I know Larry King wasn't that bad (I found him insightful), but maybe if they take enough of our cable talking heads we might get actual journalists on the news.

When is FOX news going to come to defend Lavabit against the oppressive Obama regime?

Surely the government violating the constitution to get at Lavabit's data and thus compeling them to shut down is as outrageous as Obamacare and all of the businesses FOX claims it is destroying.

I'm sure everyone has already said it but leadership is not management. Leadership is the act of leading, it requires actions not a title.

On a hockey team, the leader is the captain. He leads by example, his teammates respect him. The GM does not tell the hockey players what to do, he manages their pay and who gets fired when the team does poorly.

In engineering, management is not leadership, it is management. The leaders are the guys who when they speak, everyone shuts up. The leaders are the guys who the team goes to for answers. The leaders are the ones who have the trust of the management.

If you are interviewing at a place that doesn't know the difference between management and leadership, and god forbid actually has a management person leading engineers, run. Run away. You don't want to work there. I have worked at places where management people lead engineers. The manager was trying to explain how hard it is to be an engineer to other managers and he said "they write thousands and thousands of lines of code with 10 logic statements on each line just to solve simple problems". That guy was an idiot, he was a management person trying to pretend that he had any technical leadership skills at all. That always fails. Other management people like it because they all speak the same language and they don't have to interface with the awkward engineers, but in the end you cant have management leading technical talent.

If you ever try to explain to a lay-person how and to what extent facebook and google know everything about you they are usually not very supportive of it. The people who don't mind are either not sharing anything significant or just don't care because online privacy and data mining isn't something they are really concerned with as it doesn't directly affect their daily lives.

Most people that use facebook don't truly understand the nature of facebook's business model and the technical expertise deployed to harvest their data. Much in the same way that most people can't fathom the extent to which the government can know everything you do on a computer. It's just not within their realm of understanding, most people don't even really understand how the internet works on a basic level.

I think that if people really understood that Enemy of the State (the movie) is a pretty good depiction of the state of government surveillance they would not support it.
It's not fair to conclude that since people are ok with facebook they are ok with being put into a NSA database. They don't understand the consequences of either.

Does your mind feel a little fuzzy?

I think the number of people in your scenario is not large enough to have any effect in the supply of software engineers. But since we're off topic anyways lets continue.

I do think you have a valid point, and it is a subset of a larger problem involving rehabilitated criminals.
In the US, the laws are setup so that any criminal mistake you make will follow you for life. There are companies whose only purpose is to scrape the internet to grab your mugshot from your pot possession arrest when you were 18 and keep it on file forever so they can sell it to potential employers. These companies have no concern for privacy laws if they exist (for the most part they don't unless you're eligible for expungement).
Further compounding the problem is that even without the private companies compiling public records, there are still public records; and if your name pops up in a record search your probably not getting a job.
The whole point of having a rehabilitation based criminal justice system is to return criminals to society in a way that allows for them to rejoin society in a productive and healthy way. Attaching a stigma to them for the rest of their life is preventing them from becoming productive and healthy members of society.

What's not so simple is actually publically saying something that can be viewed as soft on crime. It's popular to say "I think we should track every criminal because of the children" and is not popular to say "I think we should allow rehabilitated criminals privacy so they can move on with their life". Of course there is a gray area, murderers are different than minor drug offenders. But in our society, there are no gray areas, only criminal or not.

/offtopic

I think art and science/math are different kinds of "hard". I lived with a guy who basically got a degree in playing the guitar (music performance). He played the guitar more than I studied. But as a amature guitar player and a engineer myself I can tell you that I would rather play scales for 2 hours than do differential equations for 2 hours. There is a difference.

I didn't chose guitar over engineering because he had immense talent in music and I don't, my talent is in engineering.

I'm not sure where you live and if the culture is different but in the US, drop the whole "with honours thing"; no employer cares about your grades or what honors you achieved (not that it isn't personally valuable to be at the top of the academic game). They are taking a risk and want to see material evidence that you are competent as a professional, not as an academic. I hope you interned or did a CoOp somewhere because that is almost a golden ticket to a job.

You may also have to lower your expectations. You may not be able to work in the most desirable location, you might have better luck looking in a more rural or less desirable location. In the US midwest, getting a job in suburban Chicago is far easier than getting a job in Chicago proper. Getting a job in Milwaukee is even easier and getting a job in Sheboygan is like shooting fish in a barrel, something they do often in Sheboygan. You may also have to get the experience by doing something related to what you want to do. I know a EE who want's to design electronics but couldn't find a job so he got a Electronics Test Engineer position and after a year and a half of that could have moved within the company to hardware design ( instead he went back for his masters).

Source: graduated with a CompE degree in 2011 and have worked in suburban chicago, sheboygan, and milwaukee as a firmware engineer.

Our outsourcing "partners" in India cost about .25 of what an average American developer would cost. They earn far less as the outsourcing pimp takes their cut. I don't predict that the amount of developer jobs will grow at the same pace as the amount of developers. Therefore I predict the affect will be that wages are suppressed further, probably resulting in poorer quality of developers.