I'm astonished by this attitude. I hate buzzwords like "human capital", but it should be obvious that it's incredibly time consuming and resource intensive to produce people who can program in mainstream languages and platforms. This is not simply an issue of mining more coal or growing more corn.
Except he is exactly right. If the salaries are competitive enough, all the smart people who are currently attracted to sitting around in wall street making millions doing nothing truly productive might think twice and consider CS or SE.
It isn't an instantaneous turnaround - new talent doesn't come out of the woodwork overnight - but give it 5 - 6 years and if average salary went up another 30k you'd have a % more college students entering the field due to the market demands for it.
That is how it always works with worker shortages.
All business is ruled by the laws of economics. Supply and Demand determine prices. Silicon Valley is not exempt, nor ... and more to the point ... should it be.
No, this is exactly what's wrong with all of this analysis. Economics is a social science. That's one of the reasons why behavioral economics has attracted so many bright minds, because of the obvious shortcoming of classical economics. To think that people are simply going to chase higher salaries ignores everything that you should know about how real people make decisions about careers.
That's not to say that there are no examples of this, but it's obvious based on the numbers of people who self-describe as a "programmer" that this is not happening in sufficient numbers relative to the demand.
I'm astonished by this attitude. I hate buzzwords like "human capital", but it should be obvious that it's incredibly time consuming and resource intensive to produce people who can program in mainstream languages and platforms. This is not simply an issue of mining more coal or growing more corn.