You're wondering about the software industry specifically, but what you're really asking about is the education industrial complex. Universities are not in the

You're wondering about the software industry specifically, but what you're really asking about is the education industrial complex. Universities are not in the business of properly meeting labor demands of the market with skilled workers, and they never have been. Their goal is to increase enrollment and capture as much grant and tuition money as they can. Universities don't care if too many lawyers, chemical engineers, etc. are being trained. There are several paths into software engineering, many of which bypass the education industrial complex. It's getting easier to access just the education needed to do a technical job like programming. > Is it that we are so unproductive and failure-prone that we guarantee ourselves full employment? I think there's some truth to this, but I also speculate that software devs are much more productive as a cohort than we like to let on. Just think about quickly everything in the industry changes. There's a new way to write JS apps every 3 months and a major breaking, paradigm-shifting change to React every couple years it seems like, and that's just the web side. Most workers don't have to deal with the amount of change throughout their careers as programmers do, and it is absolutely exhausting.