I'm all for the wage argument.... yes if you raise wages high enough they will come... but why take it to such extremes?
SV has done this to itself. It clusters around tiny, restricted geographic locations, which push out the locals, gentrify entire cities, and then these companies have the gall to complain about the cost of labor, which they helped to define the high prices of. More consideration is placed on proximity than prurient economic interests, because Business Interests Always Come First.
It's just expensive. It means that some low-value projects aren't profitable and all projects are higher risk than we are currently expecting them to be.
> SV has done this to itself.
I'm sympathetic here. But if we let wages in urban centers rise, companies will be more willing to set up offices in other parts of the U.S. Or virtual offices even.
I once interviewed for a company who was opening a new Nashville office because they had tapped out the talent pool around Ft. Campbell, Kentucky. It turned out they were still trying to pay Ft. Campbell salaries there. They forgot that bigger talent pools have more competition.
You can either throw small bait into a thousand small talent pools, or invest in some serious tackle to fish in the ocean. You either spend money on sending recruiters out to the dark, untapped reserves, or you spend enough to compete with the entire rest of the world on salary. If you really need the talent, and you can't afford the price tag, you have to settle into a niche that is just big enough for your company, and not worth the effort for someone bigger than you.
If you need cheap engineers, you can get them from any town or city that doesn't already have an 800-lb gorilla employer in it. But you have to go to them. If you move them to you, they stop being cheap, because your competition can snap them up as easily as anyone else.
That's the something that can be done about it. If you can't compete in California, stop trying. Go somewhere else with weaker competition. People follow the jobs. If you don't believe that California needs more people, they need to start exporting those job opportunities to places with less severe population pressures. Otherwise, the people will keep coming.
The definition of a shortage is "prices are to high".
My post was countering the dumb meme that I always see which is "there isn't a shortage of devs, companies just don't want to pay high salaries".
Obviously common use just means "an insufficient amount under these circumstances", but if we wanted to be very strict we could say "a situation where not all the players can simultaneously satisfy their demand at any price". A shortage is a situation where supply is inelastic and below demand.
Everyone hiring programmers could fill their roster simultaneously if they could pay enough - if not today then certainly soon. In a lot of famines, there are X people sharing food for <X people - price is no longer a reflection of desire, because no one voluntarily leaves the auction.
I do think it's important to distinguish insufficient demand from a simple lack of supply, but the latter definitely exists.
There are also situations where the supply of employees is kept artificially low (security clearance, taxi medallions, etc.).
My definition of shortage is "prices are to high". And I think that it is always a good thing to drive prices down.
Obviously bread costing a thousand dollars is bad. That's why I used it as an example.
Similarly there is nothing wrong with trying to solve the dev shortage (meaning prices are too high), by importing more devs.
Obviously it is ridiculous to pay people 1 million dollars. In the same way that it is ridiculous to pay a thousand dollars for bread.
Seems like a feature not a bug to me.
The United States has well less than 5% of the worlds population. We are extremely lucky to attract the top talent from the other 95% and we need to defend that pipeline.
I don't see anyone arguing that exceptional talent shouldn't be welcomed into the U.S.
And I think the U.S. tech workforce is more elastic than you give credit for, especially for software skills. It's just most organizations want employees they don't have to train for their stacks, which I don't think is particularly reasonable.
Now, another point to make would be about possible output versus labor costs. Ie SV will employ labor in close relationship to the output of that labor and the cost of it. Once those two values equate there is no more (efficient) demand for labor available.
That's Econ theory land though. I think this is much more about profit margins and market inefficiencies.
There is NEVER a time when there are not enough qualified US Citizens.
Why? Because if I am a company, I will 100% always be able to hire enough engineers, if I just do this 1 weird trick.
And that trick is "pay every engineer 1 million dollars".
The question is always about price.
In the same way that a food shortage has basically never existed in history. Sure, there were places where the price of bread was 1 thousand dollars, and people were starving to death because they couldn't have enough food. But thats not a shortage, thats just people complaining about price!
Now, the real question you have to ask yourself, is "is bread costing 1 thousand dollars a good thing?" And when you can answer that questions, you will also be able to answer "is a software engineer costing 1 million dollars a good thing"?
Edit: my post doesn't seem to be clear.
My point that I was making is that "bread costing 1 thousand dollars is a bad thing". And that there is nothing wrong with driving down the price of devs.
My definition of shortage is "prices are too high"