there is some shortage of programmers of any but minimal competenceI think our industry sets a high bar for "minimal competence". It isn't fizzbuzz. I went to an interview where I was asked to write, on the whiteboard, a recursive solution to the problem of printing all possible permutations of a string. I blew it, and of course I went home and worked on it a bit and solved it (the way I usually program, try it a bit, run it, modify, test, iterate), and I emailed them my solution, but that's how it goes: no offer. I want to be very clear about this, I am not complaining. This company has every right to decide what their interview process will be. But of course it irritates me to no end to hear about how there's a shortage of programmers beyond "minimal competence", especially when the people doing the hiring what to hire whip-smart engineers at roughly half the rate a top MBA or law grad would command.
I've had such discussions on this board with people about the the concept of a "shortage" at the "market rate" when everyone is experiencing hiring troubles at this rate. I think it's an absurd notion - if demand clearly exceeds supply, this is not evidence of a shortage, it is evidence that salaries need to rise to reach an equilibrium. All I can say is that some very intelligent and rational people simply disagree with me on this.
As a personal anecdote - I was in grad school at Berkeley during the first dot com boom, when industries were claiming a severe shortate of engineering graduates. I saw reports of average starting salaries out of the MBA program, the JD program, and the various MS/PhD engineering grads... not a single engineering degree program, even PhDs in CS, were at the MBA or JD level. Why is there so much resistance to paying engineers what it will actually take to get more top people into the field?