> That pool of high-performers is not a big one and you're directly removing competition and silo-ing all the best people under your control.

That is precisely the idea that was at an all time high during ZIRP - just (acqui)hire people and companies to make sure no one else has access to them. In an ideal world this should have been banned under antitrust regulations, but eh.

And now it has predictably blown up in our faces.

I happen to agree with you that individual companies hoarding high-performers and keeping them useless is a dumb strategy and that it should have been targeted by anti-trust.

I was more pointing out that hoarding high-performers as a country is desirable since geopolitics prioritizes different outcomes than pure capitalism.

Optimally, the US would attract the cream of the crop, the top 5% of the world and let them roam freely inside of the American system with plenty of capital (both money and labor). I'd venture and point out that many of America's greatest technological leaps were a direct result of this kind of strategy (think WWII, the space program, computing, etc, etc).

The reason why increasing wages for low-level jobs is so important is that it puts upwards pressure on all wages above them as well.

If the lowest paid lowest responsibility job has a wage increase, then any job which requires more from the worker needs to increase their salaries, or people dip out and take the easier job for the same salary.

In reality, the example is usually something like a situation where a highly stressful and highly skilled job is maybe paying $30 per hour and the worker decides to change to a menial job for $25 per hour instead or even less.

Any talk of "worker shortages" is not just a lie, it is a lie born from evil. Born out of the current geriatric ideology of hatred against the youth of your own people, which is dominating in industrial society all over the world.

Any business which cannot pay a good salary for the workers they employ shouldn't be in business in the first place. It is better for the economy that those people work with something else. Especially since a normal worker usually has an output of 5-10 times more than what they are paid, and in efficient sectors even more than that.

Paying more guarantees getting more high quality applicants. It also means more applicants who aren’t high quality. That’s why you do interviews instead of choosing randomly. If a company’s hiring process is unable to select the best applicants, that’s a separate problem.

So many employers on this thread are basically revealing they have no idea how to interview and select candidates. It has never been easier to find skilled engineers, and yet they're struggling to hire.

They aren't looking for candidates. They are looking for candidates unlikely or strongly disincentivized to leave, whistleblow, say no, ask for a raise, be on board with implementing systems architected to hide their fundamentally abusive natures behind many layers of indirection, without digging in enough to grok what they are.

That population requires a very pointed set of constraints that are super hard to find, because no one in their right mind would want to live under the systems we're building if they live somewhere without worse off already.

Globalism is just a shortcut around gaining the consent of the labor class which materializes in the form of "you can't pay me enough to implement that".

It reads like a sense of entitlement. They've put in work to determine a "fair" wage to offer. Despite this, they have a hard time filling job openings. How could this be? They've done what they're supposed to do and they're not getting what they deserve in return! Are they too selective, or are they offering too little? No, it's the children who are wrong.