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Comment by bowlofpetunias | Hacker News Reader

Coincidentally, today both in the UK and the Netherlands reports were published about the rapidly increasing shortage of "IT workers".

After digging a bit deeper into the actual numbers (when for fuck sake are they going stop grouping everyone who touches a computer under the heading "IT"?), it's mostly "developers, developers, developers".

Also, reactions on most forums are "fuck you, pay us". All perks, generational differences and cultural changes aside, this is mostly a money problem. I see so many people in jobs that where there is considerably less demand and require a lot less effort to keep skills and knowledge current earn a lot more money than developers.

Why are, with some localized exceptions like SV, developers still being paid considerably less than all reports suggest their market value is?

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SV is an anomaly. You have a super high concentration of VCs ploughing tens of millions in to hundreds (probably thousands) of companies. It's easy to compete for talent when you have millions of someone else's money to spend on payroll.

In other areas there just isn't that kind of money floating about to compete with (nor is there as strong a need to compete in the first place as non-SV companies aren't fighting against a hundred other tech companies for access to the same talent). So, companies pay what they pay and a dev either sucks it up or moves to SV if he/she wants to earn more.

I would assume that big companies that are post-investment (Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Autodesk, Cisco, Intel, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Zynga, etc etc etc) pay out several orders more dollars of salary than companies running on VC. Startups with VC money have to compete against THOSE companies to hire. Engineers here have a great alternatives and can optimize for money, stock, satisfaction, education, connections, etc, so you don't have to stay in a sucky job, low salary, or bad company. That is why salaries are so high.

CA as a whole receives about $15B/yr in VC. Assuming every penny of that went to engineer compensation (not at all accurate - customer acquisitions is probably a bigger line item), that would be 75,000 jobs @ $200K company cost (probably low for the Bay Area). So VC directly pays for maybe 5-20K engineers in the Bay Area.

Insatiable, rich tech companies are why salaries are high.

Yep, really good points. Basically, the Bay Area is a land unto itself and assuming tech salaries in other parts of the country/world should be at comparable levels isn't really realistic.

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