"Just pay more, and you'll get it". Thats very general and does not always work if pool of candidates is genuinely smaller than demand. The Education part will obviously correct this long term but does not really help in the short term.
The google phrase for this article in general is "exogenous force".
As long as the worldwide financial markets will only fund startups in SV staffed by young Stanford grads, Stanford will never be able to produce enough grads to staff the result of a world wide financial bubble. Imagine if the housing bubble last decade would only hire house framing carpenters born in Boise ID.
Eventually the idea of doing a startup in Chicago, Berlin, Paris, Prague, will change from "impossible" to "insanely rebellious and financially reckless" to "thats a great idea" and at that point the candidate pool being too small will disappear.
There are other exogenous forces such as companies that want to hire H1Bs, for whatever reason, must in public declare a labor shortage for legal reasons regardless if one exists or not. I'm not trying to debate H1B program but to state authoritatively that it legally requires corporate statements about the labor market to a pre-defined value of 'shortage' regardless of actual market conditions. As if in a thought experiment federal regulators required CNBC to report false numbers for todays Dow Jones index and people actually debated policy based on the legally required fake numbers. Any corporate statement by any company hiring, or planning to hire H1Bs in the future, is inherently legally required to be a false, fixed statement of 'shortage'.
SV startups don't just hire Stanford grads I think people like to apply that stereotype to make them fill better if they get rejected and it is generally applied to a portion of FANG and not startups. (In reality I know a good number of people working at Google who have degrees from schools which are not even in world's top 100). Working for large company and looking at other large companies the H1B debate is being made irrelevant being tired of convincing people it's an issue they just opened up offices abroad. We for example have developers in US, Germany, Ireland, India.
We've clearly circularized the argument back to there is shortage, because clearly programmers in India as a group are not paid nearly as much as programmers in SV; there seems to be no labor shortage given that ageism is popular across the industry, women are more or less not allowed, etc.
If it would be considered shockingly newsworthy that a company hires old female programmers in India for the same pay as young white guys in SV, that in itself seems evidence there is no shortage at all.
The inability to hire given a "fish in the barrel" hiring target, might indicate a shortage of quality management, especially HR management, but clearly not a shortage of software development professionals. Suggesting companies need to pay more to get better management, given income disparities that already exist... The real story is no matter how much more management is paid, for various workplace or cultural or demographic or educational issues the management product produced even at ridiculous pay rates is shockingly deficient.
Companies are tripping over each other trying to hire women. My wife is blindly offered jobs entirely because she is a woman. Not secretly or anything, they literally say "we are looking for women for our team".
>If it would be considered shockingly newsworthy that a company hires old female programmers in India for the same pay as young white guys in SV, that in itself seems evidence there is no shortage at all
No it isn't. There is no reason to believe old Indian women are as qualified as young white men. There's actually huge reasons to believe they are not. And why are you so fixated on white men? Considering the demographics of the USA, white men are under-represented in US tech jobs, Asian and Indian men are over-represented.
Observation: Many tech professionals are comfortable with active discrimination because it aligns with their political and social beliefs (ie "women have been underrepresented in the past, so we should weigh them more heavily in the future when considering them as candidates, or actively seek women out for roles").
Look at the interview process these days. There are plenty of people capable of doing the jobs out, but who can be bothered to jump through all the nonsense hoops?
Getting that set up though costs way way more than it costs to simply hire an employee here. Large companies can do this, but small to medium sized businesses certainly cannot.
Nope it costs pretty much peanuts to setup especially if they go through local partner in Ukraine or Belarus the overhead for local company handling everything for you is 30% +/-
"Supply and demand" is that simple. The timescale is the part throws people off. The supply should increase even if it's just more people deciding to get degrees and experience in a field that is lucrative.
That's not true. For any occupation there are qualified people who have dropped out of that particular labor pool to pursue other options such as: teaching, stay-at-home parent, graduate school, etc. If you offer enough cash you can lure them back.
"Demand" really means "demand at this price". That's why there's a demand curve - the amount of demand changes as the price changes. So, no, the pool of candidates is not "genuinely smaller than demand". The pool of candidates at this price may be genuinely smaller than the demand at this price.
What I think is happening is that companies are offering less than the market-clearing price for talent, and then complaining that they can't find talent (at that price). Well, yeah, that's usually the way it goes when you offer less-than-market prices for anything.
No, education will not obviously correct it because education's effects are not only delayed but relatively weak as many abilities are largely determined before the candidate's birth. We know IQ and conscientiousness, probably most important qualities for modern economy, are largely genetic.
If your statement is true (Big if) the obvious thing to do would be to take better care of underserved populations so that you can take advantage of the natural talent in them (make a bigger middle class with all the trappings including education). You can’t tell me middle class white and Asian men as a population have some secret software development gene, for example. Therefore there must be some inefficiency around race, gender or socioeconomic beginnings.
But it also implies that there’s a natural scarcity to the best talent, in which case you will always run out, no matter what you do to expand the field (barring creepy eugenics or cloning programs).
In which case, paying more money makes sense. In fact a pay scale more on par with pro sports salaries would be the most likely outcome.
