I started using AIM in 1998, around the time I graduated from high school.

I did a study abroad while in college. It was the most cost effective way to have a semi real time chat with friends/family back here in the States.

And people forget that stores only tend to carry the "popular" items.

For example, wife and I buy unlocked smart phones so we are not locked to a single carrier. We have bought our phones from Newegg and Amazon and gotten our cases from there too - we didn't necessarily want whatever Apple/Samsung/LG and the carriers were pushing.

You've been lucky then.

I have gotten scolded (eventually laid off) for doing that sort of thing at my old job - "I don't have the budget for you to be doing that sort of scripting on these projects." Boss would rather have done crap by hand.

At my job before that, I did that sort of thing but there was limited funds/advancement so that's why I left to go to the aforementioned job that promised to let me go do my own thing.

You forgot one other thing.... If there were such a shortage, you'd see companies investing more in training - i.e. like people with backgrounds in related fields that had an interest in coding.

People tend to forget, CS is a relatively new degree at many universities. My parents went to 2 different universities (one large, one small, two different states, etc.) in the late '60's and early '70's. Programming courses were just starting to be offered, usually in the Math department, but other departments in Science and Engineering offered them as well. The uni's rented time on computers elsewhere or just got their first machine. Both my parents had math degrees and went on to become professional programmers and nothing melted down/blew up and they didn't have all the niceties that we are use too today. Point is, if there was a real shortage, companies would be looking for smart people they could train up as well.

Sure, people may have more choices today that they didn't have decades ago. But companies are willing to do less to keep people around than they did decades ago.

I've heard/commented before around the 'net - is it any coincidence that with the death of the pension, that any type of employee loyalty died along with it?

I think you're right - people also have their own network locally and with all the layoffs and what no that happen frequently, why move unless it is the last resort.

I also think the last recession made it harder for people to move because they may have been under water on their mortgages. Property values in general feel, so unless you were in dire straights why wouldn't you just try to ride things out rather than sell at a loss?

I agree with this, I'd like to see the job posting, salary/benefits, location and the hiring process/interview questions. My hunch is that there is a mismatch between job expectations/salary and what actually exists in reality.

I'd argue that half the problem is that some employers get the idea that they need to interview developers like Google or Amazon for roles that may not need that level of detail. In other words, if you're just updating business rules in a CRUD based web app using any of the standard libraries, I don't know if asking candidates to code a binary tree on a whiteboard is the best test of whether or not someone would be able to do the job effectively. Even Google admits that they have a high "false positive" rate (people that fail their interview but would be successful in the job anyways), but when you receive millions of applications a year, I suppose you can afford to be picky.

I would also like to point out that when many companies got their first computers in the 50's, 60's or 70's, there was no such thing as a "computer science" degree. Programming courses were generally offered under math, science or engineering departments. Companies hired people without the formal computer science education we think of today, and things didn't melt down, and they didn't have the benefits of all the different frameworks, languages, etc. that we have today.

I would contend that there is a shortage, but it is mostly for senior level people who may have some niche experience, which is true of almost any field. But for your run of the mill jobs, you don't necessarily need this. Most people, by definition, are average.

Oh, and companies don't get a free pass, either. Many of them what a top 1% coder for bottom 50% wages if at all possible.

Lastly, if there was such a shortage, we'd see companies hiring people that didn't have their "required" experience, but had a couple operational brain cells that could be coached up. I saw this during the dot-com boom.