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Comment by deepVoid | Hacker News Reader

It is not hard at all if they are willing to pay big bucks. They want to game the visa system, suppress the wage, and get cheap labor. Just take a look at all the profits Apple, Google, Microsoft make every year. And yet, they still collude together in order to suppress wage, given the high housing prices in the bay area [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

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This really depends on the area od specialization. There are tons of web designers locally available but how about distributed computing, computer vision, self-driving, robotics, device drivers, OS kernels, language designers? These specialties are probably not high order bits outside of BigCo and there is simply not enough supply. As far as ML/AI is concerned it's super hard to hire talent even if you are willing to pay big bucks. There are fewer than 2000 PhDs the world churns out (from reasonably respectable programs) and the demand is approximately 50X of this skill set. I see lots of team end up hiring someone who did online courses and it does work out many times but if you want to get folks who spend 5 years of their lives in full-time in-depth studies of all nooks and crannies then its uphil battle for anyone regardless of how much cash you have.

You are talking as if these engineers grow on trees outside US borders.

The US is the largest source for this type of engineering, other countries are simply not doing any of it.

The cost of buying a Ferrari is prolly lower than getting a Phd from Stanford on any of those topics.

The fact is companies are not willing to pay for the training etc for it.

There simply is not enough demand at the economic price point for it, or else companies would be spending billions in retraining.

Even I want to own a Rolls Royce and date Katey Perry.

BigCos like Google and Microsoft can afford to pay big bucks and collude together. Startups on the other hand can't always afford to pay $100k+ for a junior engineer.

If they set up shop somewhere other than San Francisco, they wouldn’t have to.

Right. It’s not really about paying the devs, it’s about paying the landowners.

They do set up shop elsewhere. The problem is that the BigCos are also doing the same (NYC, Seattle, Austin, Boulder, etc.) and bringing their high salaries with them.

> Startups on the other hand can't always afford to pay $100k+ for a junior engineer.

Sounds like a failed business plan then.

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