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Comment by Cookingboy | Hacker News Reader

> and particularly skilled developers.

skilled developers are much more common than people think. We get the impression of rarity precisely because we limit the search pool to local areas where very often many top companies are competing for the same talent pool.

But at the end of the day there are a ton of super smart developers in EU, China, India, Japan, South America or even lower to mid COL areas in the U.S. who are more than happy to take 50% of Silicon Valley pay and just do as well of a job.

At the very end of the day vast majority of software engineering is far from rocket science, and you don't need someone who can re-invent MapReduce out of thin air just to refactor that clusterfuck of Redux code.

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Just as there are super smart, skilled developers in these areas, there are also lots and lots of software companies in EU, China, India, Japan and South America. These companies will need to up their game to keep these talented developers from fleeing to better paying, outsourced jobs.

This might not mean much for someone who made their career in SV, but certainly means a lot to an Indian, Russian or Brazilian developer.

Skilled developers are numerous, but there's an ocean of mediocrity making it harder for companies to find the ones they will be willing to accept. On top of that, when they do find them, these candidates have typically already realized their negotiating power.

Recent numbers at my place of work (looking for a couple of senior hires):

3 months, 200 applicants, 35 full-day technical interviews, 2 offers. 1 accepted. The guy who rejected had a competing offer.

I'm poking around currently, and there's definitely an appetite for companies to get strong candidates in for interview. However, I keep these numbers in mind. The odds are against us.

Technically correct, but even GitLab has a relatively short list of countries where they hire[0]. Legal requirement are probably going to continue to limit the talent pool for the foreseeable future.

[0] - https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/employment-so...

Doing some simple math on your "limited talent pool" in the "short list of countries" brings the total population of those countries up to:

* ~900 million people for where they use companies (and probably in the low tens of million of possible employees)

* probably ~2 billion people for where they use contracts (and probably some more low tens of millions of possible employees)

Those are <<huge>> pools of people.

There's not much need to outsource as long as companies are swimming in cheap money. For most U.S companies dev money is barely an issue and in Europe they mostly don't earn that much to begin with.

If this bubble bursts then yeah painful changes will likely come.

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