"the growth of Silicon Valley" - real meaning, "the growth of the profits of the heirs who own the majority of tech company stocks, are the VC limited partner f

"the growth of Silicon Valley" - real meaning, "the growth of the profits of the heirs who own the majority of tech company stocks, are the VC limited partner financiers etc." "There are no unemployed competent programmers". This has two meaningless adjectives - unemployed and competent. People working at McDonalds are "employed". Competent is a completely arbitrary concept as well, some people consider only 1% of programmers comptent. So this sentence is double meaningless. My experience with HR at companies - if you dropped out of college in your senior year you're SOL - they want someone with a Bachelors. Sometimes even a Masters. They want an unbroken history of jobs going back to leaving college - if you decided to take a summer off and travel, god help you. Before you have even sat down to talk, they want references from your former 3 bosses, so you have to beg them for a favor to give you a recommendation - to a company which you might not even be working for. The interview happens during working hours, so odds are you'll have to take a vacation day just to interview at the place. Then there is specialization. Knowing how heaps work or other elemental CS and programming concepts does not matter to the interviewer. Knowing Python in and out does not matter to the interviewer. Having a pretty good grasp of the Django web framework does not matter to the interviewer. What does matter is that they, unlike your company, use multiple databases with Django, so they will drill you on that. Oh you don't know how to select different databases in a QuerySet? That's it for you - next. Of course, you can go out of your way to learn this specific part of the framework, but then it will just be another specific part of Django you don't know. Or maybe they run CherryPy. The real thing is companies used to actually train people. Now they won't wait a week for someone to get up to speed with some sub-specialization. So they leave the position open until they find such a person. This is not a shortage of people, it's a lack of desire to invest by investors.