I met someone else complaining about this, that they hired everyone they could and were desperate. Their salaries were around $60K. Don't see how anyone can be scratching their heads over that.
This attitude has to change.
If a company can make significantly more money by hiring someone, then they should be aggressively increasing wages to signal to the market that they are serious. It's basically refusing to participate in the free market, or a complete lack of understanding of how markets work.
Business managers frequently act like they understand economics better than economists yet this attitude should telegraph a level of cluelessness that makes them unfit to manage a hiring process.
Everyone wants to pay less and get more talent. If you can't afford to pay more then compete on other aspects---allow remote work, more flex-time, and so on. Try something different in your interviews. Offer apprenticeships.
Sometimes it's not even a pure talent shortage that force increasing wages. In San Francisco the housing shortage and lack of support for new construction wipes out a lot of gains that come with higher salaries.
You can even see that problem get worse as people leave. Fantastic dev I worked with moved from Seattle back to India. She said that yes, she made more money in Seattle, but cost of living was so low in Bangalore that she effectively made a lot more money there. Coupled with her family being closer, it made perfect sense.
iPhones are cool, but houses are cooler.
(mostly joking)
And, from an investment point of view, maintenance may not be worth it if you believe that housing prices are too high and that a correction will be coming in the short to medium term. Why spend your own money on repairs if your house's value is going to tank in a few years anyway?
You don't give them enough credit. This process works for them sometimes. And sometimes is evidently enough.
Part of this complaining can be an attempt to influence/distort government policy, justify a flawed or exploitative hiring process, or managing who to blame when they miss a quota.
I definitely agree that what you said is part of reality for some companies, which is why I think it's important to aggressively point out that there are solutions when the "skill shortage" is brought up.
Additionally, if underpaying younger talent is prevalent, then all the more reason a company should offer competitive salaries to recent graduates when faced with a shortage. They'd start booking some easy wins.
And I say this as a Canadian.
Generally speaking, people need to start being more proactive asking for raises and switching to higher paying jobs if we want compensation in the GTA job market to improve.
The problem in Vancouver is that it often feels like any PHP jockey with 3 years of industry experience is called "senior". This doesn't happen in other market's I've experienced. It happens here because the Vancouver talent pool is very shallow. We have a very wide base of low skilled juniors and intermediates with a very narrow point of experienced senior engineers. There are far more juniors than there is demand for juniors so that pushes down salaries. Conversely, there is a lot more demand for seniors, real seniors, than there is supply in the local market and that pushes up salaries.
So it’s backwards. Canadian salaries should be a lot higher to reflect that they have a lower total employee cost.
One difference I can think of is that Canada has Universal Healthcare. Maybe the compensation system differs because Canadian companies can pay <Salary> and US Companies have to pay <Salary + benefits>?
(I mostly see people here on HN throwing salary numbers around, not total compensation. Also, I wonder if having the government handle benefits would make it easier to pay more (since companies don't have to pay benefits) or less (since companies just pay the government to do the benefits). )
What happens is simply that many Canadians like Canada and don't want to move south, and the Canadian economy is poorer than the American one (in particular, there is way less VC investment per capita), so companies have less money to fight over developers, and many developers (like myself) are content with this market.
I agree that Canadian employers can totally up their hiring game by upping the miserly salaries but they could emphasize the social differences between Canada and the US to attract risk-averse/future-focused candidates.
Also employers pay for your medical insurance with pretty good plans, if you have a medical issue your paying at most ~$5k and $3k/yr for family medical insurance.
So universal healthcare isn't a good enough reason to not move to the USA. Also the US might get universal healthcare in that time span.
I think my motorbike vs. Camry analogy is reasonable. Vast numbers of people ride motorbikes every day and live for decades without encountering a problem .Others can end up having their lives turned upside down as a result of some accident. A social safety net is not designed for everyone to bounce on but to catch the most unfortunate in society and help them cope as best as possible at their time of extreme adversity. My point is that the US, especially with the impending destruction of the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid defunding, is about to lose its very short-lived and already weak safety net. If you can go back to Canada when adversity strikes, you are in good shape. Most people don't have that option.
My intent was to outline the fact that the US safety net is weak and there are plenty of corner cases that one could fall into from which recovery will be tough. Reduction in Medicaid will only worsen this. If you have coverage that you feel covers you in a majority of worst case scenarios, then you are in good shape but hopefully you are up to date on your read of the coverages. The Canadian safety net, in my opinion, saves one a little bit from this planning.
[1] https://www.dallasnews.com/news/local-politics/2013/08/02/gr...
Though I'll note that the US puts a higher percent of GDP into public healthcare expenditure than Canada (yes, Americans pay more taxes for healthcare than Canadians, despite not having much public healthcare), so I guess the US is just bad at doing healthcare efficiently. Source: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.PUBL.ZS
I was answering the parent post on why salaries are not directly comparable in the US and Canada with one opinion, re. the healthcare safety net. It is entirely possible that having a sane immigration policy rather than the indentured sickness that is the H1B also leads to a healthier supply of talent and thus lowers wages. I am sure there are other factors.
Assuming that this calculation applies to your firm, are you going to leave profit to others when you could instead have a win/win situation for everyone (business, employees, customers) instead?
In the same vein, people aren't paid based on the content of the work -- they are paid based on market rates. Doing mundane work like fulfilling unit test contracts doesn't sound that valuable until there is no one in your geographic area that can or will take that job {in that place, at that time, with the legal ability to work, etc}.