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I more or less agree with you, but would like to add into the big picture. This is where economic theory meets really... and falls short. Salaries cannot be in

I more or less agree with you, but would like to add into the big picture. This is where economic theory meets really... and falls short. Salaries cannot be increased ad-infinitum. Even an extraordinary candidate's potential contribution can add so much value, since it is constrained by the way it fits in the business (and ultimately by the market for the product/service your team is helping to provide). Requirements cannot be decreased arbitrarily either. The relationship between skill and value added is non linear, and may fall rapidly into the negatives below some threshold (it takes more time for a mentor to teach a rookie how to do things than to do things himself, borderline incompetent employees make costly mistakes, etc). So, we are basically in a situation where a market cannot sustain itself (Paul Graham wrote about this in one of his essays, the example he used is how this same forces drove out the existance of butlers). So, in this sense, I believe shortages of labor are very real.

roc 13y ago
The experience of the dot com bubble suggests the general shape of how much salaries can increase and requirements decrease. [1] As we're not remotely approaching either end of that envelope, I'm not too convinced that any hard limits are coming into play. I mean, we're not talking about whether anyone can hire couriers to write web services for six figures. We're talking about whether employers are willing to hire people with 5 years of experience with Technology X at X% more than their last comparable hire, as opposed to waiting around for the posting-perfect-match outlier with the requested 10 years experience, but who'll accept essentially the same wage as that last 5-years-experience hire. [1] Much of that might have been arguably unsustainable, but not all. And again, we're talking about degrees and trends: are offers going up at all? Are employers budging on requirements at all?

roc 13y ago

The experience of the dot com bubble suggests the general shape of how much salaries can increase and requirements decrease. [1] As we're not remotely approaching either end of that envelope, I'm not too convinced that any hard limits are coming into play. I mean, we're not talking about whether anyone can hire couriers to write web services for six figures. We're talking about whether employers are willing to hire people with 5 years of experience with Technology X at X% more than their last comparable hire, as opposed to waiting around for the posting-perfect-match outlier with the requested 10 years experience, but who'll accept essentially the same wage as that last 5-years-experience hire. [1] Much of that might have been arguably unsustainable, but not all. And again, we're talking about degrees and trends: are offers going up at all? Are employers budging on requirements at all?