[ source : http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html ]
If there was a labor shortage, wouldn't real U.S. wages have been going up?
If I want a $5 Prime Rib Eye steak, and can't find it, is there a beef shortage?
Raise wages, and the talent will come.
The fact that many SV companies want mythical beings to solve their engineering problems is an entirely different issue, but this does not invalidate their claims of a "shortage." It just means that they have failed to come up with a business that is capable of being worked on by the existing talent pool.
To be fair with the analogy, that should rather read...
> If I want a $1,000,000,000 unicorn, one out of the 100 that are in existence, and I can't find someone to sell it, is it because I'm not paying enough?
The answer then becomes - Yes.
Top engineers in the US are not mythical creatures, they do exists. Hence why the original analogy is disingenuous.
I don't mean you in specific, but this is the simple fact about unicorn hunting.
EDIT to note: this does not apply in the mythical "Lake Wobegone"-like areas people are sure to point out to me, where I've heard that a full third of the population are unicorns ;-).
I'm astonished by this attitude. I hate buzzwords like "human capital", but it should be obvious that it's incredibly time consuming and resource intensive to produce people who can program in mainstream languages and platforms. This is not simply an issue of mining more coal or growing more corn.
It isn't an instantaneous turnaround - new talent doesn't come out of the woodwork overnight - but give it 5 - 6 years and if average salary went up another 30k you'd have a % more college students entering the field due to the market demands for it.
That is how it always works with worker shortages.
No, this is exactly what's wrong with all of this analysis. Economics is a social science. That's one of the reasons why behavioral economics has attracted so many bright minds, because of the obvious shortcoming of classical economics. To think that people are simply going to chase higher salaries ignores everything that you should know about how real people make decisions about careers.
That's not to say that there are no examples of this, but it's obvious based on the numbers of people who self-describe as a "programmer" that this is not happening in sufficient numbers relative to the demand.
Strange how the laws of economics only cease to apply when their application would result in higher wages for workers.