Define "shortage".

Scenario 1: People are starving. There is not enough food available, at any price, to meet the need, and there is a hard lower bound on how much is needed. We say that there's a shortage of food.

Scenario 2: There is a supply-and-demand situation for some limited good, and some who desire to use that good get priced out. This is the normal functioning of a market. Those who get priced out, though, complain about a "shortage" of that good. What they actually mean, though, is not an absolute shortage, but a shortage at the price they are willing or able to pay.

I think the STEM shortage is the second kind. Sure, your company could do all kinds of nifty things if engineers were abundant and free. That doesn't mean there's a "Scenario 1" shortage, though.

In the meantime, the engineers want jobs that pay twice as much as their current ones. There's a "shortage" of those, too.

Yes, there's always a "shortage" of workers willing to work for less than market rate, just like there's always a "shortage" of free beer. That's market equilibrium.

It's clearly not a shortage in the economic sense, but it still makes sense to frame it as such, if you're buying labor.

Engineering and programming? There is a shortage of people.

Plenty of jobs.

No shortage of people only a shortage of people willing to work for less than market rate. Tesla for example can’t hire and keep talented people because it’s well known that wages are modestly low for a job that expects 60+hrs a week in a high col area

> Plenty of jobs.

There's plenty of jobs, but also plenty of applicants. Ask any one of these companies how many resumes they get, or how long it takes them to fill a position.