The current crop of AI startups offer exceptionally high salaries, to the point that San Francisco rents have almost doubled over the past 2 years. Note that the most prominent AI researchers are of Chinese national origin. We can't only pay and train our way into getting talented people. We have to expand the pool internationally.

You can’t just train people and have them be good software engineers… It takes years of training to be a good software engineer (with plenty of people flunking out during the training).

You're making a few (reasonable) assumptions based on the base rate of engineering interviewing practices in the industry. I'm not using Leetcode though a coding problem is part of our onsite process. My first screen is mostly a series of knowledge questions and asking candidates to explain projects they built on their resumes. Most candidates cannot do this. They fail to explain their own projects and fail to explain foundational concepts of distributed systems.

As an interviewer I need to be able to challenge candidates to get adequate signal to make an informed selection. My pool is computer science graduates and experienced software engineers. Most candidates fail. I haven't analyzed the distribution but my best guess is that over half of the successful candidates are on work visas.

As someone who was out of work for a large portion of 2025 and attended many interviews, I found interviewing frustrating and failed many. Only after taking a couple of months sitting down and studying fundamentals, grinding leetcode, reading the latest distributed systems literature, and practicing interviewing, I discovered that I genuinely had knowledge and skill gaps. The studying actually helped me become a better engineer. I received several offers after this intensive study period.

I wanted to make a separate comment to respond to the sampling bias question. From discussions with colleagues and analysis of companies, there is a large overhang of credentialed yet low-capability engineers in many high-population countries. For example, the top Indian and Chinese companies offer comparable salaries to the US-owned multinationals resident in their countries. These are outliers.

The vast majority of candidates for Flipcart and Bytedance simply would never be able to perform adequately. These top companies pay extraordinarily highly compared to most software engineering firms in their countries, far beyond the delta between OpenAI and a typical software engineer in the United States. The quality gradient is still there. Flipcart and Bytedance need to compete internationally, so their salaries are pulled upwards substantially.

I see a lot of Polish names in those coding websites leaderboards. It seems to be working, Polish tech industry is growing, as is India's and China's. Idk, grinding seems to work if that's your issue.

So? At least they're grinding, and we as a nation used to have that American grit. Now everyone just sits on their asses and cry "unfair" when someone willing to grind gets better opportunities.

Paying more guarantees getting more high quality applicants. It also means more applicants who aren’t high quality. That’s why you do interviews instead of choosing randomly. If a company’s hiring process is unable to select the best applicants, that’s a separate problem.

The reason why increasing wages for low-level jobs is so important is that it puts upwards pressure on all wages above them as well.

If the lowest paid lowest responsibility job has a wage increase, then any job which requires more from the worker needs to increase their salaries, or people dip out and take the easier job for the same salary.

In reality, the example is usually something like a situation where a highly stressful and highly skilled job is maybe paying $30 per hour and the worker decides to change to a menial job for $25 per hour instead or even less.

Any talk of "worker shortages" is not just a lie, it is a lie born from evil. Born out of the current geriatric ideology of hatred against the youth of your own people, which is dominating in industrial society all over the world.

Any business which cannot pay a good salary for the workers they employ shouldn't be in business in the first place. It is better for the economy that those people work with something else. Especially since a normal worker usually has an output of 5-10 times more than what they are paid, and in efficient sectors even more than that.

> That pool of high-performers is not a big one and you're directly removing competition and silo-ing all the best people under your control.

That is precisely the idea that was at an all time high during ZIRP - just (acqui)hire people and companies to make sure no one else has access to them. In an ideal world this should have been banned under antitrust regulations, but eh.

And now it has predictably blown up in our faces.

Both could be true. Just because millions are out of work doesn’t mean every specialty has sufficient domestic talent pool. No one says we should recruit only domestic talent in sports.

Except this doesn’t make sense if the argument is that there are a ton of unemployed CS people sitting around. The labor market is like any other market.

I dunno, I don't work in Big Tech and I feel the commenter you're-replying-to's concerns. There is some sort of mismatch if my pipeline is this empty and this many qualified applicants are jobless and unhappy about it. Comp is fine and people can live wherever they want, but there is no way my team is going to meet its goal of doubling in size by the end of the year.

I am also not sure the world is quite as discriminatory as you paint it as. I'm over 40. I'm a woman. It's a mixed bag; most places I interviewed during my last job search were very normal about everything. One place rejected me because I "can't thrive in a high-ambiguity environment" and I'm just like ... the interview consisted only of leetcode questions with one right answer, that I got right, so ... just say "our investors are all Republicans and I don't think we should be hiring trans people, yeah we clocked you btw." But it's honestly a lot more rare than I had expected going into it.

I don't really know what's going on with tech right now, or what the future looks like, but despite AI, despite not being fresh out of school, it all feels pretty normal to me. The ZIRP days seemed about the same as things feel now. What's changed is I can ask Claude "what would this crazy design look like?" read it, run it, and say "ewww, no, yeah I knew that would be terrible" without investing the week to write it myself. I am not sure that spells the end of our field.

> only a compensation shortage.

This is said all the time, and don't get me wrong, I like "compensation" as much as the other guy, but to me this just sounds like a race to the bottom (or sky) for companies.

It's great for those compensated for sure. But what happens once the companies with deepest pockets, FAANG and such, pay the most and drain the job market, what happens to all the other companies then? It raises the bar significantly for any new startup, makes it ever more impossible for any boring, middle-of-the-road company to find anyone remotely capable. Ultimately growth of the tech sector is limited by the number of people you have available, regardless of how much you pay for them. If anything, another country with more potential talent could even surpass the one playing alone in its own sandbox.

I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, and maybe in an economic downturn it's even a good thing, I'm just saying that it doesn't come with no tradeoffs.

Do you interview people?

Most developers are still overpaid from the pre-AI boom, so this sounds about right.