[klipt]

The Bay Area is fundamentally broken in that cities refuse to build new housing and schools. Supply is limited, demand exceeds supply, and engineers are competing against each other for that very limited supply.

So if all us engineers' salaries went up, it wouldn't help. We'd just end up spending even more to out compete each other. (Well, I guess it would help push non-engineers out of the Bay Area, but is that really what we want?)

[qdpb]

Perhaps an interesting way to interpret what you're saying is that SF is bad enough that people no longer want to move there since all their surplus income will be consumed by housing costs (valid concern!).

But new immigrant salaries are as good as american salaries in terms of how much they can push prices up; so hiring H1-B is essentially similar to a pay cut for people (same $$, higher housing costs); following this pay cut some existing engineers will leave.

In the end you just end up with replacing some old engineers with new ones through a costly lengthy process.

This is the kind of absurd logical games one has to play in order to not acknowledge basic economics of supply and demand.

[jtzhou]

The natural solution to this would be more rail to allow people to have reasonable commutes into the city. But some critics think rail encourages sprawl and the only answer is more skyscrapers and density.

And on the other side, NIMBY's in low-density areas like Menlo Park and Atherton killed the restoration of the Dumbarton Bridge Rail (also victim of a mysterious arson recently) and are delaying electrification of the Caltrain. The Dumbarton Bridge, for example, would allow people to live on the East Bay and take direct rail into Palo Alto, Redwood City or Menlo Park, and up and down the corridor.

[qdpb]

If there is nowhere to house new engineers, why do companies apply for H1-B?

[klipt]

That's mostly orthogonal to the H1-B question - why do they hire anyone? (Most of the hires are not H1-Bs.)

I'd guess the answer is, marginally, hiring people is still good for companies. But combined with the lack of housing development, it's slowly but steadily making life worse for everyone in the Bay Area who doesn't yet own a house.

If it continues this way, eventually people won't move here without ridiculously high salary offers, and companies will be forced to expand in cheaper cities instead.