10 ms·
All arguments aside, there's one fundamental way to answer whether companies' talent shortage complaints are "phony" or not: pay. If there really were a shortag
by fivedogit 11y ago
All arguments aside, there's one fundamental way to answer whether companies' talent shortage complaints are "phony" or not: pay. If there really were a shortage, pay would be rising dramatically. Average engineers would make 200k, 300k... Just like doctors do. But it isn't happening. These BigCos just want more supply so they can pay even less than they do now. Plain and simple.
Edit: Doctors and lawyers make so much because of artificial governors on the supply. They're not absurdly more talented or educated than other people (e.g. engineers), there are simply fewer of them. In the case of doctors, med school is the limiting factor. The time and $ investment is nuts. For lawyers, it's the Bar exam. When there are too many lawyers, the Bar association makes the test harder. When there aren't enough, they make it easier.
This makes me want a standardized programming test so a) talent level could be gagued more accurately than a cursory glance at someone's github account and b) the supply of engineers would be choked off.
- pbh101 11y agoPay in the field has indeed risen dramatically in the last decade. Maybe not uniformly or to the level we would like (or in a way we think will last, such as being accompanied by increases in status in contrast to doctors, to expand on your example), but it has notably risen.
- _delirium 11y agoA pay-trend graph for some of these "established" companies, like Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Seagate, IBM, Dell, HP, etc. would be interesting. My guess is pay has indeed been rising, but not as rapidly as the Silicon Valley boom would suggest. Unfortunately I don't think there is a good public data set.
- tdicola 11y agoCompanies have been looking for other ways to keep wages from growing, see for example the poaching lawsuit Apple, Google, etc. lost: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/apple-google-intel-adobe-reach-new-deal-employee-poaching-suit-n287241 http://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/apple-google-i...
- ams6110 11y agoIf competent developers are willing to work for whatever "BigCo" is paying, why would BigCo pay more?
- rewqfdsa 11y agoAlternate theory: "BigCo"'s internal processes have poor ability to distinguish talented developers from commodity developers, so all the good developers evaporate away, leaving BigCo with a poor of mediocre developers and a higher overall cost of getting things done. (This greater cost and reduces flexibility makes them vulnerable to smaller companies that can distinguish talent and attract it.)