[pellucidar]

Yes, but those hours aren't actually a line item when salaried employees do it, so the expense isn't as visible as other expenses.

I think the perception of a lack of quality engineers in the market is just a symptom of the problem: the expense in time and annoyance of changing jobs and the risk (or experience) of becoming a false negative reduces job mobility and heavily slants the resume stack towards the true negatives rather than the experienced people who would be more actively looking around in a saner market.

I haven't heard of a better explanation for the notion, seemingly unique to software, that so many people floating around the industry are so abysmally unqualified to work at another company in the same industry. There are historical factors, but they don't seem adequate to explain this perceived fraud problem.