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Comment by reinhardt | Hacker News Reader

> if there are companies so desperate to hire engineers that they're turning to immigration law to try to increase the supply, why aren't they simply offering large enough compensation packages to attract the existing pool?

I don't get this argument. If there are 100 open positions and 80 eligible candidates, 20 (at least) positions will remain vacant, regardless of compensation. Not saying that this example reflects the real world, just that the argument is not sound from a logical/mathematical standpoint.

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Your math is wrong, or rather irrelevant. The pool of eligible candidates is not fixed. It constantly changes based on the offered compensation and other factors. For example there are plenty of people qualified to do engineering work who aren't working in that field right now for whatever reason, but could be enticed to take an engineering job for enough money.

I disagree, the pool of candidates basically only changes via immigration and as people retrain or teenagers choose different college majors (very slow).

> For example there are plenty of people qualified to do engineering work who aren't working in that field right now for whatever reason, but could be enticed to take an engineering job for enough money.

Like whom? How can you be qualified to do software engineering if a) you've invested so much in a different career that you already make more than SV salaries and b) you presumably haven't done software engineering in years?

That's just flat out wrong. I know people who were formerly software developers and who stopped their careers to become stay-at-home parents. If you offered a salary of, let's say, $300K they would be happy to reenter the workforce. It's not that hard to catch back up.

As for past investments in different careers, those are sunk costs and irrelevant to decisions made now.

> I know people who were formerly software developers and who stopped their careers to become stay-at-home parents.

The population of people who consider $150k a year not to be sufficient incentive to get a job is vanishingly small.

> As for past investments in different careers, those are sunk costs and irrelevant to decisions made now.

It's not irrelevant if they did those things instead of learning/doing software engineering. You can't study medicine or law or banking for 8 years and just become an engineer at Google overnight because the Google starting salary had (hypothetically) risen to $300k and it's now a better deal.

The argument is that there are thousands of eligible candidates who simply haven't chosen to apply for your company because they are happy at their current position, and Apple/etc are choosing to focus on increasing the pool of candidates rather than increasing their attractiveness to the existing group of candidates.

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