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>there's a shortage of US Citizen for that job, and they receive market rate salary That's not quite right. If you can't hire somebody at salary $X, then $X is
by praxulus 10y ago
>there's a shortage of US Citizen for that job, and they receive market rate salary
That's not quite right. If you can't hire somebody at salary $X, then $X is not the market rate for someone in that position. The language I've heard is "prevailing wage", which can be less than the "market rate" if workers aren't making full use of their bargaining power.
- arachnids 10y agoThis doesn't make sense to me, CS skills aren't a big fungible set that allow people to move around freely. I have a particular set of skills that I've honed over several years. These skills make me valuable at my specific job, but completely unemployable as a databases person, or an SRE, or a distributed systems specialist. It doesn't matter how much money they offer, they can't hire me because I don't have the skills. It's perfectly possible for subsets of the market to grow demand faster than the population responds by training for these skills (say by new targeted degree programs in school). You're left with the choice of offering other native employees a pay bump to do something they don't have the skills for or want to do, or bring in foreign talent that is trained and interested, this is not a hard call at all. The problem is that "STEM" is a ridiculously broad classification to try and capture this need, clearly not all science/tech jobs are spiking in demand. At the same time, it's probably a bad idea to have the government specify sub-quotas within, say, software engineering. Government intervention like this, letting bureaucrats make arbitrary decisions on things they don't have expertise about is how you get bad rules.