I think your edit hits the nail on the head in regards to higher salaries attracting more people to the profession. I've posted about this a few times here on H

I think your edit hits the nail on the head in regards to higher salaries attracting more people to the profession. I've posted about this a few times here on HN if you care to look at my comment history but basically the efforts our politicians and our bosses go through to bring in foreign workers and suppress wages results in signalling to potential entrants into the tech employment market. If you take a smart person (which we've acknowledged tech workers are, because gosh, we need to drink from the global talent pool to find such smart people), and they have many options including protected professions that are definitely more lucrative and don't have any of this downward pressure, what choice do you think this smart person would make?