Here's a related question that I never see addressed: how big of a programmer shortage do you think there would be if salaries were 50% higher? All the talk seems to assume that the makeup of industry is utterly inelastic. Fine, maybe your small company in Cleveland can't go out tomorrow and hire 10 A+ developers, but do people really not believe that if starting salary for an A+ developer was $150k, or whatever, that we might get more high-achievers choosing CSCI majors than pre-med or pre-law?
Nobody could sanely argue that there isn't tons of talent outside the US; and maybe it would be good to bring some of it in. But I have yet to see the argument for why these companies with balance sheets that Switzerland would envy couldn't solve this problem by getting out the checkbook. Yeah, the problem wouldn't go away tomorrow, but I'm not sure that making it go away tomorrow should be the only acceptable solution. Guess what, guys: I can't hire people to come and drywall my office tomorrow at whatever price I feel like paying, either.
Put another way, there's probably a reason we don't hear about the great doctor and lawyer shortage. Not apples to apples, obviously, but maybe it's oranges to grapefruits.
Well, there is a doctor shortage, particularly in the general practitioner space, where salaries are much lower than specialist medicine; likewise, while there's not a shortage of lawyers, oversupply has pushed down wages (and pushed would-be attorneys out of the market), and law school enrollments have fallen appropriately.
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.
My point was less that we bring in the big guns by poaching them from these other fields, then that we address the issue the way it's traditionally been addressed, which is to let the market take care of it. If these development jobs are really magnificent engines of wealth creation, then pay more to hire for the positions and more qualified people will appear. If, as you point out, there's now a lawyer glut, and now lawyers must roll naked in five dollar bills instead of fifties, then that's a sign the process works.
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.
You know, I just got around to looking at the current FLC wage tiers for my area, and I have to admit I'm shocked -- I knew "prevailing wage" was a joke, but I didn't realize that it meant H-1Bs could come in at $64K a year for a senior developer, for whatever value of "senior" you get at what's an entry-level wage. It seems to me that a lot of trash H-1Bs could be avoided if we got a senator or rep to introduce the following legislation:
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.
And all those services you keep comparing against, you know, can't be moved outside the USA (I'm not going to china to get a back rub or my transmission rebuilt). And of course, software doesn't work like that at all (I can open a software development office in China with the money I make there; as a bonus, I avoid repatriating the money back into the states for extra taxes).
That's a fair point, but it remains to be seen what the frictions are. I doubt that the domestic software industry has had my welfare particularly in mind all these years up till now, and yet they're all still here, paying what everyone wants us to think is our exorbitant American salaries.
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.
It is actually quite economical to make software in the states, one of the reasons being our relatively sane immigration policy. But it wouldn't take much xenophobia to make china look good. America also can't sit on its hands and remain competitive; its a constant battle and we have to continuously adapt and tweek our policies to remain #1.
Disclosure: I'm an American who has worked for Microsoft in Beijing for 7+ years.
So basically you're proposing protectionist policies to limit supply and thus inflate the price of labor (that is, you).
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?
It may be useful for you to actually read TFA, which (spoiler alert) is not by me saying that we need to screw down the number of people we allow into the country, but is rather by another gentleman who has been stranded someplace unpleasant due to the ill winds of supply and demand, and wants to transform immigration policy until he washes up someplace more suited to his temperament.
Downvotes don't faze me but I find it telling that I don't see an actual reply to my point regarding protectionist policies. If you find yourself instinctively downvoting my comment, please also take a minute to form a coherent reply to it and post it. Why is it ok for the (American) hacker news crowd to demand a legally mandated supply shortage to keep the prices of their labor inflated while it's not ok for (usually much poorer) taxi drivers to demand the same (campaigning against Uber and such)?
I didn't downvote you, but maybe other people did because, as my original reply suggested, you're arguing against a position that nobody was taking. Nobody was talking about eliminating immigration, and not re-legislating immigration policy at the behest of MSFT and GOOG or Paul Graham cannot reasonably be translated as a 'mandated supply shortage.'
"Nobody was talking about eliminating immigration,"
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.
"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.
You make a few valid points. But the issue is like always, every one feels their work is the most important occupation in the universe and every one else must just accommodate to whatever the conditions there are.
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.
> but do people really not believe that if starting salary for an A+ developer was $150k, or whatever, that we might get more high-achievers
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.
Not much room to grow? Says who? Did I miss the referendum in which the computer science salary cap was enacted into law?
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.
Then let them carry on. Most of these companies are global in nature already. My naive view of the plea for more foreign tech workers to enter the US is that the majority of those controlling the money just really really really like like in SF and don't want to leave. When there's talk of tech worker shortage, there's not even any really serious effort to look around the US. Nope, the hive mind is in SF, and they'll move heaven and earth before they have to move someplace else.
The US is third? Well jeez, you'd think that a country arguing that they need to attract all the top programmers in the world would at least try and pay the highest in the world to start with.
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.
But unlike a resteraunt, you can open abroad and capture labor resources in other countries. So if programmers get too expensive in the states, or Silicon Valley, relative to the world market, there is a point where you are forced to open an office elsewhere (if not your competition does and eats your lunch). Without immigration, that would happen sooner (rather than the mythical doubling of American programming salaries).
Programmers in the US are already wildly, wildly expensive in the USA relative to the world market, often by an order of magnitude. So, if that's the case, we're already screwed and we're only being saved by some market inefficiency. We should all prepare for the inevitable future where we are doing very well to make 15-20k.
Ultimately it's a world market for labor at the top end. Barring artificial distortions (immigration/emigration restrictions), people will move to where they can get the best deal; since good Chinese programmers can immigrate to the states, it puts a floor on Chinese salaries, the same is true in India actually.
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).
> Barring artificial distortions (immigration/emigration restrictions), people will move to where they can get the best deal;
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.
There is some of that, but not when wages are a magnitude off. If I can only make $50k in saint Louis and $150k in SF, there is huge pressure to move and start climbing the ladder. The programmer making $20k in Bangalore will move to the Bay area to add an extra zero to the end of their salary if they have the ability.
This mobility checks salary bottoms for those who do want to stay (e.g. for the market I'm in over in China).
There certainly is some pressure, but be careful not to overestimate it. Most programmers are not in Silicon Valley and feel no pressure to be even though they would make much more money. And this isn't even about "great" programmers versus competent programmers.
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.
Nobody could sanely argue that there isn't tons of talent outside the US; and maybe it would be good to bring some of it in. But I have yet to see the argument for why these companies with balance sheets that Switzerland would envy couldn't solve this problem by getting out the checkbook. Yeah, the problem wouldn't go away tomorrow, but I'm not sure that making it go away tomorrow should be the only acceptable solution. Guess what, guys: I can't hire people to come and drywall my office tomorrow at whatever price I feel like paying, either.
Put another way, there's probably a reason we don't hear about the great doctor and lawyer shortage. Not apples to apples, obviously, but maybe it's oranges to grapefruits.