Excuse me, he is just a guy with a company, not some demi-God who has access to a list of all qualified people out there.

When people say: "Hey, there's talent in the US! Look hard and you will find it!", you are kinda missing the circumstances under which he is operating.

First, the cost. Are you suggesting he offer $1 million for a job that used to go for $200,000 just because he can't find anyone? That is flawed economics and a blind faith in the market. The market is not perfectly elastic. We're talking about people, and not mass-produced goods or primary, replaceable material (Iron, Coal etc.). He probably can't operate profitably at those prices.

Second, people are super diverse, and from personal experience, its very very hard to find the right kind of people for any job. If he's found someone who works well for the company, he's very lucky and realizes that. All he wants to do is to bring him to his main office so that he can possibly be more efficient and productive, and the current US labor laws are not letting him do so.

>In fact, the way you can tell this is bs and it is entirely about price is AeroFS opened a canadian subsidiary! I wonder how much that cost. At a guess, $30k? So apparently $30k is less than the premium required to pry engineers out of dropbox or box.

What if engineers working at dropbox are perfectly happy where they are? How do you know that he hasn't tried that? Does he even have time to court all the employees of dropbox; he probably has much better things to do with his time.

>Or god forbid, train someone.

Anecdotally, this is false. I admit I've worked only for 2 American companies so far, but both of them have been incredibly involved with the local community; hiring many entry-level engineers, giving internships to students from community colleges and organizing learn-to-code events on premises.

So perhaps he needs to offer a million dollars, if that's what it takes to get his perfect unicorn (minimum job requirements: 23 years experience with python. Cue whining that we have a talent shortage when Guido declines job offer.) But I'd bet he'd get a hell of a lot of interest at even 10% or 15% over the going wage.

All he wants is to sidestep US immigration law to undercut wages of domestic employees. There, was that so hard to admit?

Yes, he's too busy to recruit! Why aren't those uppity employees lining up begging to work for him? I mean, looking at employees on linkedin is, like, so much work!

Whoa, this is not ok.

Most of your 15+ comments in this thread have combined grand unsubstantiated claims with lashing out at those you disagree with. That's bad enough, but here you've crossed into personal attack. Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News.

The level of discourse you're practicing here makes me ashamed of this site: lacking in either civility or substance and whipping up indignant froth. In the future, please optimize for quality rather than quantity. One high-quality comment is a greater contribution than a dozen rude ones.

People legitimately have divergent views of this complex matter: companies use the immigration process for different reasons, there are different levels of talent being sought, employers and employees have different vantage points, and so on. Turning it into a polarized nastiness match, as you and a few others have done, destroys the capacity of this site for exploratory conversation.

Of course it is about cost. Because if he kept upping his offer, he would get someone (if the office is a normal place). He simply does not want to pay the going rate for the skill set he needs. I'd like to hire lots of people on HN for minimum wage as well - I know that's not reasonable though and I don't whine about it.

Obviously, a young French guy with disposable income, no dependents and earthly possessions that fit in a large backpack and a suitcase is not representative of the majority of H1B workers but the specter of deportation is not very scary to me. The last two times were just opportunities to travel.

I'm certainly not saying it's the motivation in every case - doubtless it is often about costs and sometimes genuinely about talent.

Similarly a lot of people talking about salary are missing the point. Sure, there might be more candidates if the salary offered were higher but even if they had the right skills (and that's a big if) they might not be a good fit for the team.

I know mentioning "culture fit" may attract a lot of flak but consider this: if a candidate cares more about the salary than the product and the team then even if they're incredibly skilled they risk being detrimental to the company as a whole. I've seen what the world of finance looks like through some friends and it's not pretty.

And it's just a job. Not a mission.

People jump out of bed to go skiing, or cure cancer, or research fundamental physics, or to practice medicine, or to help the needy, or to help animals, or to put a human on mars, or for 1000 other reasons.

Not to steal a point of marketshare from office 365.

But I do think I see why aerofs has trouble hiring.

I don't recall claiming to make the world a better place. We've changed our focus since I joined and to be honest I was more excited about the original vision but I'll take corporate file sharing over online advertising any day.

Then again, I'd take life as an itinerant purveyor of french toast and fine liquors over online advertising so I'm hardly representative of the average person in this "industry".

People going on about cultural fit and missions -- while, of course, having a problem hiring -- make me literally laugh out loud.

I'd rather be an itinerant snow bum, personally.

I don't think culture has been a major issue for us when hiring. I merely brought it up as a counterpoint to the "just raise the salary" argument which strikes me as disingenuous.