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Comment by fighterpilot | Hacker News Reader

You're thinking in absolutes. We would both agree that a billion dollars a month is too high.

And I don't see how what you've said is related to what I said, which was a critique of the idea that this move is artificially depressing wages when allegedly it's an attempt to stop poaching of key talent at artificially high non market rates.

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>We would both agree that a billion dollars a month is too high.

I would not necessarily agree. There are CEOs who make around that amount, why shouldn't an engineer make that much if they're equally important to the organization?

From what I could gather from Google, TSMC engineers make far less than I do as a FAANG engineer, and TSMC posted a ~$14 billion profit last year. If these employees are so important to Taiwan's future, why can't they at least pay them FAANG-level salaries? It's not that they don't have the money.

Because they're not equally important. Most engineers don't add billions of dollars of value. If a miscellaneous engineer resigns, it will have in most cases little impact on the prospects of the company. Most add only incremental value. The superstar seven figure ICs do get paid as such but they're rare, most people aren't that capable of that much value add as an IC.

The company made billions in profits. That could be due to a number of reasons. IP, relationships, network effects, scale economies, regulatory capture, brand equity, etc.

>Because they're not equally important. Most engineers don't add billions of dollars of value.

Let the market decide that.

>The company made billions in profits. That could be due to a number of reasons. IP, relationships, network effects, etc.

That's not the point. The point is they're using the government to make it harder for their engineers to find other work, rather than just pay them higher wages so they'll stay on their own accord.

If the workers aren't important, then they don't need laws to stop them from looking for jobs elsewhere. Are us software engineers more important than those in other countries with comparable costs of living? That's hard to answer in general, but software engineers in the US are paid much better on average than in most European countries. Of course there are exceptions but hacker news is full of stories talking about this issue (many euro engineers come to the us bc we pay so much more).

It's very hard to overcome economics. If they don't pay their engineers at TSMC something approaching alternatives, they will start to leave. It doesn't matter whether the company made billions of dollars because of a few people - the company will struggle if they start losing their engineering talent. So that kind of sets their value.

What I'm arguing is that they'll need to pay better wages, otherwise people will leave, regardless of this law about advertising jobs.

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