It's true that there's rarely a shortage of anything if you're willing to pay arbitrarily high prices for it, but that's not really what the word means. That like saying there isn't a water shortage in California as long as anyone, anywhere in the world is selling bottled water at any price - that's obviously absurd, and no, it's not just haggling.

If you can only hire qualified software engineers at $250k, then there is reasonably some sort of shortage. That's not the same as suggesting that very rich firms shouldn't pay up (and they are), but let's not rob perfectly good words of their meaning just to make a point.

There are many high paid careers that earn that much, but they never get the amount of publicity and discussion about shortage than engineers do.

It's artificially generated.

So you haven't heard about the teacher shortage, the nurse shortage or the doctor shortage? They usually get way more publicity than the engineering shortage.

Oh wow, I really disagree. The engineer shortage gets a tremendous amount of press.

I tend to agree with you - if you define shortage as "unavailable at any price", then you have essentially written the word out of the English language. So obviously when people say "shortage" they mean something else.

I don't really agree with you about the $250k, depending on what you mean by qualified. Keep in mind, the median salary for a lawyer in silicon valley is just shy of 200k a year (check US News Best Jobs for salary info). For a physician, it's typically much higher.

Those are tough jobs. But does your definition of "qualified" include a graduate degree from an elite school? Keep in mind, the majors required even to apply have high attrition rates and lower GPAs than most other majors on campus. To get into an elite graduate engineering or CS school, you still need to get very high standardized test scores and have a strong GPA, and elite engineering or science programs typically have vastly higher attrition rates than law or med school (no joke, elite PhD programs have attrition rates between 35%-50%, whereas elite MD or JD programs have attrition rates below 0.5% (yes, one half of one percent). It's harder to get info on MS program attrition rates, the only one I found was behind a paywall and the summary didn't distinguish between elite and non-elite programs, but MS attrition rates overall were about 30%. MS programs are a bit shorter than Law school, for instance, but I consider the coursework to be considerably more rigorous (I actually did attend an elite law and an elite graduate engineering program, mine is only one data point, but I'd say law is like running 70 minutes at a 7mm, whereas engineering BS+MS is like running 50 minutes at a sub 6 mm. The first is pretty tough no doubt. But while the second is shorter, it is probably harder).

Then add in the really difficult interview process at elite software companies (to me, this is like taking a subset of the bar exam every time you change jobs), and overall?

Honestly, 250K is probably about where mid-career salaries would need to be for graduate degrees from strong programs in engineering to be competitive with the options available to students academically talented enough to do it.

I agree with you. A claim that "there is a shortage of X" typically amounts to a claim that "X is too expensive", albeit with slightly different connotations. This is the point I was making.