They're "high" relative to some (most) jobs and not others. It sounds like you may be implying something like "programmers make enough already". Perhaps true on

They're "high" relative to some (most) jobs and not others. It sounds like you may be implying something like "programmers make enough already". Perhaps true on a moral plane, has nothing to do with economics though. Why is gold so expensive? Because it's demanded. There is no inherent correct price to anything absent a market. > The fact is that they could offer $1,000,000 starting salaries tomorrow and the pool of 'qualified' applicants would not change because salary is not the determining factor here. OK. I think this is the core of the matter. Let's assume the number of "qualified" programmers is fixed over the short term. The market is made of actors/companies. If a company wants more of the qualified programmers, and they pay $1M starting salary, that company will get them. And then the market price will rise. The fact that it hasn't risen to $1M implies the companies don't really want them that badly. And in the long term, a price raise would encourage more programmers to become qualified and the problem would be rectified. But if what you are saying is true, and they really only want Stanford grads or equivalents, why would they care about H1Bs? It's not. They want to keep the price down. Even if we assumed the number of qualified programmers were constant, there would be no more of a "shortage" than there is a shortage of gold. We don't say there's a gold shortage even though its quantity is "fixed" and presumably everyone would like more of it if it were cheaper. I think people make a stronger argument for a shortage in the labor market WRT doctors. In that case there is a cartel (the AMA) keeping the quantity artificially low. There is no such phenomenon in programming. There's nothing stopping a university hiring all top-notch CS profs and becoming the next CMU/Stanford, and charging students a bundle...if the price were right.