"Just pay more, and you'll get it". Thats very general and does not always work if pool of candidates is genuinely smaller than demand. The Education part will obviously correct this long term but does not really help in the short term.
As long as the worldwide financial markets will only fund startups in SV staffed by young Stanford grads, Stanford will never be able to produce enough grads to staff the result of a world wide financial bubble. Imagine if the housing bubble last decade would only hire house framing carpenters born in Boise ID.
Eventually the idea of doing a startup in Chicago, Berlin, Paris, Prague, will change from "impossible" to "insanely rebellious and financially reckless" to "thats a great idea" and at that point the candidate pool being too small will disappear.
There are other exogenous forces such as companies that want to hire H1Bs, for whatever reason, must in public declare a labor shortage for legal reasons regardless if one exists or not. I'm not trying to debate H1B program but to state authoritatively that it legally requires corporate statements about the labor market to a pre-defined value of 'shortage' regardless of actual market conditions. As if in a thought experiment federal regulators required CNBC to report false numbers for todays Dow Jones index and people actually debated policy based on the legally required fake numbers. Any corporate statement by any company hiring, or planning to hire H1Bs in the future, is inherently legally required to be a false, fixed statement of 'shortage'.
If it would be considered shockingly newsworthy that a company hires old female programmers in India for the same pay as young white guys in SV, that in itself seems evidence there is no shortage at all.
The inability to hire given a "fish in the barrel" hiring target, might indicate a shortage of quality management, especially HR management, but clearly not a shortage of software development professionals. Suggesting companies need to pay more to get better management, given income disparities that already exist... The real story is no matter how much more management is paid, for various workplace or cultural or demographic or educational issues the management product produced even at ridiculous pay rates is shockingly deficient.
Companies are tripping over each other trying to hire women. My wife is blindly offered jobs entirely because she is a woman. Not secretly or anything, they literally say "we are looking for women for our team".
>If it would be considered shockingly newsworthy that a company hires old female programmers in India for the same pay as young white guys in SV, that in itself seems evidence there is no shortage at all
No it isn't. There is no reason to believe old Indian women are as qualified as young white men. There's actually huge reasons to believe they are not. And why are you so fixated on white men? Considering the demographics of the USA, white men are under-represented in US tech jobs, Asian and Indian men are over-represented.
What I think is happening is that companies are offering less than the market-clearing price for talent, and then complaining that they can't find talent (at that price). Well, yeah, that's usually the way it goes when you offer less-than-market prices for anything.
But it also implies that there’s a natural scarcity to the best talent, in which case you will always run out, no matter what you do to expand the field (barring creepy eugenics or cloning programs).
In which case, paying more money makes sense. In fact a pay scale more on par with pro sports salaries would be the most likely outcome.