See also "The Lump of Labor Fallacy". Supply and demand only "work" in cases where supply can be raised in a roughly linear ( as in non-discontinuous ) fashion.

See also "The Lump of Labor Fallacy". Supply and demand only "work" in cases where supply can be raised in a roughly linear ( as in non-discontinuous ) fashion. The only means of raising the supply of programmers has a ten-year lag. H1B visas are an attempt at substitution. But it's not clear this works. Had I met happy, well-adjusted folks who were here formerly on an H1B, I'd be much less inclined to say that. I've mainly met angry people. WRT SiVa/SanFrancisco, the costs of living have massively outstripped even techie salaries. There is no programmer shortage. It's either a Machiavellian ploy or bad reading of tea leaves. If programmers cost too much, then there would be all sorts of accounting tricks to salve this wound. Quite the opposite is true. For every hour you spend programming, some multiple ( much > 1 ) of your employer's "burdened run rate" is attributed to it. The failure of the overall culture to come to terms with the things needed to produce software are reasonably obvious if you will only look.