The WordPress Talent Shortage Might Be a Pricing Problem

An article like this should probably focus on either salary worker or providing development services to paying clients. There is a big difference between the two

As has been mentioned here many times, commodities get priced at market rates. If you are a freelancer basing your time on market rates then you might as well just get a job. You are setting your fee as if you were an employee while taking on all the headaches of running a business.

You base your fee not on market hourly rates, but based on value. You don't charge the same fee building a campaign for Little Bobby's Lemonade Stand (which brings in a profit of 5 bucks for a couple of hours work and then shuts down for the coming school week) as you do for a high stakes start-up which is flush with funding. In the latter example, you might join a small team and have a large impact. The difference in the value of your execution vs someone who drops the ball could be huge, and you can't express this in terms of market rates.

Bringing this value (targeting high value clients and delivering high value services) is a completely different component of running a business than simply being a programmer and marketing yourself as such.

Personally, I don't think there is a talent shortage. I just think that people who need development services don't know where to start looking. There can seem to be a shortage of anything if you don't know where to look. On the supply side, people don't know how to connect with paying clients. The available tools help, but they still don't solve the problem.