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There is no shortage of software developers with the "right skills". Companies just aren't willing to pay them enough. As an experiment, try offering a salary

by dadkins 15y ago

There is no shortage of software developers with the "right skills". Companies just aren't willing to pay them enough. As an experiment, try offering a salary of $1 million and see how many qualified applicants show up.

pakitan 15y ago
Sure. There is no such thing as "unemployment" either. If you're willing to work for $1/month that is. It's about market reality, not about greedy CEOs who try to screw the hard working developers.. If the best programmer you can hire is expected to produce $X worth of value, you can't just offer a salary of 2 x $X. How many programmers do you know who can produce something worth $1M+...every year?
- dadkins 15y ago
  Even though the $1M figure was meant to be rhetorical: http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:GOOG&fstype=ii http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:GOOG&fstype=ii Google had revenues of $31B with less than 30,000 full time employees over the last year. Programmers there are bringing in over $1M on average. There must be some there that are actually worth it.
  - pakitan 15y ago
    Let's say I own a building which I'm renting for $10M/year and I employ 10 people to service the building. Are these employees "bringing" me $1M on average? Or maybe the main factor is that I own a building, worth millions? Anyway, I know you were not serious about the $1M figure. That wasn't my point either. All I'm saying is that the expected value of your work <= your salary. And sky isn't the limit for that number so employers have to take this into account.
mechanical_fish 15y ago
It would be great it I lived in a universe where the average blog post about the job market included a sketch of the supply curve ("number of qualified applicants willing to work at salary X, for 0<X<$1 million per year") as well as the demand curve ("here's the number of people the world could profitably employ as programmers at a per-programmer salary of X"). But not only is such an estimate difficult to make - many of the relevant variables are literally unknowable, and there are way more dimensions than two - but nobody would understand it anyway. People in general are bad at functions. That's why they struggle with elementary calculus. If you can demonstrate to a company that you (but not your competitor) are reliably worth X plus five percent, they will pay you X. Unfortunately, there are few programmers on earth who can demonstrably, repeatably, and uniquely add $1.5 million per year to an organization. And we certainly don't have a recipe for scalably generating $1.5m per year per programmer. (If you do, for god's sake stop posting on HN and get moving. We'll all come work for you and be rich!) Whereas what we do know is that we can basically stand around at a conference and enumerate lots and lots of likely ways to use a talented web developer to generate, say, $75k of value per year. We just don't have many talented web developers who are willing to work for less than that. So most of those relatively-low-value tasks go undone, or get done less efficiently, as web developers hold out for higher-value positions that pay $100k or $125k and that earn their employers much more than that.

by dadkins 15y ago

pakitan 15y ago

Sure. There is no such thing as "unemployment" either. If you're willing to work for $1/month that is. It's about market reality, not about greedy CEOs who try to screw the hard working developers.. If the best programmer you can hire is expected to produce $X worth of value, you can't just offer a salary of 2 x $X. How many programmers do you know who can produce something worth $1M+...every year?

dadkins 15y ago
Even though the $1M figure was meant to be rhetorical: http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:GOOG&fstype=ii http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:GOOG&fstype=ii Google had revenues of $31B with less than 30,000 full time employees over the last year. Programmers there are bringing in over $1M on average. There must be some there that are actually worth it.
- pakitan 15y ago
  Let's say I own a building which I'm renting for $10M/year and I employ 10 people to service the building. Are these employees "bringing" me $1M on average? Or maybe the main factor is that I own a building, worth millions? Anyway, I know you were not serious about the $1M figure. That wasn't my point either. All I'm saying is that the expected value of your work <= your salary. And sky isn't the limit for that number so employers have to take this into account.

mechanical_fish 15y ago

It would be great it I lived in a universe where the average blog post about the job market included a sketch of the supply curve ("number of qualified applicants willing to work at salary X, for 0<X<$1 million per year") as well as the demand curve ("here's the number of people the world could profitably employ as programmers at a per-programmer salary of X"). But not only is such an estimate difficult to make - many of the relevant variables are literally unknowable, and there are way more dimensions than two - but nobody would understand it anyway. People in general are bad at functions. That's why they struggle with elementary calculus. If you can demonstrate to a company that you (but not your competitor) are reliably worth X plus five percent, they will pay you X. Unfortunately, there are few programmers on earth who can demonstrably, repeatably, and uniquely add $1.5 million per year to an organization. And we certainly don't have a recipe for scalably generating $1.5m per year per programmer. (If you do, for god's sake stop posting on HN and get moving. We'll all come work for you and be rich!) Whereas what we do know is that we can basically stand around at a conference and enumerate lots and lots of likely ways to use a talented web developer to generate, say, $75k of value per year. We just don't have many talented web developers who are willing to work for less than that. So most of those relatively-low-value tasks go undone, or get done less efficiently, as web developers hold out for higher-value positions that pay $100k or $125k and that earn their employers much more than that.