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I work for a Bay Area based company, but I work remotely in Dallas, TX and I can assure you that this problem isn't unique to the Bay Area. It's just that the n

I work for a Bay Area based company, but I work remotely in Dallas, TX and I can assure you that this problem isn't unique to the Bay Area. It's just that the numbers skew lower. Here in Dallas, many employers scoff at paying more than $80K/year for a senior developer when they can get an H1B for $50-60K. A lot of this relates to the total capital available, as well as the lower cost of living, but the trend is the same. Employers want more bodies for less money and they've figured out that the H1B is a clear path to achieve this goal.

exelius 12y ago
Well, you get what you pay for (again, exempting professional services/staffing firms from this because they don't operate in the labor market under the same rules as individuals). If you offer $60-80k/yr, you're not going to get great developers. If the market rate is $80k and they're offering $60k for H1B developers, that's actually illegal (though unfortunately rarely enforced). But many projects don't need great engineers: they just need people who can write code that implements business requirements. Someone with a technical certification may be fine for this (which is usually all these offshore developers have anyway). I would argue that it's insane to pay $100k/yr for this kind of work: from a macro perspective, other skilled labor fields such as accounting are equally challenging, but accounting salaries are much lower. If we trained developers like we do accountants, our economy would likely be more productive.
- hkarthik 12y ago
  That's an interesting take. I agree that if programming became more common place (like learning how to use Excel), a number of low skill, high salaried programming jobs would quickly disappear. However, if that were going to happen, I feel that it would have happened already. Maybe it's because technology moves so rapidly that it forces continual disruption. Any investments and downward pressure on wages due to an increased supply of skilled labor gets effectively reset during technology shifts (like moving from mainframes -> desktop -> web -> mobile). Having come across a lot of "average engineers", I can tell you that most of the companies they work for survive mainly because they have some type of insulation from technical disruption. Sometimes its in the form of monopolies or regulatory capture, but over time even such companies become vulnerable to the major technology shifts (like mobile).

exelius 12y ago

Well, you get what you pay for (again, exempting professional services/staffing firms from this because they don't operate in the labor market under the same rules as individuals). If you offer $60-80k/yr, you're not going to get great developers. If the market rate is $80k and they're offering $60k for H1B developers, that's actually illegal (though unfortunately rarely enforced). But many projects don't need great engineers: they just need people who can write code that implements business requirements. Someone with a technical certification may be fine for this (which is usually all these offshore developers have anyway). I would argue that it's insane to pay $100k/yr for this kind of work: from a macro perspective, other skilled labor fields such as accounting are equally challenging, but accounting salaries are much lower. If we trained developers like we do accountants, our economy would likely be more productive.

hkarthik 12y ago
That's an interesting take. I agree that if programming became more common place (like learning how to use Excel), a number of low skill, high salaried programming jobs would quickly disappear. However, if that were going to happen, I feel that it would have happened already. Maybe it's because technology moves so rapidly that it forces continual disruption. Any investments and downward pressure on wages due to an increased supply of skilled labor gets effectively reset during technology shifts (like moving from mainframes -> desktop -> web -> mobile). Having come across a lot of "average engineers", I can tell you that most of the companies they work for survive mainly because they have some type of insulation from technical disruption. Sometimes its in the form of monopolies or regulatory capture, but over time even such companies become vulnerable to the major technology shifts (like mobile).