[gernb]

Mostly I do. Anyone can be a coal miner. Just show up and start digging. I'm not saying coal miners don't have their expertise and maybe their salary would go up if no one wanted to do the job but "in general" you get paid by how hard it is to find someone qualified to do the job.

All these companies are in layoff mode but because they are trying to be frugal during the recession but none of them actually want to layoff that talent, each of which was one of 100 or of 1000 resumes sent to the company. Google gets 3 million applications a year and still has trouble finding people that can do the jobs they're hiring for.

Queue rant about how the interviewing process sucks.

Maybe it does, but of the people I've interviewed only about 1 in 10 is a clear "yes, this person can code well", 2 are "probably ok" and 7 are "based on the performance/style/etc... from the leetcode question I wouldn't let you near my code base..... maybe you'd rock but you didn't show me you'd rock. You made all kinds of basic mistakes that makes it seem like you don't actually code much or you write lots of bugs. Sorry, I was totally routing for you. I would 100% love to hire you but you failed to show me you can code". That's irrespective of if they "solved it".

[fsckboy]

> "in general" you get paid by how hard it is to find someone qualified to do the job

weighted by how much people are willing to pay for the work product you create

It's probably really hard to find glassblowers these days. But, people don't want to buy that much handblown glass either.

(and before anybody says "I'd love to drink water out of hand blown glass!", remember opportunity costs: training glassblowers is probably straightforward but the projected value of their work does not support training them to blow glass considering they could train to do something in higher demand, so these potential glassblowers would want a high enough wage that you'd still settle for getting your drinking water glasses from Target)