But by that same definition then, is not a worker who wants more than what the employer is willing to pay then no longer part of the supply? By saying that it's just a system at an economic equilibrium, it feels like we remove any ability to make any comment on the system as a whole. It becomes just being what it is.
I wonder if you can't pull in some other evidence, such as, well, if you actually did raise your pay rate to a point where there would exist a worker willing to work for that amount, and you could further prove that worker would still be able to create enough value to the employer s.t. he or she was worth hiring in the first place, and that it then only boils down to the short-sightedness of the employer for not being willing enough to offer a higher wage?
(For example, something like the absurd valuations of some SV tech companies, and the millionaire they make, compared to the salary of an engineer. I personally think most places I've worked could move faster — generate more value — with better engineers, but that can't happen if you're paying "market rate" instead of paying competitively. But "enough" value is being generated, at least, people think, I guess.)
> is not a worker who wants more than what the employer is willing to pay then no longer part of the supply?
I think that is a fair assertion. If demand disappears, the supply also disappears (why supply something that nobody is going to buy?). However, the people who would have made up that supply of labour tend to not die. They find something new to supply to the market with instead, thus putting downward pressure on the jobs that do pay sufficiently to attract people, but not to the point where nobody is willing to do the job. Thus why incomes aren't increasing (but also not heading towards $0).
> if you actually did raise your pay rate to a point where there would exist a worker willing to work for that amount, and you could further prove that worker would still be able to create enough value to the employer s.t. he or she was worth hiring in the first place
This is the issue though. The farmer in the article didn't get his crop off because the consumers didn't care enough about the product to justify its harvest. The airline had to cancel the flight because the consumers didn't care enough about making that trip to justify finding a pilot. If people were starving, they would be willing to pay more for food, and the farmer could have then afforded the necessary labour. If people had to make that trip, they would have paid more for the flight, and the airline could have afforded the necessary pilot. You have to actually have a reason to pay these people sufficiently, which is not always the case. Not all jobs are actually needed.
Price is a function of supply and demand, but just saying you want something is not actually demand. There has to be the willingness and ability to pay the price that is necessary, by the very definition of demand.
In the realm of software, there is a limited number of "better engineers" in a given region and in the entire world.
Paying more will have a zero-sum effect in the short term, simply attracting workers away from other software companies. In the longer term, it will encourage more newcomers to enter the field and spur the "less better" engineers to improve or update their skills.
I'm still not clear about what you meant by "better engineers"; I'm in doubt about the theory of the 10x engineer. If you meant engineers with updated skills, then I might agree with you.
> I'm still not clear about what you meant by "better engineers"; I'm in doubt about the theory of the 10x engineer. If you meant engineers with updated skills, then I might agree with you.
I simply meant more skilled engineers. (I'll readily admit that discerning which candidates are actually more skilled during an interview is a fairly challenging problem.) My personal opinion is that "10x" is a flat-out myth, and significant culture problem in our field. Engineering anything of moderate complexity requires >1 mind, and stockpiling all your knowledge into a single person — even if he or she is a great engineer — is foolhardy. I don't think that not believing that "10x" is a thing or a good idea means that there isn't a range of skill, however.
And perhaps the above is part of the problem. I've interacted with a number of engineers writing a lot of … crap … because they don't know what they're doing, and won't take the time to learn what they're doing¹. I spend an awful lot of my own time untangling the tech debt left by the "10x"ers that came before me. While I do get paid for it, I'd usually rather be doing something else. Yet, I don't really think I could reliably pick these people out in an interview, and simply interviewing is such an endurance task of wading through the seemingly endless masses of "engineers" that can't write a for loop that can't be singled out by tech recruiters who have no tech background b/c the recruiters can't recognize a BS résumé from a non-BS one (because they have no background in tech, but are really just LinkedIn scrapers AFAICT). Lastly, I don't know that SWE is a great field for get-rich-quick: I'm not paid all that competitively if you compare SWE in the Bay Area to say, investors, doctors, lawyers, …)
¹I once interacted with someone trying to send emails. Instead of using a library, he was rolling his own serializer for emails. But he also refused to read the RFC — despite repeated attempts to show him that it contained the information he needed, and testing it repeatedly broke it. (And this is but one example out of many. I'm currently working somewhere where we have multiple broken serializers that attempt to emit data for PostgreSQL, broken for the same reasons: refusal to understand the required output format prior to writing an emitter for it. "It's just CSV/TSV"
I wonder if you can't pull in some other evidence, such as, well, if you actually did raise your pay rate to a point where there would exist a worker willing to work for that amount, and you could further prove that worker would still be able to create enough value to the employer s.t. he or she was worth hiring in the first place, and that it then only boils down to the short-sightedness of the employer for not being willing enough to offer a higher wage?
(For example, something like the absurd valuations of some SV tech companies, and the millionaire they make, compared to the salary of an engineer. I personally think most places I've worked could move faster — generate more value — with better engineers, but that can't happen if you're paying "market rate" instead of paying competitively. But "enough" value is being generated, at least, people think, I guess.)