That's not necessarily a consequence of there being an engineer shortage. You'd expect much the same behaviour if most people who emerged from uni, or worked commonly in IT, didn't have the criteria they were interested in.

I'd note you don't see Microsoft in this because they stayed in Washington and bought employment laws they like. So they can force employees to sign non-competes in Seattle while they poach from California that won't allow companies to do that.

Working in an auto state, I've seen that in other industries and it's actually kind of sickening. In the auto industry it's in bad taste to do that. Many auto suppliers have no-poaching in their business contracts. Which ties up a lot of the industry because everybody does business with everybody. As an EMPLOYEE you can apply to another job, but recruiters aren't allowed to cold-call between companies.

I've worked in an office where we would get cold call agents during work. They'd call all the extensions in the office and it was just offensive being put on the spot like that. I can't imagine working at Apple or Google and getting calls like that... And the work environment becomes "awkward" for the rest of the day because everybody knows everybody got a call... There's nothing good about that type of hiring practice.

Micrsoft was one of the (many) companies listed with which Google had similar non-poaching agreements.