The popular narrative is that there is a shortage of technology talent. This is false. All I have to do to get thousands of resumes is put an ad on Craigslist offering $175,000+ for a computer programmer. I can offer $60,000 and get no one. This is a very reasonable expectation (in that the more I'm willing to pay, the more folks are willing to work for me).

The effect of that, which isn't obvious, is that for "good jobs", the kind you would find that are interesting to you and you add real value too, aren't being chased by unemployed programmers they are being chased by every single programmer who thinks they aren't making enough money in their current job. That is where the thousands of resumes come from, people gainfully employed who are tired of not getting any raises for the last 2 to 5 years. They want more.

So when you apply to a company through the 'fire hose', your resume arrives with a zillion others. Chances are you are in a lottery you don't even know, and the 'scoring' system is something like "College, GPA, open source cred, buzzword matches, Etc." Worse the person doing the initial screening might be an English major[1] who is "good with people" and so they are working in HR and haven't a clue as to what makes one person more or less appropriate for an opening.

When you apply to a company by having someone who knows you and respects you talk to managers who are looking, you aren't in a lottery, your in a select short list of people. People where resume details mean less than the fact that you are considered to be "good" by the person who referred you.

So when you find a job that looks interesting, you contact someone you know at the company and let them know you are interested, then you are doing the contacting but you will get a much much higher response rate.

[1] Not trying to offend English majors here, one of my daughters is one, it's that if they end up in a tech company and aren't in marketing or the tech pubs group, they are most likely to be in HR.

The fact that there were 600 valid applications (the women applying had code examples to show), basically busts the "programmer shortage" myth.

There are a whole lot of people who can program computers, and who could, with some investment, become valuable assets.

But as anyone who has had to go through those resumes know, the vast majority of the resumes are from people who are totally unqualified for the job .. the fact that employers go through the entire resume pool and are unable to find qualified employees proves the shortage.

And that's just basic qualifications, we aren't even talking about actually knowing how to write good code yet.

p.s. if anyone is looking for a job and is a good java coder with some experience in webapps and GWT, send me a message.

"But again and again, he points out that qualified engineers do exist, and they’re being shut out of companies for what amounts to a cultural stigma about what sociologists would call “the other.”"

This is the point.

Edit: I think is important say that the "there's a terrible programmer shortage" belief is a myth, in the sense that it is a dramatic story that impels people towards certain behaviors and to say that this myth is wrong, in the sense that it excludes many people, in order to add some kind of sanity to the hiring process.

I may agree that it is not a convincing argument for anyone, doing any job, but I'm not sure the programmer part makes any difference.

Therefore, 1/2 of one percent of the applicants for every programming job are qualified and the rest are not. That doesn’t mean that 1/2 of one percent of working programmers are qualified or that you are being especially picky when you reject so many candidates, just that the dynamics of the market ensure that you get a lot of crap resumes when you advertise.

Now, what did YOU think Joel’s article said?

In reality there's no shortage, and isn't going to be one, outside a couple industries in NYC and SV.

Also, when you're hiring, you're getting a skewed picture of the overall programming population. Suppose (to make the math easy) that there are 100,000 programmers in the world, 90% of which are employed. So that leaves 10,000 programmers in the candidate pool. Most of the top 20% of those will be able to get a job from a referral and not go through a "normal" hiring process, so if you're screening resumes you're now down to the next 80%. But that's the bottom 80% of the 10% that's looking for a job. Of those, some are competent people between jobs or looking for a change, but a lot of them are just in the bottom 10% of the overall skill level, are basically unhirable, and are semi-permanently on the job market because of that.

To make another simplification, if you and I both screen 100 resumes in the same area, there's a reasonable chance that the 10 best candidates we see are different since they go off the market so quickly, but that the 10 worst candidates we see are the same, since they stay on the market. And unfortunately, some of those totally unhirable people have good-looking resumes.

It's VERY hard to find quality developers. I agree with the article that HR is a huge problem, but I'm a hiring manager and I still don't see a great deal of quality.

While it's not as extreme as shifting industry, I recently took the advice from a few HN threads I'd spoken up on and while I'm looking for a PHP developer, I didn't insist that PHP be one of the languages you already know.

Did that work? No. I still didn't get an influx of quality applicants.

I also said in the ad that I was more interested in a cover letter than a resume that shows where you've worked or gone to school, and I'm interested in your Stack Overflow or HN profile. In other words: I'd love to hire a hobbyist.

But none of the 5% of this country's unemployed applied.

<blockquote> Peter Cappelli: Well, the employers, if you look at what the hiring managers are saying and what they’re looking for, they’re not, for the most part, hiring people out of college anyway or out of high school. What they want is three to five years’ experience. So the shortages that they report, the difficulty hiring, are for people who have quite specific skills, and those skills are work-experience based. </blockquote>

Workers without three to five years' experience will never get three to five years' experience. The only way for a young worker to be hired is through corruption, by knowing somebody or lying about their experience. The employers have designed a system to create the shortage that they complain about, and they perpetuate it because everybody's doing it that way.

In any workplace, the grunt workers should outnumber management. It is no different in software. For every software engineer there need to be testers, bug fixers, and doc writers. Yet in the want ads for programmers, it is the other way around. Senior this. Senior that.

The way to fix this situation is easy, but like anything else it will require time and effort. Next to the routine 3-5 year want ad, also post something like this:

Job title: Computer Programmer. Requirements: can program a computer. Compensation: $14/hr or DOE.

You will get plenty of applicants because the economy is that bad right now. Use interviews to determine the best fits for your company. Hire two or three for every Project Manager or Senior anything that you have. Give them raises if they are any good, treat them with respect, and they'll stick around. Three to five years later, you will not only have coders with three to five years of programming experience. The coders will have three to five years of domain knowledge of your company's operations. That might be just as valuable as their coding ability.

This is absolutely not true. I am working in SF with a number of electrical engineers working as software developers. I have a degree from a small state college.