But from a pragmatic point of view, if the price is higher than you can reasonably afford to pay, then there's a shortage.
Also, this is compounded by the shortage being of senior/experienced developers. As a hiring manager, I get dozens of resumes from new college & bootcamp grads every day. But we're not hiring fresh grads—we're looking to hire a few excellent senior developers, and they come along once in a blue moon.
It'll probably take at least 10 years for domestic supply to catch up to domestic demand (I estimate it takes at least 10 years of development to become a senior dev). So even as pricing signals push more students to study CS, the supply won't catch up for another 10 years or so.
So in the interim the only solution is to import foreign supply.
So make some experienced developers. How many of your people are in offsite training right now?
Well?
It takes 10 years to build an experienced developer. We don't need to hire developers 10 years from now, we need to hire them now.
We do. We've literally never had an offer rejected. The problem is just that there simply isn't a supply of candidates worth making offers to.
As for this nonsense that we should somehow be training developers 10 years from now, that's just ridiculous. 95% of startups won't last 10 years and if we build our whole HR strategy on a 10 year pipeline we'd be dead.
[1] I could be wrong on this; the companies I am trying to contact may not be the ones whining. Reading the conversation here and at /r/cscareerquestions though gives one the impression that this is a pervasive problem.
There's the problem. There just aren't that many people looking for embedded software developers. The companies complaining about a shortage are mostly building web & mobile software—if you were willing to consider that field, I'm sure more opportunities would open up.
This is obviously wrong.
I'm not an economist, but I imagine an analogy to models of feedback systems that exhibit unstable behavior. Only the most simplistic systems can be made unconditionally stable.
Over time, the good will be replenished and the shortage condition resolved.
My argument was that in this situation the price should rise, reducing demand.
I've seen no good data on this issue either way, but from my anecdotal experience, salaries have been rising for a while now.
For example, in 2008, the supply of food dropped in Haiti. Prices rose to clear the market, but there was literally not enough food for survival. Many people ate dirt instead, what might callously be called a "substitute good" in purely economic terms. Of course this was a very serious and tragic food shortage.
What would a labor shortage look like? Specialized labor has an inelastic supply: you can only train workers so fast. In 2011, Georgia passed an anti-immigration law, and saw a huge drop in skilled agricultural workers that they could not hire enough. When $140 million worth of crops are left to rot in the fields, you've got a labor shortage.
I'd call it a serious shortage if, say, there were not enough IT workers to maintain the Internet. We're nowhere near that point.
If there is suddenly only enough water to hydrate 3.5 billion people, and prices quickly rise and water is distributed to the people who can afford it, do we not have a water shortage because 3.5 billion people cannot afford to drink? Or do we say, "The market is working efficiently, the concept of shortage makes no sense".
There's also the imperfect nature of the market. I believe during the recent hops shortage, there were brewers unable to get hops at any price because of distance, communication, time, etc.
Which reminds me, I don't know where this falls but suppose you want hops and all the hops have not just been sold but used. You have to wait until next harvest. Is that not a shortage?
I need a private jet. I can not obtain one. Does that mean there is a shortage of private jets? Maybe I can insist that there's a shortage of private jets "at a reasonable price?"
Additionally, "shortage" implies atypical conditions. Private jets have always been expensive.
Of course you can. Maybe not buy one outright, but you can probably charter one for $8000-10000 for a short round trip. Sure it's not cheap, but $10000 is definitely within the realm of what anybody with a decent job can save up for/borrow for something the really need. Most people who feel they really need a car for example manage to spend that sort of money and often much more.
Or perhaps you actually didn't need to private jet.
I didn't realize we were supposed to throw out these cases. They seem important to me.