This wasn’t the framing I was going for. My point was that industry boundaries are fluid and expand/contract as demand dictates. You’re correct that incentives are not all positive (pay, work life balance, perks), other industries contracting might force people to find work elsewhere.

All that said, I don’t think these people have “odd backgrounds”. I work in a math-heavy domain, so these backgrounds make as much sense as a traditional CS background, and I think these folks are just as likely to be retained in a crunch.

In my experience, this is not true. Demand for software engineers has been so high, and pay so high as a result, that it’s pulling in workers from adjacent industries. The total software-qualified workforce is larger than the set currently working in software, and people with transferrable skills move in and out of software as incentives dictate.

A number of my current and former coworkers are from math and physics backgrounds (CFD, energy, etc…). These are folks that before might have stayed in academia, or ended up in aerospace, defense, or other engineering fields.

If everyone over hired, demand drops, and companies drop pay as a result, I’m sure we’ll see some folks in software with transferrable skills move to other industries.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47692043

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Even a floor of 100W would rule out smaller/less athletic riders.

The best demographic data I can find is here: https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/103-child-population...

The best data I can find on language spoken at home is here: https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/81-children-who-spea...

The above shows the share of "Non-Hispanic White alone" children (who I'll assume speak English as a first language) going from 52% to 48% from 2015-2024, and the percentage of "Children who speak a language other than English at home" staying flat at 22% from 2013-2023. From 2015-2024, math attainment goes from 62% to 55%.

At a glance, it would seem that the shift in math attainment cannot be explained by demographics/language alone.

+1, squirting the tourists who are already there does little to discourage other tourists from coming, or to solve the problem that they're competing for the same housing.

That said, I can't help but think that AirBnB(/VRBO/etc...) is just faster to respond to market conditions than traditional hotel businesses because it leverages already built private residences. If land is 5x as profitable as accommodation for tourists, then anywhere where a hotel could be built the value of the land will increase, and thus housing costs. I guess the local govt. has zoning as a lever it can use to restrict where hotels can be built though. Maybe that's the point though, that AirBnB sidesteps zoning, extracting more value from the land than other users can.