Comment by fanzhang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fanzhang | Hacker News Reader

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Is the economics of this article right? The main problem I have is that the total supply of engineers is huge and Google is benefiting all companies that demand engineers, not just themselves, which is a massive dilution.

A Google search shows Google has about 40K software engineers, while the USA has about 18M software engineers. This means Google hires about 0.2% (i.e. 0.002) of the software labor force.

This means that Google only captures 0.2% of the benefit from increasing the labor pool. 99.8% of the dollar benefit goes to other people -- some of who are competitors even!

Further, Oracle hires a lot more software engineers, but Oracle is notorious for its profit motive and bad image while Google tries (in name at least) to be altruistic. Is Oracle spending as much as Google on STEM? How about IBM, SAP, etc? If the math works out for Google, it should doubly work out for companies employing more software engineers.

This is a theory that seems like it can be true (and make you seem smart at cocktail parties), but the math doesn't seem to add up.

You're exactly right. Investment into STEM education would be a very slow, inefficient way for FANG et al to reduce worker pay compared to collusion (which they were busted for in 2014) or more aggressively focusing on hiring overseas instead of the US.

It's true there are plenty of other self-interested reasons for these companies to fund CS education: PR, getting new devs trained on their toolchain (my college CS classes were in the Gates Building, and friendly Microsoft evangelists brought pizza and free copies of visual studio to my freshman intro CS class), and growing the tech industry overall when they control and monetize the underlying platforms.

But then, there is also the much more mundane explanation that these charitable contributions are a drop in the bucket compared to these companies' overall budgets, that they are run by human beings who see themselves as doing good and who are predisposed to think CS is a great path to a good future.

What is that doesn't add up? Of course if you want decrease your cost for salaries you can't have other people pay more. In fact, you want other people to pay less. That is how many of these companies started attracting employees in the first place. The median salary at Google is $200k, that is undoubtedly a lot of money in salaries. They certainly wouldn't mind turning some of that into profit instead. But it is probably even more important that salaries doesn't continue to rise. Especially since it is always hard to decrease pay for current employees.

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