Battling Silicon Valley Wage Suppression | Hacker News Reader

Battling Silicon Valley Wage Suppression

blog.mightyspring.com

37 pointslumens15 comments

If you suppress prices, you reduce supply. Demand remains high, supply is now artificially low.

One unspoken benefit of this history of wage suppression is the dearth of engineering talent today. Rather than high prices signaling an opportunity to invest in an engineering education, labor market participants should have rationally chosen different skills and disciplines given the relatively low perceived market pay.

It stands to reason that engineers are getting paid more now than they otherwise would be thanks to temporal lags and education costs. If an unrigged market had been signaling prices that conformed to job market participant's real demands, the students of yesterday could have recognized better job opportunities today.

The wage suppression and agitation for imported labor has cultural impacts more serious than supply and demand. The message sinks in that the occupations are low prestige, regardless of earnings. High prestige occupations don't get kicked around like that.

Isn't the same thing happening with doctors? I see a lot of doctors from outside the US. I'm not sure what would be a higher prestige profession. I think the message is that just about everybody gets kicked around.

Those Doctors are eager to come here as the wages for Doctors here is very high. Also there is a much larger bar to entry for being a Doctor then an Engineer so there has been a shortage in the US.

How does that apply to the wage disparities in, say, the UK? From what I gather the wages there seem depressed moreso than, say, in the US.

That started off as a moderately interesting blog post, and...

"Conclusion

Use Mighty Spring! ..."

ended as a thinly disguised advertisement. I think I would have preferred some indication at the top of the page that the company was offering services related to the blog post.

Noted. I work for Mighty Spring and will be done in future.

How about in the present (A little thing called editing).

Updated!

No more wage suppression cartel? No problem, on to the next schtick; cries for more H1B's because of a "STEM worker shortage".

Don't fall for it folks, the STEM worker shortage is a myth.

Absolutely. Basic economics: you suppress the price of a good, and there'll be a shortage.

I could see STEM immigration issues being debated on different merits, but not on the topic of a shortage. It really takes a lot of gall and dishonesty for certain Silicon Valley CEO's to, on the one hand, suppress wages, and on the other, say that the resulting shortage is because of immigration problems, when they themselves know the they're to blame.

So, what would have happened had Apple and Google ruthlessly poached from each other and from every other smaller tech company like Adobe? A few engineers would have been better for it, but would the companies have attained the success that they did?

It depends on how you define success. If success is producing better products that please more customers, I would hazard a guess that they actually suppressed their success. If success means minimizing short-term labor costs, then these companies were definitely successful. Minimizing short-term labor costs is an obvious win for executives, it makes them look good. For shareholders, its hard to say if they won or lost, due to longer term potential for harm. For the consumer market, it's probably a loss, because there could have been better products if companies were willing to poach the right people to get better products. And for the labor itself, a definite loss. It's also a loss for the startup community, because there's fewer people with financial independence to start their own company. And since that's where a good chunk of innovation happens, I think we all lose out quite a bit.

Very Enlightening post!

I must agree. Some definite things to consider in today's world! Great post - keep them coming!

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