The pool of unemployed engineers is of decent size, especially people who are over 40.  We know that ageism exists in tech, and many are deemed not even worthy of an interview.<p>I will also disagree that these companies &quot;cannot afford it&quot;.  Who are the ones complaining?  They are mainly very large corporations, or at least the ones that are being heard.  Do you really think that hiring of an engineer here will make it so that they will become unprofitable?<p>It&#x27;s the old saying of, &quot;if you&#x27;ve been unemployed for X number of months, you will get shunned&quot;.<p>So again, it&#x27;s supply&#x2F;demand.  If you want to pay less, why not just hire give the unemployed guys a shot at that lower pay?  It&#x27;s part of doing business.  So pay less for less quality, but that&#x27;s not what companies want.  They want to pay less but for a higher quality.  Like all things economics, we can have a substitute.  It might be an inferior one, but you&#x27;re not sure.<p>As far as wages, meh.  I dunno.  Once you hit a certain level these days, you kind of top out in engineering, or what people _want_ to pay.  And the top of the graph gets dragged down by the sheer number of H1Bs.