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Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren't high enough to make up for working at an unpopular, stagnant, and fumbling company.
the issue msft is trying to address is the scarcity of tech people in general. They could certainly pay more and fill their positions, but paying more wouldn't create 10k new engineers (or however many positions they need filled).
I support loosening immigration requirements... but another complimentary option would be for tech companies to raise wages. Why not do that?
What would that achieve? Are Microsoft's wages low, in your opinion? How much higher should they go?
It feels a little strange to me, since I don't really think "should" is a useful question. But I can see why/how the government would want to get involved - markets aren't perfect, and engineers are particularly valuable, as they tend to create wealth rather than just shuffle it around.
I'm probably not the greatest guy to ask, because I have an MS in engineering and I've seen how brutal the PhD programs are. I see that the nine of the top ten professions ranked by pay are medical specialties, with CEO as the only non-health related one there. I understand that law isn't as great at the middle and low level, but at the elite level, I do think it pays very well with more career stability than engineering - and with a degree program that has a vastly higher completion rate than almost any form of graduate study in STEM fields (and much easier undergraduate preparation as well).
So how high should wages be? I guess I'd say that wages should go high enough that getting a grad degree in engineering is a good way to get on that top ten list.
But of course I'd say that, that's my degree. You shouldn't be asking me, but you shouldn't be asking the people who want to hire engineers either. Ideally, we'd butt out and try to let the market handle this.
I'm not fundamentalist about it - truth is, I would support a general skilled emphasis in our immigration system. But specifically targeting a narrow band of the workforce, under the notion that there is a "shortage"? That smells. And after digging into the evidence, I think the "shortage" is really just a rational response to market signals.
I just don't really want to move across the country for a job, especially one that I probably wont have for the next 20 years.
Aren't there still a lot of devs in flyover country who complain about finding few positions? Or is the fact they chose not to relocate being weighed against them?
The US has no shortage of eager workers, some quite creative (which is good for such jobs). The crux of this is companies are devaluing people in general, and don't really give much care about it.
If it were a genuine crisis, rather than a 'genuine crisis', wages would be genuinely rising more than they are, for anyone with anything close to the skills sought. Instead, this strikes me as a push to get cheaper workers, rather than actually paying for a scarce resource. But maybe I'm just cynical.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.htm
Developer-related positions(both research and development), are some of the highest paid STEM-related positions available.
Aren't there still a lot of devs in flyover country who complain about finding few positions? Or is the fact they chose not to relocate being weighed against them?
They can hardly be blamed for not wanting to go live in rainy Seattle, work under someone as uninspiring as Steve Ballmer, and put up with awful stack ranking BS.
But MS might be a tougher sell. ;)
From the Huffington Post: "The Bureau Of Labor Statistics has released its annual Occupational Employment and Wages report, and the top-paying industries are dominated by health care professionals. In fact, nine of the 10 highest-paid jobs in America are in the health care industry. The only other group that made the top 10 is corporate executives." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/20/top-ten-highest-pai... Here…
A relevant point is the "carrying capacity" for healthcare professionals. The USA can probably double the number of people employed in healthcare (using a handwavy argument that that 40 million [edit: I earlier wrote 40%] of the population is uninsured).
Note the number of people with the high-paying healthcare job titles: all of them were below 100k people and many were less than 20k people.
Given that so few people work in healthcare relative to STEM, I'm not really sure that pointing out high salaries in healthcare is relevant.
Whereas I can easily see STEM doubling employment in the USA, from the already high (10's of millions?) employment base.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would that achieve? Are Microsoft's wages low, in your opinion? How much higher should they go?
This is a tough question, because I would generally prefer to allow the market to set employment and wage levels. The problem here is that employers in high tech are asking for special consideration - granting green cards specifically to STEM degrees. Unfortunately, this puts us in the position of playing favorites through government - we're deciding that there "should" be more engineers than we're getting at current…