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I love what Joel Spolski said about this "problem" in his article "Whaddaya Mean, You Can’t Find Programmers?" back in 2000. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000

• dabockster 9y ago
  But, when the price of other labor sources is cheaper (eg H1-B, interns, your nephew, etc), economics dictates that you should use those instead of the local population. The solution, imo, is to raise the price of the other sources somehow. That way, the local population is cheaper.
  • chrisbennet 9y ago
    If a company can find "other labor sources" then they really don't have a reason to say "we can't find labor". Employers are saying "there is a shortage of workers" when what they really mean is "the market price for workers is more than we want to pay" or "we don't want to share more of the profits with the employees (who actually make the product) then we used to". To "fix" this, they want some sort of special treatment that will decrease the cost of employees - like being allowed to employ more indentured servants (H1-B) at below market rate.
    • stale2002 9y ago
      If bread costs 100$ per loaf, and people are literally starving to death in the streets because they can't pay for food, is this just the "market clearing rate" for bread where supply is meeting demand, or is there a shortage of bread?
      • ewhanley 9y ago
        Wouldn't more bakeries enter the market in this scenario?
      • xenadu02 9y ago
        You could have a point if it cost $10 million to hire a senior competent software engineer. It does not. You could have a point if bread cost $75 to produce. It does not. Many of the companies complaining about a shortage of people are posting record profits. Workers are receiving the smallest share of the pie in many decades. In many cases this really is just stingy employers complaining because they want to keep most of the profit for themselves. In other cases businesses can't raise prices because their customers don't have any money (because wages are so low and the 1% captures so much economic surplus, stashing it away in investment accounts, causing investors to dash around shoveling tons of cash at anything that looks like yield). In this case hiring workers at higher wages wouldn't be sustainable without raising prices. The "solution" in this scenario is not to suppress worker's wages even further; that only makes the problem worse. The solution is much higher taxes on the ultra-rich to filter the money out of investments and back into the economy where 10: it can be spent by workers, raising profits, leading to expansion, higher pay, more spending, more profits, goto 10. If we were in a capital-constrained environment then it would make sense to cut taxes to make more capital available for investment. We aren't. We haven't been in decades. Taxes on income & capital gains >10m should be much higher.
        • aianus 9y ago
          Are you a stingy asshole if you refuse to pay $50 for a loaf of bread even though you're making $200k a year and can easily afford it? Of course not. You'll buy a cheaper loaf or you won't buy bread at all or you might even whine in the media about the shortage of bread. All of which would be understandable irrespective of how high your income is.
        • lj3 9y ago
          > The solution is much higher taxes on the ultra-rich I was with you up until this part. This has been tried for decades and it clearly doesn't work. What we need now are tax breaks specifically for small businesses. We want people to be able to work for themselves or work for somebody more willing to share more of the profits with their workers. More businesses willing to pay market rate means more employment, more competition and more pressure on the companies who like to underpay. Neither idea (tax breaks for SMB, more taxes for rich) are going to happen anytime soon. Nobody with deep enough pockets to lobby for it would want either idea to become law.