Why isn’t there a glut of good software engineers?

Why isn't there a glut of baseball players who hit .408 in the major leagues? Because it's a rare person who can hit a ball thrown at nearly 100 MPH 40% of the time. Software engineers are common but people who deliver quality product after product is a rare bird. Programming at a high level is not as easy as this author seems to think.

It just irks me when people come to me and offer me an idea, then say they'll give me 1% of a company that I build all the software to it. Either I don't understand why that happens or it's just plan greedy. I'd rather work in a company that pays me well now while playing with my own ideas in parallel.

"But that doesn’t explain why people in the Philippines or China aren’t training themselves en masse to be able to soak up the $30-100/hour jobs that would be readily available to them"

Rentacoder is readily available, its just that word on the street was most jobs paid about $5/hr.

Amazon's Mechanical Turk has some extremely fuzzy stats and not much more than anecdotes but earning around $7/hr has been reported. Higher pay, more fun, less effort?

Waiter/bartender at a tourist restaurant is probably the most fun and could pay even more.

Why is the market so fuzzy and illiquid? Why aren't there ten places I can go to find "write perl to import this old fashioned CSV file into that database" and see exactly what thats worth? Fix that and then wonder where the people are.(edited to rephrase there's no market, so no one plays the market)

Every company seems to think it needs programmers who hit .408 in the major leagues. Maybe the problem is that they think making money is a zero-sum game like baseball, so that they have to have the "best team" and not just a team which can build what's necessary to make some money (not the most money, that would also be a game).

By good, it is often meant to be in the 5% of the standard normal distribution. So "good" is an infinite shifting condition. When there are more developers, it becomes just harder to be good enough. This scares therefore often novice off. They implicitly think that they have to be "really" smart to retain a life long job.

I think that there are enough developers. But everybody is searching for the geniuses that can create a competitive advantage.