There is no talent shortage

What happens once a person encounters programming is a different story. I tried, with seemingly mixed success, to portray Jon as someone who is indeed interested in coding - enough to try stuff on his own, and certainly not on a "just to get by" basis - but who did not discover this interest until he picked his major (arbitrarily, perhaps) and actually tried it. Adjusted for age difference, Jon is about as excited about programming as Norman was, but encountered it much later. I think there are many reasons why one would or would not encounter programming at a younger age AND in a manner that excites him (parents, friend circle, alternative entertainment available, neighbourhood, school/teachers, etc). In aggregate, they come down to luck.

It is a weird market. I've been job searching pretty hard for the past month in SF and the response has been a bit frustrating. I get tons of people reaching out to me after meeting me at tech meetups, etc, but I'd say over half of those leads end up cutting me at an HR filter before I can even get an interview!

From what I understand it's due to two things-- at 34, I'm older than others going for junior positions. I spent a decade abroad after graduation and have only a year of experience at a tech start-up in Asia. I can kind of understand the pursuit of someone who already knows what they're doing, but on the other hand everyone has to start learning somewhere. Sure my bohemian background and experience starting and running a non-tech business and learning multiple foreign languages doesn't translate directly into usable skills here, but I would have thought that it would have been a strong signal I'm capable of working hard and learning quickly.

Not to overstate things, I am getting a lot of interest and a few interviews and even repeat interviews. It's just that things are moving very slowly, and I'm not getting a great return on the time I put into it. Also, SF is a very expensive city to live in off of savings earned in a developing country!

I think the shortage isn't so much general talent; it's a shortage of people who already have X skill a given business wants right now.

Even if the hole needs to be filled, there is shortage of brainy people without jobs in this world.

Put your public email in your profile, I was about to contact you about my company but I can't because it isn't listed.

If you want to find work, make yourself easiest to get a hold of. ;)

Also, start hacking up a portfolio.

Exactly. The "talent shortage" is a lack of employable programmers period, not just a lack of exceptional programmers. And this is easy to see: everybody I know in my class (also Berkeley, coincidentally) has managed to get an internship or full time job without much effort. This includes both people with and without experience before college. I managed to get a couple of interesting offers despite never sending my resume out, attending career fairs or even answering recruiter emails. Clearly the market is in the programmer's favor--every programmer's favor.

As far as I can tell, pretty much everybody graduating that wants a job gets a job. Naturally, not everybody goes to work for Google or Facebook, but this includes people even worse than the presumably hypothetical "John".

Also, people like "Norman" are just as likely to get snapped up by Google and then still work in relative obscurity. Well-paid, enjoyable relative obscurity with great benefits and a great culture, but relative obscurity nonetheless.

Really, the talent shortage works like this: you, as a company, would love a "Norman". You'd be happy with a "John". You'd probably be content with anybody who can program. Instead you get "Barry" who can't write a FizzBuzz program in any language. All this puts upward pressure on programmer salaries and benefits (good) and motivates recruiters to spam me about openings for senior Java developers (bad).

Also, a lot of companies do claim to want very good engineers. But I've found this to be empty rhetoric as often as not: for every company claiming that and actually having a stringent interview process and difficult technical problems there's a company willing to accept anybody to work on their CRUD app but wants their ad to sound cool.

Anyhow: there is some shortage of programmers of any but minimal competence. That is what "talent shortage" actually means, and, as far as I can tell, it's actually accurate.