Thank you. The supply of employees is only constrained by employers' willingness to pay. At the current prevailing wages, supply is not meeting demand. This does not necessarily mean there is a shortage.

I know tons of people my age who wanted to go into computer science. They failed out, lacked the dedication it took to make up for missing skills, etc.

The wages are making people try, but the field is difficult.

Increased wages could also pull people back into software engineering who are skilled but left for more lucrative fields (or careers with better upward paths).

There can be shortages and you could also be able to hire people by pricing competitively.

If there are 100 open positions and 80 available software engineers, if 1 of those positions is able to pay twice as much as the next highest, they will get that software engineer - it doesn't change the fact that there are 80 engineers to go around, and no matter how high they offer in pay 20 positions will go unfulfilled.

No. That just means that there are unviable businesses when software engineers are priced correctly.

If there are 10 businesses that each need to hire 10 engineers, but there are only 80 engineers, then the price of the engineers will be determined by which 8 businesses have a business model that can afford those 80 engineers. The other two businesses don't have a viable business model. They can't sell enough X to account for the cost of the engineers.

Likewise, if you have a business that depends on building an electric car, and you can't afford to buy lithium at market price and still make the car cheap enough, then that isn't because there is a shortage of lithium. Its because you don't have a viable business model based on the price of lithium.

In my example above, there is no shortage of Ferraris. There is only a shortage of people willing to sell their Ferrari at $10.

Or stock. There are 100 open positions for AAPL at $129, but only 80 offers at that price. Thats not a shortage of AAPL stock. That just means there's only 80 people willing to sell at that price. However, if you offer $160 for AAPL, suddenly you'll find a lot of sellers.

Only 80 engineers looking for work? Find someone that looks good on LinkedIn and offer them double their salary. Suddenly more than 80 engineers available.

> Find someone that looks good on LinkedIn and offer them double their salary.

You make the assumption that individual employees are economically rational individuals. That is, they will optimize their lives to maximize income without regard to other factors.

It also asserts that employers clearly advertise pay for a position, which we know is not usually the case. It's not like you can peruse job boards and know exactly what every company will pay you. Sure, sometimes they have (very side) salary bands, but the vast majority of tech workers don't know what their offer will be until it is made.