Coding jobs can be easily outsourced to wherever the going rate for labor is cheapest. Google's "coder shortage" seems completely imaginary. They're an advertising company whose greatest trick was convincing the world they are a software company.
I'm a Google engineer, and both of these statements are incorrect.
Taking the second one first, Google is not an advertising company. It's a software engineering company whose primary products are most effectively monetized via advertising. Or, sometimes I think it might be more accurate to say that Google is a data center company, since building, operating and utilizing enormous data centers at extreme efficiency is Google's true core competency. If and when Google gets serious about competing with Amazon in that space Amazon will have a tough time keeping up.
Google is moving fairly quickly away from advertising, diversifying into products which are sold directly. Note that nearly all of the speculative new projects that have come out of "Google X" are built around goods and services, more than the sort of low-value (on a per transaction basis) information services that are Google's current big products. No big winners have emerged from that effort, yet, but if one or more of them do "hit", you can expect to see it quickly replace advertising as the primary revenue driver. About 10% of Google's revenues these days come from non-advertising products. 10% seems small, but keep in mind that represents $5B annually, and is up from basically 0% just a few years ago. Non-ad revenues are growing faster than the ad revenues, so the percentage of Google revenue derived from advertising will continue falling even without a massive new business.
Further, culturally, Google never has been an advertising company. It's a thoroughly engineering-focused company, top to bottom.
The shortage of engineers is not imaginary. Google legitimately has a hard time finding enough software engineers of the caliber it seeks. Money isn't the issue; few people who receive an offer from Google reject it. In the context of this article, though, the big problem is that the engineers Google can find are overwhelmingly male, and either white or Asian. Mostly white. Studies done by many organizations, including studies done internally by Google, show that diverse teams are more creative and more productive. In addition, Google's culture is surprisingly idealistic, and people in the company consider it a legitimate problem that the company -- especially eng -- is not representative of the population as a whole.
I think part of that latter point derives from the fact that Google engineers are, if anything, too well-paid. Estimates I've seen put the "1%" line at about $400K annual income, and most senior Googlers -- including engineers, not just execs and managers -- are above that line. Getting paid that much tends to make decent people wonder if they should feel guilty at their luck and their privilege. At the same time, it's not like anyone is going to agitate to get paid less. So a better option is to say "Well, the real problem here isn't that I make too much, it's that not enough people have the opportunity to do the same". In particular, women and minorities.
That last paragraph is purely personal speculation, mind you. Laszlo Bock may not agree at all.