing group of candidates.