There is no shortage of workers. This is a myth. Always has been.<p>In economics, supply = demand. There's never a surplus. there's never a shortage. If you want more engineers, raise wages. They will come. If you don't want to raise wages, then you really didn't want them. Saying there's an engineering shortage is like saying there's a hamburger shortage because I don't want to pay more than 25 cents for a hamburger. If I pay $5, I could get a nice hamburger .and ... ta da ... end of "the great hamburger shortage" in this case.<p>Silicon Valley has the wealthiest people in the world and is a very expensive place to live. Engineering careers are quite short and living in an efficiency and washed up at 38 is not as inviting as our "we need more workers" mantra repeaters would have us beleive.<p>If they raise wages, they'll get what they want. Another alternative of those giant visionary West Coast capventure brains is use the principle of "capital mobility": just move the capital to where the labor is cheap. Not very hard, folks.
Is a couple week "school" really going to produce the kind of potential hires that SV is looking for? From what I've heard, the interviews at the companies there allow only recent CS grads from top tiered universities who have been programming for fun since 12 to succeed, let alone excel. After casually programming for the past few years, I'm pretty sure I could probably figure out Ruby basics and bang out some half decent web app/data analysis tools (which I'm planning to do if I switch careers in the near future). From the sounds of it, that's about what they're doing in this program. Does that make me hire worthy to any companies in the Bay Area? (Honest question)
So please bare with me as these are the questions of an outsider looking in.<p>For background: I'm a Canadian software engineering graduate, I'm working towards my P.Eng. and have a IEEE Computer Society certification.<p>What sort of "shortage" does Silicon Valley have? tosseraccount's post leans more towards the idea that there is this huge disconnect between available worker's expectations and potential employer's expectations. Am I lead to believe there is this gap with two groups of people staring at each other?<p>When I graduated one of my profs dropped an offer for me to apply to somewhere in California. I had already accepted a position with a place that I wanted to work at locally because I was not really willing to move out of my country for something that was very sudden and - seemingly - insecure as far as job security goes. With posts like these it makes me believe that his offer was more legitamate than I had given it at the time.<p>Is the Silicon Valley hub really desperate for engineers? This peaks my interest in the sense of possibly regaining contact with him to see what he has to pitch.
I applied, interviewed for, and then (stupidly) realized that I couldn't attend the coming batch. But I did get a chance to chat with Nick for 45 minutes or so - these guys seem very with it and I really admire how the primary focus of the school is to help people become better hackers. The press they've received in the past couple of weeks has focused more on the business/recruitment aspect of the operation - the feeling I got was that that's more of a peripheral advantage of the program.<p>I hope I have the opportunity to attend in a coming batch - if nothing more than to become a better hacker.