alt Hacker NewsYeah, that's been my experience as well.
I never really understood the idea of gatekeeping jobs -- especially those at the very high or the very low end.
On the very high end, wouldn't you want to poach the most intelligent folks from around the world and bring them into the US? That pool of high-performers is not a big one and you're directly removing competition and silo-ing all the best people under your control.
On the very low end, those are jobs that are non-competitive and enable the low-mid-high level jobs to exist (and for those workers to be compensated better and so on). If you're looking at the US right now, a great example is to look at the agriculture industry. Farm bankruptcies increased by almost 50% in 2025 and 2026 is looking even worse. These bankruptcies in 2025 happened before diesel prices spiked by 30-40% and tariffs killed international ag-trade. A lot of those bankruptcies can be attributed to the the lack of farm workers which either cause farms to not be able to generate revenue and/or have dramatically reduced margins.
Edit: Wow, in the few minutes it took me to write my comment, there have been quite a few comments that are making the point that:
1. Companies need to pay more to get better talent.
2. The hiring process is broken and not surfacing high-quality domestic workers.
I guess my response is that I've offered and been offered compensation packages that seem to be quite strong. I worked with and know folks who have received similar or better packages and the quality of work seemed to be a bit of a crapshoot. Just "paying more" doesn't guarantee better workers (if that's even feasible or doable for the company). I'm sure that there is some sort of correlation between higher pay and better/more efficient productivity, but I don't work HR for Google or whatever so I don't have the data to specifically make a point. Empirically, my experience has been that there is a weak correlation and when factoring in $$ per work product, it becomes inefficient.
The hiring process being broken is very true. I'm not smart enough nor knowledgeable enough to even offer a fix to the problem. All I can say is that employers spend a lot of money trying to hire the best people and they still get burned/can't find a good candidate.
Replies
The reason why increasing wages for low-level jobs is so important is that it puts upwards pressure on all wages above them as well.
If the lowest paid lowest responsibility job has a wage increase, then any job which requires more from the worker needs to increase their salaries, or people dip out and take the easier job for the same salary.
In reality, the example is usually something like a situation where a highly stressful and highly skilled job is maybe paying $30 per hour and the worker decides to change to a menial job for $25 per hour instead or even less.
Any talk of "worker shortages" is not just a lie, it is a lie born from evil. Born out of the current geriatric ideology of hatred against the youth of your own people, which is dominating in industrial society all over the world.
Any business which cannot pay a good salary for the workers they employ shouldn't be in business in the first place. It is better for the economy that those people work with something else. Especially since a normal worker usually has an output of 5-10 times more than what they are paid, and in efficient sectors even more than that.
> That pool of high-performers is not a big one and you're directly removing competition and silo-ing all the best people under your control.
That is precisely the idea that was at an all time high during ZIRP - just (acqui)hire people and companies to make sure no one else has access to them. In an ideal world this should have been banned under antitrust regulations, but eh.
And now it has predictably blown up in our faces.
Paying more guarantees getting more high quality applicants. It also means more applicants who aren’t high quality. That’s why you do interviews instead of choosing randomly. If a company’s hiring process is unable to select the best applicants, that’s a separate problem.