I have a pet theory about the apparent shortage of 'experienced engineers' in the midst of high unemployment.<p>Software development as we know is an inherently unstable activity - it's very hard to gauge how much a project will cost in time and money. Supposedly 50% of IT projects fail and 70% don't meet all their targets (or something catastrophic like that).<p>Well here's my theory. When you can't tell how much something will cost or even whether it's really possible, when there are no guarantees, the only thing that can comfort you is that your competition wont fair any better. To ensure <i>this</i>, you just need to employ the top programmers/architects. If you have people of the best calibre, you can rest easy, because if they can't deliver, nobody can.<p>Thus, companies looking to launch risky software ventures need what is by definition a scarce resource (the best developers). Unless the nature of software changes drastically, there will <i>always</i> be a shortage of the 'experienced engineers' necessary to placate the anxiety of this high risk business. Human expertise is finite, the capacity of software projects to fail is infinite.<p>(particularly if you're talking about launching web apps and new platforms and such... if you just need some simple engineering then not so much)