[larsberg]

It will be interesting to see if there is still a shortage of "valley-quality graduates" in 3-ish years. The reports I'm hearing from most of the top-15 departments are of record CS enrollments starting from last year, far over even the boom in the dotcom era.

Of course, the growth in graduates may not keep pace with the growth in companies!

[harryh]

enrollments != graduates != star programmers

[larsberg]

Certatinly, but there's a correlation present, at least between the first two.

"Star programmers" are a completely separate problem, as Joel has mentioned before (e.g., are your stars really "Stars" if they're just the best 21-26 year olds your network knows of that are willing to live in your geographic region and not interested in graduate school?). But it's the horribly poorly managed firm that can't turn an A student from a top-fifteen CS school who did any Big Project at all succesfully into a very productive team member.

[bennyg]

Sure, but statistics is on your side too. More enrollments has a higher shot at increasing the number of star programmers than not (all education and teaching ability staying the same).