1. Needs to have great design 2. Needs to be rock-solid in terms of stability 3. Needs to be snappy to use 4. Needs to be able to handle a Reddit traffic swarm 5. Needs to have individualization and customization 6. Needs to play nicely on computers, tablets, and phones
The person (or people, more likely) who is good at all of this just isn't available at rates the companies want to pay. This is the important distinction. Hiring somebody for 100k/yr is pretty much the minimum ante for a good developer in a tech city. But these "entrepreneurs" and "founders" think that is too much money, and instead claim there's a shortage.
In reality, if you're competing for top talent, 150k/yr should be your ante, and be prepared to go well into the 200s. This shouldn't be a surprise. To get even average talent from a consulting/contracting company, you're paying about 125/hr (of which 60-70 goes to the developer). That's 250k/yr. So why are companies freaking out at paying over 100k/yr for a full-time person who they can invest in? Hell, cut out the contractors and pay your people 200k/yr, and watch the good people come talk to you.
This is what Amazon and the like are doing now. I'm hearing 22 year old kids who haven't coed a line of code in a professional capacity, getting offers of 120k/yr with a 20k signing bonus. Netflix pays a significant chunk of its engineers over 200k.
The only real problem is that it's getting more expensive to do business in a tech world. But compare the skill sets that used to draw 100k/yr, and the skill sets now required to get 145k/yr (100k/yr in 1998 dollars = 144k in 2014 dollars). Before, you could just know HTML and some shell scripting. Now, you need to know multiple frameworks, how to deal with scalability, multiple data stores, "full stack," etc.
If anything, the good talent in this industry is still dramatically under-paid. A common metric is that the company should make from you about 7x your salary to justify your position. So if a company is making 2.1 million, you should be getting 300k. But we all know that's not what's happening. Instead, our wages are being capped and forced down due to illegal collusion between the top tech employers.
This all comes down to the people who own the businesses wanting to treat tech people as interchangeable cogs, despite all the evidence to the contrary.