Comp-sci salaries are really, really good, to the point that a single experienced developer is single-handedly in the top ten percent of earners; a household with two developers is easily in the top 3-4% of household earners. And a superstar developer can make a hell of a lot more, if you're willing to play the casino economy of startups.

Yes, a b- or law-school grad who went to school in Boston is going to economically outperform their brethren from land-grant schools, but a lot of that has to do with background privilege and the ability to build a relationship graph. (If Harvard excluded the academically-mediocre children of the rich and powerful and admitted solely on merit, nine-tenths of the wealth-generating potential of its diploma would be extinguished.) Your average MBA or JD is lucky to do as well as a senior software developer.

Computer science, like medicine, is hard, while it's easier to tune one's grad school experience for less-rigorous subjects. And we all know that even credentialed programmers often can't pass the FizzBuzz test, while even fewer can speak authoritatively about complex system design and architecture. We could add more bodies to CS curricula, but it's far from clear that robbing from MBA and JD programs would add to the stock of high-quality programmers.

The idea that developers already make enough money, and so instead of letting the market set prices and the shortages work themselves out, that we should rather blow up the current system because some giant companies would just, you know, really appreciate it -- I can't even finish the sentence.

I would really enjoy paying less money to get my transmission rebuilt or the plumbing in the downstairs bathroom fixed. I would love a glut of massage therapists so that I could get my shoulder worked on for the price of an expensive coffee. I do not, however, suggest we change immigration policy to make my dreams a reality. That seems to be what it comes down to.

Subclause (II) of section 1182(n)(1)(A)(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act is amended by inserting "median" before "prevailing wage level".

This would at least prevent companies from using the lowest possible wage tier in the BLS data.

What is the point at which these giants collectively tell us to fuck ourselves and run off to the Chinese nirvana you describe? Is it just north of where we are already, so if we don't get some immigration relief immediately we're all doomed?

Maybe. Or maybe the whole process isn't as clean as you're implying that it is. I do know that for as long as I've been paying attention a standard Republican refrain has been that if we don't lower our taxes to zero then all industries, in their game-theoretic wisdom, will evaporate from our lands. And yet businesses keep failing to migrate en masse to whichever Dakota has no taxes, and Minnesotan industry draws another day's breath.

To reiterate, I'm not saying you're wrong; but the causal chain is considerably more entropic than you or pg are letting on.

Disclosure: I'm an American who has worked for Microsoft in Beijing for 7+ years.

Would you also support similar arguments for say, oh I don't know, taxi or hotel prices in the area where you live so the existing pool of taxi drivers or hotel owners can protect the income they are making?

That's a strawman. Eliminating immigration is not the only way to restrict supply of software developers.

"and not re-legislating immigration policy at the behest of..."

The fact that you felt the need to add a couple of other "baddies" after "at the behest of" should be an indicator that the original argument is weak. This entire thread thread is filled with software engineers making the argument that increased supply of software engineers is going to decrease wages. That's exactly what happens in a free market of labor.

As a thought experiment, imagine a world who got a job offer from a US company was free to move to the US and start working. Any situation short of that is a legally mandated labor supply shortage.

Well duh. But again, that's not the point of TFA.

You're clearly eager to advocate that laborers should be free to move about the world and work wherever they want. That's cool, knock yourself out. But it's another thread than this one.

Even more specifically if there really programmers out there who are best of the best. Making a lot of money would be least of their problems.

First, US is already the third country in list for highest paid programmers, there is not much room to grow.

Second, Companies are in business, not for charity.

Companies are there for profit so if they could hire a beginner programmer for 50k, they should, otherwise they would be out of business and you would be buying everything made in China.

The fact that companies are not charitable institutions is exactly the point. If they want more or better engineers they are welcome to pay salaries that will motivate such people to work for them, much as the petroleum industry is currently doing.

1. There is, as dictated by the law of supply-and-demand, not an undersupply of good programmers, otherwise good programmers would be in a negotiating position such that they would reject your 50k offer for a 150k offer elsewhere; or

2. The market cannot support this hypothetical company's business model. If my restaurant fails because labor costs leave me overrunning my revenue, few people would argue that is evidence we need immigration reform so I can find cheaper labor.

EDIT: http://www.payscale.com/research/IN/Job=Web_Developer/Salary

The maximum on that scale is 530,000 Rs, which is 8000 USD for a web developer. No doubt other countries have even lower salaries.

It is a whole different game for soso programmers. If you want a soso programmer in China, they will be much cheaper in the states, but the bottom is also much lower than one from the states could imagine, and often you just get what you pay for (or worse).

No, they won't. Many people value staying near home more than they value additional salary. That's especially true for people who'd have to move house thousands of miles into a new culture, but it's true even of people within the US.

This mobility checks salary bottoms for those who do want to stay (e.g. for the market I'm in over in China).

I'm one of them. If you can excuse my lack of humility, I am a great programmer. I've been described by management and teammembers regularly as a rock star. I could easily make 10x the salary were I to move to SV.

I have zero desire to and I've never felt like I was missing anything. Out of my graduating class, only one guy moved to California - in fact, he's the only guy I know of at all who moved to California. I know at least a dozen "great" programmers who live here quite happily.

Of course the extra money is an incentive and there obviously has been and is an influx of programmers to Silicon Valley and the surrounding area. But the wage impact (in terms of setting floors) of the migration is pretty minimal relative to other effects. That's why there are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of programmers worldwide, including very close to the full 5% of "great" programmers from those areas, that are working for what you and I would consider garbage wages.