What demonstrates that the market for programmers is not subject to the basic laws of supply and demand?

I can guarantee you that there are enough US citizen/resident programmers to meet your hiring goals. I can absolutely believe that your company can't afford to pay what it would take to meet your goals with only US persons. But "we want more than we can afford" is very different from "there aren't enough."

I don't understand why you keep mentioning other companies. What does the fact that a bunch of big companies all sponsor visas have to do with the fact that there's no such thing as a labor shortage, just companies wishing they could pay less and hire more, and acting on that wish in various ways?

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linkregister an hour ago | parent [-]

The company I work at pays a similar distribution to the H1B salaries offered by Anthropic: https://www.levels.fyi/h1b/?q=anthropic .

> I can guarantee you that there are enough US citizen/resident programmers to meet your hiring goals.

You can't make that guarantee. These companies spend lots of money to hire immigration lawyers to sponsor visas and process H1B -> Perm processes. The market would absolutely reward a participant who could bypass this headache and hire only people who do not require visa sponsorship. But the counterfactual has been tried. Many startups do not sponsor visas and they get outcompeted frequently.

	▲	wat10000 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I can make that guarantee. You're telling me you wouldn't have enough people if you hired away every single employee of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft? Because that is something you could do with enough money. Labor isn't some magic thing exempt from supply and demand. Pay more, get more. It works. If you can't afford to pay more to get more, well, that happens. We don't always have enough money to buy everything we want. The fact that I can't afford a Cirrus Vision jet is unfortunate, but it doesn't mean there's a shortage of jets.