Tech Worker in US – There is a shortage at the price big tech companies want to pay

You may have noticed that the big tech companies are agitating for an expansion of the H1B visa system whereby foreigners with certain tech skills can come and work in the US. You know, for big tech companies and the like. Easy issuance of green cards for those with those tech skills. It’s not an unusual set of requests: the tech companies would dearly love to be able to find all the talent they think they require and obviously, just like any other business, they’d prefer to pay less rather than more for their supplies of whatever it is…

What those big tech companies are saying isn’t that there’s a shortage of decent engineers in the US. They’re saying there’s a shortage of good engineers at the price they want to pay. The correct answer to which is that they should raise the price they’re willing to pay for good engineers. Sure, this does raise the already very high wages of Silicon Valley engineers. But as Smith points out, it starts to raise all US wages. for higher wages for engineers will lead to more training to be such engineers, leaving open the places they would have taken otherwise (say, as quants on Wall Street) and everyone in the country gets to move up a step. OK, sure, the effect of 100,000 more engineers in a society of 300 million people isn’t going to be directly measurable but it will be there.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at  There Is No Tech Worker Shortage And If There Is It’s The Tech Companies’ Fault.