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Comment by smnrchrds | Hacker News Reader

The HN consensus has been that there is no shortage of labour as long as you can just pay more and get the labour. Even the fact that prices are consistently increasing doesn't mean that there is a labour shortage. It's only a shortage if you cannot buy labour at any price.

It is not what you specifically are arguing here, but I have read different iterations of the above dozens of times on HN and it is always highly upvoted and almost all comments are in support of this position. I find it interesting that you can just pay more to buy or rent in SF, so by this definition there is no housing shortage in SF.

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> The HN consensus has been that there is no shortage of labour as long as you can just pay more and get the labour.

The problem with this argument (as a native German speaker) is that in German, there do exist two different concepts that are both translated with "shortage" in English:

- [die] Knappheit

- [der] Mangel

"Knappheit" is a sign of an efficient market: if the supply decreases or the demand increases, the prices go up, so only the buyers that are willing to pay most get their share. This makes a market efficient.

"Mangel", on the other hand, means that (nearly) no matter how much you are willing to pay, you cannot get the good. This is a strong sign that the market is broken (often because of regulations).

Of course the media in its agenda loves to confuse these two concepts and writes of "Fachkräftemangel" ("shortage of professionals"; even though "Fachkraft" which I translate with "professional" here, actually literally means "field [field of study] force"), hiding the fact that there are no signs of Mangel, but of Knappheit.

>The HN consensus has been that there is no shortage of labour as long as you can just pay more and get the labour.

I guess I'm on that side, for the following reasons - the companies that want Cobol are companies that are pretty rich. Yet, Cobol salaries are on the low end for Software developers.

>I find it interesting that you can just pay more to buy or rent in SF, so by this definition there is no housing shortage in SF.

there's no housing shortage in SF for billionaires who are willing to pay whatever is asked. Did I mention my perception that the companies who want Cobol programmers are really rich.

Now, it may be that there is an actual Cobol shortage, I would even agree that it is likely because at the rate offered not very many people would be interested in learning a language generally derided and not much like other languages. But we cannot know that there is an actual Cobol shortage when the rates offered are less than those for Machine Learning experts.

If you offer top rates for Cobol programmers and can't get them, then you have a shortage.

Many governments use COBOL too, governments are theoretically rich, but they also have many holes to fill.

good point, I don't have a good metric for weighing how much government benefits would increase the value therefore it might be that there is enough money on the table for gov employees that there can be said to be a shortage.

There is a sense in which you only get a shortage as a result of something like price controls. If Saudi Arabia stops producing oil, the price goes up, but you can still get it. But if the government institutes price controls then people buy all they like at that price until the supply runs out. Then you can't buy it at all because nobody who has it wants to sell it for less than the price cap and nobody is allowed to sell it for more.

There is another definition of a shortage which basically says that supply doesn't respond to price, i.e. even if people are willing to pay more, the total amount of supply doesn't increase.

If gasoline was suddenly $50/gallon, it wouldn't stay there very long because it would immediately be profitable for new supply to come online, using production methods that aren't economical at lower prices. Supply would increase in response to higher prices.

This is also true of COBOL developers. If they were highly paid (relative to other software developers) then more people would learn COBOL and the supply of COBOL developers would increase in response to the high price.

It isn't really true of housing in SF. The price goes up and the supply remains the same because new construction is constrained by zoning. So there's a shortage.

But surely there is a shortage, and you can't just pay more.

My mom knew COBOL. She retired in the 1970s. You're going to have a tough time hiring her now.

I've never written a line of COBOL, but pay me enough money, and I'll be up and running in a mainframe terminal by the end of the month.

Looking at in.indeed.com, you can make ₹10,00,000 or more per year. Up to as much as ₹25,00,000.

...but that's if you have "3-5 years of Experience in Cobol, IMS, DB2, JCL".

I imagine an entry-level job might pay ₹7,00,000 or so, if you can show sufficient coursework in COBOL?

Some quick googling shows that ₹10,00,000 is about $13,560 USD.

edit: I made the mistake of multiplying this by 12 originally since I didn't read carefully.

The commenter specifically said that the Indian salaries are per year. So they definitely underpay even for the Indian market, given salaries for non-COBOL.

You're right, not sure how I missed that.

One might ask, setting aside the task of getting accurate and representative numbers, because that's too much work, what do Indians believe is plausible?

Some people are surely trying to set expectations low, while others may be exaggerating what you can make with a few years of experience.

However, I've seen quite a few different sources claim an entry level developer makes around 4-10 lakh rupees a year. This makes me think they think their audience considers that good but not unbelievable.

And then when somebody claims you can make 60 lakh or more with 5 years experience, it makes me think that their audience knows roughly what US salaries are, whether or not the figure is realistic.

I think the confusion stems from the fact that India has a surplus of IT employees. The sheer number of universities and software graduates is hard for Western countries to imagine.

As such, you will see a massive salary range, anywhere from 3-60 lakhs per year. It’s hard to calculate based on experience - tenure, tech stack, or otherwise.

The lower end is dominated by body shops that take the bulk of offshored projects, since that’s exactly what Western companies want. The higher end is dominated by FAANG and VC funded startups. Moreover, the majority of companies do not have significant yearly raises, and jumping jobs is the often the only solution.

Learning COBOL doesn't require you were born in the 1940s though. If COBOL jobs were paying what "AI" jobs are now, more people would start learning it.

A shock or major unforeseen event could cause a shortage for a time. But we've been hearing about the dire shortage of COBOL programmers for 30 years or more haven't we? Yet in that time apparently they haven't either migrated their systems off COBOL, started paying people more, or decided they don't need to invest as much effort into it? Doesn't seem all that credible.

Well, yes, you've cleverly deduced there is no real shortage.

There aren't any significant number of people wringing their hands over it for 30 years either.

You're welcome, glad I could clear that up for you.

Local vs global.

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