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You have to be careful about counting jobs and engineers and declaring a shortage or surplus - because those statistics contain an implicit assumption that engineers are all the same and are completely interchangeable.

In my career, I've seen absolutely enormous variation in the productivity of various engineers. This includes pathetically incompetent ones that graduated from top-name engineering schools.

Quite a few engineers are negatively productive - they subtract value. Bad engineering can cost a company terribly, even destroy it.

It is true that if you're willing to pay enough, you can hire anyone. But that doesn't mean there isn't a shortage, as the supply of competent engineers didn't increase by one. It just meant that another firm didn't get the person you hired.

>Labor has never been in such high supply, and it has never been cheaper.

But qualified labor is in short supply, and it's never been more expensive.

> "There are more technical jobs open than qualified candidates to fill them."

I'm going to be very pedantic here. This statement is in fact true. Had the word "qualified" been taken out, then you are absolutely right, there is no shortage. However, the problem with STEM jobs isn't the lack of "on-paper" qualifications, but rather "off-paper" qualifications. Everyone wants the next Facebook engineer, but they are in limited supply. Case in point? Me. On paper, I've written web apps in Rails, Python, JS, and PHP for 5 years now, but I do not consider myself on par with my technical co-founder. On paper I am 100% qualified to fill a majority of these positions, but in reality, I'm not. Our expectations are offset by the stories we hear daily about Dropbox, Facebook, Google, etc. We are just seeing starting to approach the bend of the hockey stick in the "software is eating the world". It's only until we have a large quantity of qualified engineers when the hockey stick starts shooting upwards.

This is another perception issue that I keep encountering. The job description you've written above is for an extremely senior engineer, what some would call a product architect (e.g. your co-founder), not a fresh graduate. In fact, being a new graduate is now, by your own admission, considered to be an unacceptable level of training for a "Facebook engineer".

This is corporate bullshit, and you've fallen for it. If companies want someone who has mastered a technological stack, this is not an "engineer". This is an architect. And this position should be paid significantly more than an engineer. Although you may not consider yourself a competent engineer by the "Facebook standard", not only are you a competent engineer, but a senior engineer by every definition of the word. The fact that your evaluation of your own competence is so warped by corporate PR is extremely worrisome.

What I see here is that the bar for the definition of "competent engineer" keeps going higher and higher, without a commensurate increase in salary. This is a classic symptom of excess supply.

> This is corporate bullshit

I spent 4 years at the largest business software company in the world and have spent 3 years on and off in very small (3 employee) startups. I would presume my bullshit meter is fairly well tuned.

> you've fallen for it.

I haven't. I tried finding a technical co-founder that didn't cost me an arm and leg, and it's taken me 6 years to do so. (YMMV)

> This is an architect. And this position should be paid significantly more than an engineer.

This is laughable. I've seen more architects in my day than most people have seen sales people. Just type in "SAP Architect" on any job search and compare it to the number you get for "Rails Architect". Architects are the bullshit powerpoint pushers I used to see day in and day out in Enterprise IT, who, after 5 years of never coding or implementing, fell short of guiding their dev teams because they couldn't keep up with the ever-changing technology stack. You know who should be paid more than anyone else? The person that can build a small team, make crazy revenue in a very short (relative) amount of time. It doesn't matter what you call those people, but they do exist, are in short supply and should be compensated equal to their productive output.

> What I see here is that the bar for the definition of "competent engineer" keeps going higher and higher, without a commensurate increase in salary.

Actually this has more to do with time than anything. The Next Big Startup™, can't afford to spend 6 months on software, when they can higher Rockstar Dev Mcgee™ who can create it for them in 1-2 months.

Lastly, I'm failing to see the motive behind "corporate bullshit" you speak of. Google and Facebook do not want to pay these insane salaries, so it's in their interest to actually (1) have a large supply and (2) promote that there is a large supply, not the opposite. Their compensation packages are a direct effect of the shortage of supply of qualified talent. If this "corporate bullshit" is being lead by a small amount of vocal developers who are artificially padding their salaries by crying "supply shortage", then this is far from being "corporate".

The question ultimately becomes, what is our idea of "competent". From what I've seen, there is massive demand for people to create the next AirBnB/Dropbox/etc, which requires some very talented individuals to run and maintain. The other 99% clones of those companies that fail are because they don't have those competent people. So it's a loser's game with a bunch of people who demand that they win. Thus, the situation we are in.

EDIT: This video by Gabe Newell says it all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8QEOBgLBQU#t=12m20s (from about 12:20 to 16:00 - these "least correctly valued" people are no longer incorrect valued, that's my point)

> The person that can build a small team, make crazy revenue in a very short (relative) amount of time. It doesn't matter what you call those people, but they do exist, are in short supply and should be compensated equal to their productive output.

Precisely. I realize that we're using our definitions loosely, but this is exactly what I'm referring to when I mention Product Architect.

My next point is, what makes you think Google/Facebook/etc. have anything they can offer this person? The reality is, this eponymous engineer is a future billionaire, not a stock employee you can just hire with 120k a year and free pop. If this is what big corps mean when they say "competent", then excuse me as I laugh my ass off at their excellent "compensation package".

>From what I've seen, there is massive demand for people to create the next AirBnB/Dropbox/etc, which requires some very talented individuals to run and maintain.

You have to realize that it is absurd to expect someone like this to accept a job at a big corp. Just as a recent example, look at the Whatsapp founders.

Which brings me to my initial assertion: there is no skills shortage. Just a superstar shortage at bargain basement prices.

1) I think there's only a couple of hundred billionaires in the world.

2) 120K is a lot of money for an average American.

3) I don't think 'crazy revenue' is built by the merit and efficiency at which you can complete your tech stack. Case in point, FB during year 1 of its PHP stack; or Digg or Reddit year 1. Personally I think luck has a lot to do with it.

Which brings me to my assertion: There is no superstar programmer. Just a delusion sold by capitalists to get the proletariat to consume more information on an advertising-driven business model. I just want to be a ramen-sustainable programmer (but not ramen-sustainable startup).

I'm with noname on this one. 99.99% of those excellent engineers are NOT going to be billionaires.

They'll be lucky to be millionaires (and I'll envy them if I can't join them).

For those marvelous engineers to become millionaires, they need to have the luck to be paired with an excellent business team, build the right product and have a large dose of luck.

I'd rather have a not-so-brilliant engineer and an excellent team, vision and execution (as in build the right thing at the right time and produce value), for most products (very especially for your AirBnB or Facebook examples) you don't need top-tier talent to build it (you do need some to scale).

Edit: some of these marvelous people, which have actually built a succesful startup, tried again and FAILED. So it's not just the person, the idea must be right, the timing must be right and luck has to be on his side.

Is 120K a year a lot of money in a city where the median price for a 3br house is 1.1 million? (check zillow and us news money magazine for figures).

According to sfgate, the average application developer in SF earns 110K a year, the average dental hygenist earns 106k a year, the average RN earns 112K a year. Software devs earn fine salaries, and I'm very pleased that dental hygienists and nurses are well paid, they should be! But let's not start acting like software devs in high cost areas like SF (where many of the companies claiming a shortage are located) are an exceptionally well paid group compared to other professions in high cost areas. They earn enough that in a two income family with both parents working full time (say, a dental hygenist and software developer), they can afford a house in a reasonable school district, moderate but not exceptional vacations, and so forth.

Google and Apple have been deliberately keeping salaries down due to illegal non-poaching agreements.

Coursera has a lot of intro-level courses, but not really much in-depth stuff.

I remember being at the end of my degree and a bunch of us were sitting in the cafeteria complaining about how we hadn't learned anything. Then we realised that we were just talking about facts (and of which we had actually learned a lot - especially about underlying systems rather than factoids), but we had ignored a ton of soft skills in terms of research, collaboration, scientific procedure and rigor, self-expression, critique of other's work rigor, ethics, and plenty more I can't think of right now. In particular, it taught us how to learn further. This is a skill that a lot of people don't have. There are plenty of autodidacts, but they are definitely a small minority of people.

A smattering of online courses doesn't cover most of these items in the same manner or depth. It was certainly more than 'an old boys network', especially for me, since I have kept in contact with 0 people from those days.

Is it worth 300k? Maybe not[1]. But I didn't pay for a US university, and I've seen here on HN that there are claims that such sky-high figures are not the norm, and that there are plenty of ways to get cheaper degree-level education.

[1]Well, it was 'worth 300k' in a way - it changed who I was as a person for the better, and the way I look at new information. But I wouldn't have gone 300k into debt at the time. I did go about 40k into debt though (via HECS)

Coursera has a lot of intro-level courses, but not really much in-depth stuff.

that depends on your definition of intro-level.

Take CS. Yes they have intro level stuff

Learn to Program | An Introduction to Interactive Programming In Python

Then they have classes that require prior knowledge

princeton algorithms | stanford algorithms | functional programming | programming languages

then more advanced class like

Plus this is just the first wave. You can see that they're organizing classes so they go deeper with their specialization tracks. And its natural that professor's would create the introductory courses first ... because obviously one has to learn the fundamentals before you can proceed to more advanced classes.

Furthermore, I expect that the next round of classes you'll start to see more advanced materials. Robert Ghrist who's created the UPenn Intro to Calculus class said his goal is to create a MOOC in topology (his specialty).

"There are more technical jobs open than qualified candidates to fill them."

I don't understand how people can make this statement without considering price. Really thoughtful people, too. I'm not joking, people who seem very intelligent and thoughtful say this - "there are more tech jobs open than qualified candidates to fill them [unstated: at the price employers want to pay]"

The example people often use is trying to buy a car. I'm willing to pay $5,000 for a used car, I insist on a mercedes in excellent shape with fewer than 10,000 miles, and I state that "there are more people trying to buy a car than quality cars to purchase". All those seemingly rational people who say things like "There are more technical jobs open than qualified candidates to fill them" would tell me I'm being unrealistic about the market. Yet they talk about software developers being in short supply without considering the salary at which they are in short supply.