At my last corporate job, we had a hard time finding good developers, even before the topic of compensation came up. That can be attributed to the unsexiness of the industry (fiber channel / SAN).

We went through a round of resume screening and applicants. We filtered > 100 resumes, and interviewed maybe 3. Our intern, an undergrad, was a better programmer than any applicant we saw.

One guy, with maybe 10 years experience, was coding on the whiteboard. We asked him to write something. He said "It can't be done!". I was seriously tempted to grab the intern and have code it up.