91–100 of 128 posts
There is a shortage of good people willing to work for peanuts. There is no shortage of good people. Offer 500k/year, you'll have more people than you can manage.
I have a problem with "If supply of workers is short of demand, price should go up". In a very basic view this makes sense. But not in even slightly more sophisticated models. A company makes a certain "marginal" revenue off the employee. It's not always easy or even possible to compute the exact amount, but the salary is limited by this marginal revenue. The difference between marginal revenue and salary is the marg…
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=revenue+per+employee+ap... Seems likely to be a pretty safe margin
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I take exception that argument because, well, I'd like to think of myself as an exception. I arrived in the US as an H1B and while it's difficult to talk about my skills objectively, I am certainly not paid below-average wages. I don't doubt that the majority of H1B visa holders are as you say. But the system can work correctly- I and many others I know are hopefully proof of that. So, "totally" debunked? No.
There is a separate visa for top tallent. H1B's are randomly assigned because it's about body's not tallent. Which is not to say we don't get top tallent randomly, but if your paying 400k/year you don't need to risk the H1B lotto. PS: you only need 3 on that list and 4, 6, and 8 are not that hard to meet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_visa
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It's very definitely a pay issue. It's also a hiring issue: most of Silicon Valley deliberately makes it as difficult as possible to pass the hiring bar. There is one company with whom I've interviewed once, gotten an offer, and then been rejected when I applied later in a separate round after a year and a half doing other things. There's another company where I interviewed once, got an offer, did something else, int…
> It's very definitely a pay issue. How do you know this? From my own experience trying to hire in this economy, and from talking to other people hiring, the problem is finding good engineers that are hirable at all [edit: local or remote, for any amount of money]. When I've lost a candidate due to him taking another offer, the reasons have always been unrelated to money. Things like "The other company's problems are…
The problem is that recent grads don't have the experience most of you are looking for. The people with the experience are quite often married and have two careers to think about when making a move. If you're asking me to risk the move on my own, that's one thing. If you're asking me to beg my wife to halt all progress in her career, that's another. And now you're telling me that you're not willing to pay me enough to live relatively close to work and still have the same cash flow? No thanks!
Edit:
As an aside, a lot of startups try to justify the drop in cash flow with equity. Please... stop doing this. I don't mean to say that you shouldn't offer equity, you absolutely should. However I'm already telling you that I'm risk averse. Or, put differently, I'm telling you that I need compensation that's stable and easy to value. Your equity is nice, and I definitely want it, but it's the opposite of what I'm asking you for.
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It's very definitely a pay issue. It's also a hiring issue: most of Silicon Valley deliberately makes it as difficult as possible to pass the hiring bar. There is one company with whom I've interviewed once, gotten an offer, and then been rejected when I applied later in a separate round after a year and a half doing other things. There's another company where I interviewed once, got an offer, did something else, int…
> It's very definitely a pay issue. How do you know this? From my own experience trying to hire in this economy, and from talking to other people hiring, the problem is finding good engineers that are hirable at all [edit: local or remote, for any amount of money]. When I've lost a candidate due to him taking another offer, the reasons have always been unrelated to money. Things like "The other company's problems are…
Not to say there aren't some limits. There are obviously a limited number of people with expertise in kernel-level scheduler algorithms at any given time, for example. But as several of us have said below: if your business model relies on consistently finding and hiring unicorns, that is your problem. Either stop relying on unicorns or move your corporate HQ to the magical land of Equestria.
Still, the BigCos almost all hire people right out of college and actually relocate and train them in the industrial environment, so I wouldn't call it a labor shortage until I've tried competing with that.
(None of this is to say that I'm not trying to take advantage from my side by deliberately getting as close as I can to Unicorn-level expertise. Of course I am! But most of the time a well-run company built to grow should want my hardworking front-end, back-end, every-end web-dev friend who's less egotistical and doesn't rant on Hacker News, not a unicorn.)
There is a shortage of good people willing to work for peanuts. There is no shortage of good people. Offer 500k/year, you'll have more people than you can manage.
Yes, but this reasoning only goes so far. In order to pay all your engineers 500k/year, you'd have to absurdly profitable. Maybe MS and Google could pull that off, but most companies could not.
Problem solved.
tl;dr: paying high salaries is becoming a competitive advantage.
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http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=revenue+per+employee+ap... Seems likely to be a pretty safe margin
You realize that's revenue, not net income or profit, right?
I find it utterly ridiculous that people are complaining about a "talent shortage" when a typical 35-year-old software engineer can't buy a house in the Bay Area. You tell a shortage by price signals, and useless bikeshedding executives out-earn engineers by quite a bit, but no one takes this (I hope) to mean that there's a useless-meddling-executive shortage. This concept of a "talent shortage" is hereby banned unti…
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All business is ruled by the laws of economics. Supply and Demand determine prices. Silicon Valley is not exempt, nor ... and more to the point ... should it be.
> All business is ruled by the laws of economics. No, this is exactly what's wrong with all of this analysis. Economics is a social science. That's one of the reasons why behavioral economics has attracted so many bright minds, because of the obvious shortcoming of classical economics. To think that people are simply going to chase higher salaries ignores everything that you should know about how real people make dec…
Strange how the laws of economics only cease to apply when their application would result in higher wages for workers.
There is a shortage of good people willing to work for peanuts. There is no shortage of good people. Offer 500k/year, you'll have more people than you can manage.
Yes, but this reasoning only goes so far. In order to pay all your engineers 500k/year, you'd have to absurdly profitable. Maybe MS and Google could pull that off, but most companies could not.
So either they can afford to raise salaries, or non-engineers are much more productive and highly-paid than engineers, or these firms just like being as exploitative as they can in terms of maximizing revenue-per-employee and minimizing salary costs.