Unemployment in the U.S. Is Falling, So Why Isn’t Pay Rising?

If you don't agree with that, then there aren't any good stats, hence the use of the labor participation number, as the "default" goto for unemployment.

If you want alternatives, may I recommend:

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

This does suggest that U-5 at least is a more realistic figure, or perhaps the average of U-5 + U-6. That would make real unemployment somewhere between 6 and 7.8, and indicates plenty of slack in the labor force.

If tomorrow every electrical engineer salary went 10 times higher, supply would still take 10 years to improve.

With software engineering specifically, given the amount of people who have access to the internet, lets say like unemployed young men in theirs 20s working in the food industry or something, working part time and play video games for 40 hrs a week. If you have access to an xbox, then you have access to free online courses to learn machine learning, intro to programming, the entire internet where you can openly asked the internet questions and try to figure out a skill thats valuable and in software specifically, have multiple free venues of learning it.

But theres a lot of people who don't do that and don't take advantage of it, but also protest wages in silicon valley. There are people who work at coffee shops 20 hrs a week by choice, and go hiking by choice and had access to the same resources everyone else did, and came even alot from middle class to upper class homes, but don't want to learn high demand skills, and in fact protest them.

in this case, I'd say the pay is not only high enough, but it's so high they dislike the fact that not doing the work to get those high paying jobs is decreasing the quality of their life relative to everyone else around them.

obviously outliers exist, but what is it about software development, that, atleast for the population who can afford internet, and video game consoles, makes it so elite people arent motivated to learn.

I think some people don't want to learn or put in the effort, but also don't want to experience the reduction in quality of life as a result of other people putting in the effort.I think those same people protest more as the wages are increased, as they misinterpret the market signals for need as abusive to their lifestyle in which they choose to not go learn high demand skills.

Could this be valid in some cases?

"Free online course to learn Tensorflow"

"same for Elastic Search"

"intro to VR"

"Intro to Python"

"App dev"

etc...these are all free and accessible to the same people who work at coffee shops and browse twitter and facebook.....

So would it take 10 years for these people to learn the skills?

I think the market signals are being interpreted as intentionally divisive to people who don't have the skills, instead of a need for the population of people who have the skill to increase, and thus they protest the market signals as a response instead of utilizing free and open resources on top of their already paid for internet utilties provided by these relatively highly paid workers, to make it free and easier and more accessible for other people to learn.

Sure learning these skills outside of a part time barista job could take 2-3 years, but even an entry level software position at a just a-okay tech firm who starts them out at say $50k/yr with no benefits, is still higher than working minimum wage, by a large degree.

I'm not sure everyone who is experiencing a disadvantage from the pay difference wants to increase their skill level, or learn new skills.

There are plenty of people who do and work long hours and cant, but there are also plenty of young people who do not, and choose not to and make other lifestyle decisions, which is fine with me, as long as they don't throw rocks at me because I chose to do my math homework in highschool when they chose to go out and drink every school night. Sometimes peoples life choices do have an impact, and its not always the responisibiltiy of the most successful companinies in the world to calibrate everyone elses life to the minimum starting salary of the most skilled workers on the planet.

I don't know what IS a good solution, but I feel this is an unrealistic expectation. Regardless, these companies are making an effort to do this anyways as they are in need of this skills and creating venues to take people from 0 to 1 with never having known anything about software or math.