Shortage of Engineers or a Glut: No Simple Answer
Ask a child if there is a shortage of ice cream in the world, and no doubt, the response will be an emphatic yes—there certainly is. And ask a tech CEO if there is a shortage of engineers, and you will get the exact same answer.
Context & Ripple Effects
Two weeks of coverage have pushed the same claim from different directions: [[a:1188659|Business Week reported in October that tech companies see a dearth of mobile-software developers]], and just before this piece ran, PE Hub documented an ex-Digg engineer drawing seven offers and taking one at $150K. TechCrunch's answer is deliberately unsatisfying — CEOs ask about engineer supply the way a child asks about ice cream, so the interesting question is not whether the shortage exists but which engineers it covers.
That distinction matters because the evidence in play points both ways at once: individual proven builders command auction-level bids while the broader profession's supply stays unmeasured, making 'shortage' a claim about a segment dressed up as a claim about the whole.
First-order effects
- Employers chasing the same proven profiles — the engineer behind seven competing $150K offers — face direct salary inflation concentrated at the top of the hiring market.
- Mobile-first companies feel the pinch earliest: with mobile developers explicitly reported scarce since October, product roadmaps rather than headcount budgets become the binding constraint for app-driven firms.
Second-order effects
- Every accepted premium offer resets the reference price for similar résumés, forcing rivals into counteroffers and pushing startup compensation toward equity-heavy packages to compete on more than cash.
- If only narrow skill sets clear high prices while generalist engineering does not, firms redirect spending from broad junior hiring toward recruiting and retaining a small pool of proven builders.
Third-order effects
- A segmented market undermines the policy usefulness of a uniform-shortage story: training pipelines and visa arguments calibrated to 'not enough engineers' will misfire if the actual scarcity is confined to specific specializations.
- The recurring gap between CEO shortage rhetoric and mixed wage signals risks becoming the standard test case for how tech labor narratives form — and how hard they are to falsify once adopted.
The trend: Tech labor narratives swing between shortage and glut as demand concentrates in whichever specialty is newest — mobile development in 2010 — keeping true aggregate supply persistently hard to measure.