> I dunno. Developers already earn ridiculous salaries compared to pretty much any other profession.

A common misconception. Check out other comments in this thread. Folks in many other professions, such as nursing, can make about the same as "senior engineers".

> At some point businesses just can't afford to pay any more

I heard the same claim back when $150k was a top salary in SF. Then companies needed to pay more, and somehow they managed to do so.

Check out a tech company's balance sheet. The margins are typically more than enough to cover some raises.

"Somehow they managed to pay more"... that's one way to look at it. The other possibility is that only those businesses that could afford to pay more are left now. If you can scale to a million users per engineer, sure, pay them more.

If you can't operate at that scale, tough luck. You need to do exactly what the article suggests: outsource and buy services. In house dev teams are now so expensive that many companies just can't afford them.

> The other possibility is that only those businesses that could afford to pay more are left now.

What's wrong with that?

I can't afford to hire a butler, so I don't get one. The government doesn't owe me one. Nor does it issue a special visa so someone can come and be my butler for the $50/week I can afford...

The problem is that only the most profitable companies remain. If you don't see the problems that can lead to, I don't know what to say.

I'm not demanding "the government" do anything about it, and I don't think that cheap foreign labor will help at all. I don't have any solutions.

But access to developers is an issue, and saying that companies should just pay more is naive and doesn't solve any problems.