You are actually proving my point. If there are 4.8 million developers who are not commanding Meta salaries, and they "pay well" it should be fairly straightforward to get labor.

It's simple: the more picky you are the more you will have to pay. The GP admitted the upper bound of Meta, which is a company that is sustainably operating in the same country. If you cannot compete in a labor market, either raise your product pricing or be more efficient. If not, you will make less profit and/or go out of business, which is an appropriate outcome most of the time.

No one is entitled to their business model.

I think the other part of the problem is no one in software wants to work in Huntsville.

There are numerous reasons why AL sucks.

There's a ton of reasons to not like AL, but Huntsville is actually pretty decent from what I've seen of it.

Huntsville isn’t the socially liberal (ie we are all people and you do you) oasis like Atlanta, Miami and other major cities in red states.

To be clear, I’m not saying all conservatives are evil. I have nothing against the Kemp’s (GA’s governor) and traditional conservatives.

I totally agree with you, people thinking of moving there should be aware of the politics of the area.

But compared to a lot of the rest of Alabama and other stereotypes of the South, it's really a decent place. Definitely not the anti-science, anti-intellectual backwater many might assume. There's a lot of bright people there with interest in aerospace and engineering at all levels. And it's also a college town.

And yet you'll suffer from their policies. Just avoid getting pregnant and have complications, for one example.

I can’t believe that his work is so complicated that he can’t take a good older developer in thier 30s, who would be more than willing to move to a lower cost of living area where they can raise a family affordability and design an internal training program to get them up to speed.

Offer things that we care about like free health insurance, “unlimited PTO”, a generous 401K match with immediate vesting, etc.

I personally wouldn’t move to Alabama. But many would.

At 50, I need to work. But I don’t need to chase after FAANG salaries. I optimize for my other priorities. As I said in my previous post, I’m not “disdaining what I can’t have”. I’ve been there done that.

Given that Meta pays so well, why are they so dependent on H1B?

Or google? In 2023 they had a net elimination of 6576 US jobs, but added 5479 H1B.

This isn't a simple market issue, these companies are abusing worker visas to replace Americans from their own companies.

While I'd normally use levels.fyi for more accurate data, since you don't want to rely on that, here's info from glassdoor.

Senior: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/remote-senior-software-en...

> $178K - $262K/yr

Principal: https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/remote-principal-software...

> $269K - $415K/yr

> The estimated total pay for a Principal Software Engineer is $329,957 per year in the Remote area, with an average salary of $196,928 per year. These numbers represent the median, which is the midpoint of the ranges from our proprietary Total Pay Estimate model and based on salaries collected from our users. The estimated additional pay is $133,029 per year. Additional pay could include cash bonus, commission, tips, and profit sharing.

Sounds like the right ballpark. If you're in a location that doesn't pay as well, remote can pay much better.

Exactly how many “remote principal software developer” jobs do you think there are available and that’s a self selected sample and even then they for some reason separate “senior software developer”.

Look at salary.com where you can see by cities.

None of the BigTech companies have many remote jobs. Google is even requiring their customer facing professional services department to be in certain cities. That was a bridge too far even for AWS.