Walk into any tech company office in SF right now and ask whether they desperately need to find engineers. 99% of the time you will get a resounding YES. The shortage of engineers is not a myth. Most Satellite engineering offices are meant to find those engineers; not to simply save labor costs.
I think the shortage is a huge myth. Companies want more cheap engineers, because they use the engineers more like they are office furniture to look pretty and serve as fancy headcount for an acquisition or new funding round. Only a few of them are expected to know how to build anything.
What I see in the market right now is wage suppression at almost any cost for the vast majority of jobs, and then a huge jump up in wages for those few specialized roles where actual productivity is required.
I want to say this in the nicest way possible: I absolutely think you are 100% wrong about both the company's desire for new engineers and the competency of the engineers being hired.
It seems like data about salary trends, relative hiring of less experienced or younger quantiles of the candidate population, and company behaviors that could be motivated by wage arbitrage could possibly resolve our disagreement.
Do you agree? If we had data about these things it would shed light on whether employers are motivated to get talent because talent is productive vs. motivated for some other means by which companies are profiting from headcount?
> Do you agree? If we had data about these things it would shed light on whether employers are motivated to get talent because talent is productive vs. motivated for some other means by which companies are profiting from headcount?
Absolutely I would agree if the data indicated that. My opinion is admittedly based on anecdata, even if the people I've spoken with is somewhat large and limited to engineers in Tech companies.
