Yes, I can get all the engineers I want if I pay a million dollars a year. But if they are also employed as engineers somewhere else, the lack of engineering talent just moves to those other companies.

Say there is only a car in the entire world. I could buy it for more no more money, but ultimately there is still a shortage, in the sense that even if we had 5 people willing to pY 5 billion for the only car I. The world, they would all not be able to get it. In cars, this is fixed by the fact that we can build cars easily: It doesn't take that long to make another car, and eventually you can build thousands a day.

So if we look at the system overall, we have to consider unemployment in the profession, and how many people just don't want to go I to stem because it doesn't pay enough.

They say I see it, pay in CS specifically is pretty darned good, compared to alternatives in the US. Any lack of developers we have today doesn't come from them choosing other occupations because programming doesn't pay the bills: We just have way too many people getting paid a lot less, or unemployed altogether, that either can't afford the retraining to be programmers, or just. can't do it altogether.

So it's not, IMO, as if the shortage of good pay is the problem: Remember the dot com boom, when a lot of borderline incompetent people were getting a ton of money and achieving very little? That,s the best we'd get if we just multiplied all tech salaries by 10x. Our real problems are far more complicated.

I dunno, I hear a lot about people who are qualified and experienced software developers moving to other fields, particularly finance and non-technical management, because they can get paid better, or leaving work entirely because no o e is offering enough to make it worthwhile for them not to just live off their savings (and not just hear about, I know people in the last category.)

The idea that there isn't potential talent in the field that could be accessed by paying more is false. Obviously, employers prefer not to do that, because every dollar paid to an employee is a dollar the employer doesn't keep.

> We just have way too many people getting paid a lot less, or unemployed altogether, that either can't afford the retraining to be programmers, or just. can't do it altogether.

To the extent that there is a "can't afford" problem here, and this really is an undesirable situation demanding a public policy response, the solution is obvious from the statement of the problem, and it's not "import foreign workers".

That, of course, is the entire purpose of high prices. You want some of the demand to go away because they find it to be too expensive so that the supply eventually matches up to the demand. There would be no purpose in having different prices for different jobs otherwise.

A shortage happens when price cannot rise for some reason, such as the government implementing a wage ceiling. I'm not quite sure what could be preventing price from rising in this specific case. It seems like a pretty wide open market.

> Any lack of developers we have today doesn't come from them choosing other occupations because programming doesn't pay the bills

Or they are simply doing better elsewhere. Paying the bills isn't necessarily enough incentive. Even in my own situation, while I still keep my foot in the developer door a bit, I am spending more and more time in my other careers. I could go back to programming full time, but I haven't found an offer incentivizing enough yet.

Let's say a loaf of bread went up in price to 100$, and the majority of people in the USA were literally starving to death.

Yes or no, is the US suffering from a food shortage?

I would argue, yes.

* Does every single person need to be able to afford bread for it to not be a food shortage? Or is it okay if some still go without as long as the price goes below a certain point? What is that point?

* Is there a shortage of Ferraris because they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is more than I can spend on car? Or are non-essential items not included in shortages?

* If non-essential items are excluded, what is essential about developers? We lived for hundreds of thousands of years without without software just fine.

* If developers are essential, are they always going to be in a shortage situation until they all work for free? I can imagine several developer jobs I would have done for $1/hr, but not for $10/hr, as it is no longer worth the cost to me at that point.

I may agree with you, but I'm not quite sure I understand what a 'normal person' shortage even is. It does not seem to be clearly defined anywhere.

I'd define a shortage by comparing short and long term movements in labor.

As in, if price goes way way up for certain positions, it takes a long time for labor to react and produce more supply. This is bad.

So in the short term, there is a shortage of developers, while labor catches up and tries to fulfill this demand.

To put it another way, imagine if workers could see the future, 10 years ago, and could know how high salaries for devs were going to be.

If workers were armed with this knowledge, a whole lot more of them would have chosen to go into tech.

The Ferrari example doesn't work, because if Ferrari 10 years ago, knew exactly how much demand was going to be, I don't think it would have changed their supply or price at all.

I am not sure of a better word for this "shortage", but I am thinking of any situation where expectations for the future do not match up with the reality of the future, in short term inelastic markets.

And the solution to this market information failure is to either get better information about the future or work towards making the market more elastic.

I got my first full-time programming job soon after the dot-com bust and even at that time it paid better than the offers I'm seeing for new hires these days. And that's without even factoring in inflation. They are making quite a bit less than I was in real dollars.

By that definition I think it is very safe to say that there isn't any sign of a developer shortage. It is a high paying profession, for sure, but it always has been. It's not like it was a minimum wage job 10 years ago. It was still a six figure job even then.

If the demand is high, the market should respond by increasing supply in the long term as well.

I know lots of mediocre devs who are way overpayed in the Bay Area. You do NOT have to be good to make 6 figures.

Mediocre web developer is a very high paying gig.