Tax incentives in the US happen (a) where an entrenched industry negotiates it using its existing jobs as leverage; and (b) where a depressed region hopes to attract new investment. In the latter case offsetting problems conspire to prevent economic growth. That tends to be labor pool mismatch, poor regulatory environment as compared to other states, and overseas competition that offers supply chain and labor advantages. In other words, tax incentives aren't enough, period.
Labor advantages are the biggest deal. The US spends a mind boggling amount of money on education and still gets out-competed by struggling poor countries.
My company just hired two H1B's to do Sharepoint work because there was literally no one in my part of the state qualified who didn't already have a job doing something more fun, and no one else wanted to move to the middle of nowhere. And we already pay 10% above market for the state to attract people to our little backwater locale.
10% above the rest of the state to move to the middle of nowhere obviously wasn't enough. When a company says they can't find anyone to hire, what they really mean most of the time is "we can't find anyone to hire for the mostly arbitrary price we want to hire them at."
My guess is the company is making far more off of those employees than the labor cost, so if you didn't have access to H-1B employees you would have kept increasing the salary 20%, 30%, 50% until you found someone.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard an org say that did a market analysis and the offered wage is "competitive" so clearly it's a labor supply issue and not possible that they are not offering enough compensation. Competitive does not mean "we're offering a little more than the minimum salary we saw on glassdoor," but often that's exactly how they determined it.
>10% above the rest of the state to move to the middle of nowhere obviously wasn't enough. When a company says they can't find anyone to hire, what they really mean most of the time is "we can't find anyone to hire for the mostly arbitrary price we want to hire them at."
If my salary would be doubled tomorrow, there's nowhere in the continental United States I wouldn't move to. Given 100mbps+ internet of course, but that does cover anywhere that could double a software engineer's salary. If you're a software company without good internet, it might be time to move.
A 10% raise isn't worth leaving for in my opinion, if you are happy with your job. Between moving and simply leaving a work environment where you understand the expectations, 10% doesn't cut it.
>The US spends a mind boggling amount of money on education and still gets out-competed by struggling poor countries.
I don't think that makes sense, or rather it's a massive selection bias. The foreigners who manage to get a H-1B visa are usually highly qualified, but obviously that doesn't mean that all foreigners are highly qualified, those who aren't just don't get the visa. That's actually often a problem for these countries as the highly educated leave while the low qualified workforce remains at home.
I'm sure the US produces highly qualified engineers, but you also have to care for your local, less qualified populace that you can't just export abroad and forget they exist.
As for the fact that no homegrown engineer accepts to work in your "little backwater locale" that actually means that local engineers actually outcompete foreigners and not the other way around since it's those latter ones who have to settle for "the middle of nowhere".
New York state started a program of "Empire Zones" in depressed areas, but pretty soon every legislator wanted one in his district and next thing you know we have an Empire Zone in every county.
The loss of revenue is real, the benefits for the community never seem to materialize.
