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But there's a perverse side to this. By offering MORE compensation, it would seem likely that MORE unqualified people will apply. For your logic to work, we'd need to show that making a skill more expensive would automatically cause inept people to stop applying. If that doesn't hold true, you could be throwing away 999 out of 1000 candidates instead of 199 out of 200.

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That's what I concluded too! If you raise industry standard average pay it's just going to attract even more incompetent people and therefore the flood of applications from non-programmers will increase.

Actually you'd be throwing away <=998 of 1000 instead of 199 out of 200: we're proposing that the net result would be more hires.

We don't have to show that it would make inept people stop applying. We just have to be able to get better at weeding out the rubbish ones - i.e. in less time, lower cost.

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