[gozur88]

>You believe that anyone can be trained to be an effective programmer. If that's true, then there's some truth to your argument: why not invest in education and training to meet the high demand for programmers?

We have. We've had retraining programs for decades, where people in declining industries get retrained as programmers or SAs (plus a bunch of other things).

The problem is nobody will hire them without experience. Some percentage of these people could be at least serviceable programmers, but they pretty much just languish on benefits because it's more convenient for companies to hire H-1B people with experience.

Megan McArdle had a good piece on this related to her retraining as a Netware admin.