I am fortunate enough to have found Holberton School, which has a two-year software engineering program that emphasizes project-based and peer-learning methods. I appreciate the balance of theory and practical work that I have to complete but most importantly, the flexibility with which I can learn.
The evolution of tech will continue to span out and eventually, these shortages will be felt outside the US.
Would you want graduates of such programs working on the software that goes into your operating system, your car, or other such systems? I doubt you'll find people graduating from these programs working at places like SpaceX or the JPL (unless they're doing some CRUD/web dev work), or even at Apple designing compilers or iphone processors.
Just as an anecdote, my current company hired a couple of graduates of these programs, and they didn't fair well.
There is value in being balanced and diversity, but this applies to teams, not necessarily individuals. Not everyone on your engineering team needs to be an architect. After your globally distributed, fault tolerant, realtime, highly available system is designed, somebody’s got to build it. And most startups or software teams have no business even trying to design such a system in the first place.
In the US, my generation was told we all needed four year degrees. We don’t. Some jobs and some roles certainly but the entire population of future adults?
There is an engineering shortage in the US because everyone was too busy getting four year degrees in more well rounded fields. Meanwhile Apple needs tens of thousands of engineers that could have been trained by two year vocational programs that the US was apparently above for our children, and thus cannot meet their business needs.
And yet this data from Triplebyte is incredibly encouraging because while we screwed up the educational policy, it may not be so difficult to fix.