There are a variety of reasons for that, in my experience. In the I-4 corridor the "shortage" is driven by two things, primarily: 1) it's just a crappy place to raise a family, what with the poor public services (parks, transportation, you name it) and school systems (gotta fund those prisons and blame the poor and old people for consuming state-subsidized health care and driving up those costs, y'know); 2) companies there are even more ridiculous than the valley with lowball compensation packages (this is especially true of the simulations and video game companies in the area).

People, especially educated and intelligent people, typically don't want to live in a place that values tourism, guns, and private religious school vouchers over parks, playgrounds, and public schools, and that also pay average (at best) industry wages.

How do you local unemployment data on developers? Are there any agencies that collect this data?

Don't tempt me like that. I'm homesick, but doubt I could sell the wife on Florida. :P

I wonder if anyone in NY, SF, or any other 1st tier developer city can comment on the local unemployment rate for either software devs or IT in general. Here in Orlando/Tampa it's been around 2% for YEARS.

I don't know how First Tier Phoenix is... it's mostly business process development here, a lot of banking, and quite a bit of other financial process development, and business management dev.

We've been really low on unemployment for a number of years... the cost of living compared to dev wages (usually >= 80% of NYC/SF wages) is really great, that I would be hard pressed to consider moving to SF, Seattle or NYC. That said, it's a bit hard to find talent, but then I don't do it for a living... Also, I don't think the business people doing HR really "get" the mindset of a software developer in terms of actually recruiting.