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Comment by grizzles | Hacker News Reader

If you run a small business, it's a real thing. On wages, it's nearly impossible to compete with the big corporations.

That leaves you with one choice - outsource your engineering to China or India. Or they could just come here (wherever here is) and contribute to the local economy by buying stuff, driving down the per capita crime rate (immigrants have a far lower crime rate), etc.

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If a small business needs lower salaries to thrive, then that means their only real benefit they provide their customers is the fact that they can exploit some employees ignorance of market rate.

Or, God forbid, they could pay their employees more.

This means the business isnt feasible.

This is a very important point, let me expand a bit. If your business/product requires a supply of sub-market waged talent, then you have not found true product-market fit or your product just does not provide sufficient value to sustain a real business (real meaning one that can operate on market wages.)

Why do you say sub-market? When Disney or any other huge corporation outsources their IT dept to India / China, that's the MARKET. Good Luck putting an import tax on virtual goods / services.

It is market wage in India/China. If they can export jobs to India/China and make things work, good for them, that is a good business.

If the company is complaining of a shortage of US workers however, they are paying sub-market US wages. There is no such thing as a shortage in economics.

That's a bad inference to make. It certainly doesn't mean that. It's the rule, not the exception for new tech companies to experience a flat line or no growth period. The onus is on management to get out of that death spiral as quickly as possible.

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