[johnnyanmac]

>And yes, this is creating a vicious feedback loop where we are no longer producing many new people with these skills despite a lot of demand.

if the company would rather burn out and age out all their talent than invest in the future, I don't know what to say. For niche domains, you can't treat talent a a pure business expense. That's how you lose out all that talent to China and suddenly you can't compete at all. If anything, training should be treated like insurance.

>It is no longer feasible in many cases to have companies effectively subsidize the development of highly skilled systems software people.

"subsidize" implies that somehow engineers are saving money by choosing to take these more niche paths. It doesn't make sense. You have a product and you need talent to develop and maintain it to compete. There's no "subsidies" in a business relationship like this.

your choices are few and simple: train in-house, lobby schools to train for you, or publicize your tech and hope people train themselves for you again. It seems like these days companies aren't looking out long term though and just want to jump the ship that has plenty of time to steer past the iceberg everyone sees ahead.