It's obvious if you ever were anywhere close to a process of hiring a programmer. It's hard to find competent people. There is a lot of competition. A lot of positions companies could profitably hire at decent salaries won't ever be filled because salaries of people qualified to do those jobs start above profitability threshold.

Besides, it's not rocket science that having more talented productive people in your country is a good idea.

Have you considered the difficulty in hiring is partly due to artificially complex and high standards? That maybe, to some degree, these standards are promoted in part to contribute to a feedback loop?

It's not that hard. You have to pay a decent wage and make sure your hiring practices aren't completely broken.

> A lot of positions companies could profitably hire at decent salaries won't ever be filled because salaries of people qualified to do those jobs start above profitability threshold.

This is true of every job. If salaries were cheaper you would be willing to hire more of them.

> decent salaries won't ever be filled because salaries of people qualified to do those jobs start above profitability threshold.

Wait, so will this move lower engineers salaries or raise it because they won't have to compete "with an underclass."

The reasoning isn't self-consistent because obviously it will mean lower wages for engineers.

It's hard if you want to hire programmers the way Google and Facebook do, but it's easy to argue that their hiring practices and outcomes are a "wet streets cause rain" situation, where they get away with doing something totally non-scalable because of their enormous market power and status.