Hacker News Reader

Comment by ditonal | Hacker News Reader

That's why it's a job 'opening'. My point was that it doesn't get filled but people classify it as an opening, but if someone wanted a Harvard lawyer for $60k it wouldn't even get listed.

View on HN

Do you have an example of a job opening where they're offering 60k for a MIT programmer? I can give you a bunch where they offer substantially more (all $100k+ with just an undergrad degree):

https://www.google.com/about/jobs/search/#t=sq&q=j&j...

http://careers.microsoft.com/careers/en/us/grad-software-job...

https://www.dropbox.com/jobs

You are totally missing my point. Yes, I realize MIT programmers make more and you need to pay them well to hire them. However, if you look at average software engineering salaries, you will realize most people do not pay as well as prestigious tech companies. Yet their job openings are used to indicate a shortage. Shortages are just low bids in a market, the fact that lots of people want to buy gold at $1 an ounce does not mean there is a shortage of gold. It's a bad metric if you understand anything about economics, and yet I've yet to see another metric used to argue for a 'shortage'.

I'm just asking for a few examples. Do you have any where they advertise an open job but the pay is low?

With exceptions, salaries aren't advertised in job openings. However you can look at average software engineering salaries to learn that most salaries are south of 100k, and it seems unlikely that on average higher salaries are getting turned down for much lower ones. Furthermore, specific examples are unnecessary. I originally asked for metric that proved there was a developer shortage, and explained why job openings are a bad indication of one. There have been none other proposed to my knowledge, so you're really just nitpicking details irrelevant to my original point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com