It didn't help that it was about 15 degrees outside when I typed it.

As you can see, the autocorrect on this thing is awesome!

Unwanted to take advantage of this, but I only have an iPhone 6 plus. :-(

I get that competition leads to higher salaries. My point is that higher salaries, while it might be a "solution" for a given company's trouble filling positions, isn't an industry-wide solution. If I offer an above-market salary to fill my rec then I'm necessarily taking someone off the market who could be working for some other company. If all other companies increase their compensation equal to the amount I increased mine then I don't gain any advantage and I have approximately as much trouble finding talent as I do today.

What would likely ameliorate the "talent deficit" is that some tech jobs would either cease to exist or move overseas if the compensation level grew too high.

Here's why I'm not convinced that the answer is simply higher salaries. To be sure, some workers who could be doing tech decide to do something else. Maybe they go into academia, finance, IP law, etc. Raising tech salaries across the board, by everyone who employs tech workers, would steal some of these guys back. But would it be enough? You would probably also motivate some young people to go into tech that currently go into other fields. But that's for the future; it doesn't help the present. The fact is that there's a fixed supply of domestic talent at each point along the talent spectrum. You could pay 10x as much and it won't magically increase the amount of available talent. If there is, in fact, not enough talent to "go around", i.e. to fill all the tech positions employers want to fill, then we don't just have a salary problem.

Side note: what's good for the domestic tech worker may not be the same as what's good for the country. That is to say, an influx of highly-skilled foreign tech workers might depress salaries in the short term, but an abundance of cheap tech labor could juice the success of domestic tech companies which, in the long run, may actually be better for the U.S. as a whole.

There's also anecdotal evidence that the U.S. is becoming less attractive to foreign talent and not more. Which, in my opinion, is terrible news.

I don't disagree with what Obama did in principle, but I disagree with the way he did it. We're still a nation of lex, not rex. Obama's changing of the rules via executive order are just as bad as Bush's changing of the rules via executive order.

Typo. he's == he.

Apparently, he's can finally do what he thinks is wrong, too.

It's bringing back suppressed memories of Highlander 2!

Is it possible that either of these are true, even in a general sense? There are gender disparities in several fields. The median salary for nurses is $65,470, whereas the median salary for IT Technicians is $42,992, but you don't hear a whole bunch of FUD over the fact that 90% of nurses are females. And when it comes right down to it, nurses are far more valuable to society than IT techs. Meanwhile, oil rig workers, about 95% male, make on average $99,175. Why no big push for women in that field?

You've won Slashdot for the day. Congratulations!

This Barbie actually does sound like some computer "engineers" I've known.

The big news to me isn't that they weren't able to invent the tech, but their estimate that even if their most optimistic scenario had come true w.r.t. clean energy tech that it still wouldn't be enough to avoid the "really bad" scenario w.r.t. climate change (if you trust Hansen's models).

This is theft, plain and simple, just like "civil" asset forfeiture.