Great article. Thanks to Dan Wang for writing it. My main difference in perspective with this article (I'm hesitant to call it a disagreement, because it's mo

Great article. Thanks to Dan Wang for writing it. My main difference in perspective with this article (I'm hesitant to call it a disagreement, because it's more a matter or perspective than any specific conclusion) is that I don't think people need to be consciously aware of market or societal forces and pressures to be powerfully influenced by them. I think anyone who wonders why more people don't major in CS (as well as other fields claiming a "shortage") should read the chapter on pay and professions from Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations". I don't think they need to read it and accept it without critical thought, just be aware of the perspective - that there are a huge number of inter-dependent factors, other than pay, that powerfully influence the desirability of a profession. Here's a link: http://geolib.com/smith.adam/won1-10.html http://geolib.com/smith.adam/won1-10.html This is all pretty intuitive - if you want people to take on tedious, odious, or dishonorable work, you may have to pay them well. I actually think CS, and programming, may be a more unpleasant profession than people recognize. Huge open offices, back visibility, SCRUM meetings that deny long term thinking and autonomy, constant technology churn, age-related employment issues, and, yes, specialized visas that mean employers can rely on captive employees who can't leave the field and have limited rights to leave their employer, all these things do mean that CS may be a much less desirable field for people with academic talent. Also - while wages are high, this may be the Silicon Valley effect. A job that pays an average of 120k, but plays this consistently in smaller, less expensive cities, may be more desirable than a job that pays 150k on average, but where 95% of the employment is concentrated in a place where the median price of a house is $1.2+ million. Just for a dose or reality, a registered nurse in San Francisco earns more, at the median, than an application developer. That's a-ok by me! Nursing is a tough job. But if someone prefers to do good as a nurse and make more money than siting around fixing bugs in the latest javascript framework, come on, that's perfectly rational! I really don't think young people need to have analyzed this to be influenced by it. There's a reason we call it the "invisible hand". In short, if it is rational to avoid this field, that's probably enough to conclude that these are factors in deterring workers from it. I don't think you need to prove hyper-awareness specifically of these issues. Keep in mind, people who are capable of learning to code and work in software development teams do have a high level of capacity for work and study. They have a lot of options. I'm not sure that software development, as a field, is all that competitive with the other things they can do. In short, people may be behaving very rationally by avoiding this field.