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Comment by pfedor | Hacker News Reader

I don't know whether there is a shortage of engineers in the US, but I know that your argument that there isn't is invalid, because 90% of the country could be starving and you could still say that there is no shortage of food, after all anyone willing to pay the market price can get it.

Those benefitting from higher wages are not the people of the United Stated who defend the borders, just the small fraction of the people who happen to be software engineers. All the rest of the people of the US are hurt by this, since they have to pay more for the goods and services to which the software engineers contributed.

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Economic shortage is a term describing a disparity between the amount demanded for a product or service and the amount supplied in a market. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_shortage) Note, that says noting about price. The reason why there is no shortage of engineers is there are surplus 'Unemployed' engineers on the market that move into other industries not because they are cheap. One of the first effects of a shortage is an increase in price, however wages have stagnated again suggesting a surplus.

PS: Rayiner's argument is despite a surplus of engineers people still want to increase the H1B cap and they want to do that to save money.

Oh please. "The reason why there is no shortage of food is there are surplus 'Unrealized' meals, i.e., all the things other than food produced by people who could be producing food instead, if only food was more expensive."

(As a side note, I personally have never met or heard of an actually unemployed software engineer, i.e., a person who was able to write code and was looking for a job and couldn't find one. Not only in the US, any of the countries I've lived in. Unemployment in Poland in the early 2000s was at times above 20% and yet I've never heard of an unemployed computer programmer, despite the fact most of the people I was hanging out with were computer programmers.)

There are a lot of talented engineers who have been forced out of the field due to never finding a job after collage. I worked with a guy that had his masters from MIT in engine design who said less than half the people in his program found Engenearing jobs and that was more or less expected. He was doing statistical analysis of criminal behavior.

Now Progamers are in much higher demand, but even still the percentage of programmers that stick with it for more than 10 years is fairly low.

I know at least 2 who were unemployed for some time. But then again, I only know them because my employer is the one who fired them.

I think there's something like 5% unemployment amongst computer programmers in the US. Based on experience with (ex-)coworkers, that number can easily be attributed to people who are looking for programming jobs who aren't competent enough to hold a job. In fact, that unemployment number should probably be higher, and I shudder to think what kind of crappy unmaintainable code is being written by those programmers who really should probably be unemployed (or at least in another field.)

In short, our need for programmers doesn't come from some lack of people willing to work for a certain salary; it comes from a lack of people capable of doing the job.

This doesn't entirely make sense. Price is inextricably coupled with supply and demand. I mean, you literally cannot graph supply and demand without involving price, because price is one of the axes of the graph.

I don't know about the "unemployed" claim. Is there any data on this? The existence of some unemployed engineers does not mean there is not a shortage of engineers. They could be grossly incompetent. Or they are part of the level of unemployment that is considered normal. That's why 4% unemployment is considered to be "full employment."

Wages have most certainly not stagnated in the tech industry.

You can have economies without prices as with socialist states.

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