[CleanedStar]

Absolutely.

Several years ago I was at a company and we were hiring for a position. One guy came in, who was maybe in his mid-50s. His technical skills were excellent, he could answer any question thrown at him in detail. Aside from that he was a normal, genial guy with a solid resume - we has passed on another guy with good tech knowledge but who did not act normal. I was desperate to have the position filled as people had quit and I was handling a large load.

Two managers said they didn't want to hire him. I really protested this - we had interviewed so many people and had finally found someone decent. I said he was perfect, what more could they want, what was wrong with him? I asked that last question repeatedly. Finally one said, "I think if we called him up in the middle of the night to fix a problem, he would be unhappy with that". Months later we hired a guy in his 20s, who had less technical talent.

That's the position companies are in. They pass over perfect candidates like this guy in his 50s, and then bemoan they can't find candidates.

These companies fund think tanks who have economists who tell us that value is determined by supply and demand, that if there is enough demand for something, the price for it will rise until a supply comes about. This is their philosophy, yet now they're saying there is a shortage of engineers. It is total BS. Engineers are being overworked and underpaid. People talk about high engineer salaries, they don't talk about how engineers have to pay for their own college degrees, do all that studying, then go to work, make a starting salary, then have death marches on projects etc.

Engineers are usually undercompensated for the work they do. The only exceptions to this are during tech bubbles (say 1999), but those only last for a short while. They're also made up for on the other side by tech slumps, where IT workers employable during normal times, but perhaps without a college degree, are out of work.

[bayesianhorse]

I don't believe in the "labor shortage should result in higher wages" argument. Usually we are talking about a baseline. If companies believed, they could make more profit by doubling the salary and thus maybe attracting more talent, they would do so.

Supply/demand is all the economics most people understand. But it's not just about the labor market, but what the company is doing with the labor.