You can always find a developer. It is not guaranteed that you're able to find a Rails core committer with healthcare industry experience, a distributed system

You can always find a developer. It is not guaranteed that you're able to find a Rails core committer with healthcare industry experience, a distributed systems background, and immediate availability to work in San Francisco for $90k. That's an exaggeration. OK, now let me try again: it's not guaranteed that you're able to find a commercially proficient programmer capable of shipping working web applications for $125k. That programmer was once available in quantity, but AppAmaGooFaceSoft have bought up all the supply in San Francisco available at that price, and many prices higher. People unwilling to pay the new market price for that developer describe this state of affairs as a "shortage." Graduates of coding schools are wonderful. We should encourage as many as possible to begin rewarding careers as software developers. Most do not yet have skills sufficient to fill the modal position in the software industry. If you were to wave a magic wand and conjure up 100 developers who did, that would be wonderful and you'd be the most popular person in Silicon Valley for a few days, but they'd disappear into the vast, vast demand for people capable of shipping things. AppAmaGooFaceSoft will probably hire ~10k developers this year... like they did last year, and the year before that. You mentioned you're surprised that there exists demands for developers. AppAmaGooFaceSoft make billions of dollars in profit every month, almost entirely as a direct consequence of their ability to ship software. They have not yet discovered a number of engineers at which they cannot ship more software in more markets. There exist other companies which are using software to nip at the heels of billion dollar industries, and they're also quite capable of throwing 500 developers at a problem that used to require 10,000 people spread across 200 companies. It's a good time to know how to code.