I find it utterly ridiculous that people are complaining about a "talent shortage" when a typical 35-year-old software engineer can't buy a house in the Bay Are

I find it utterly ridiculous that people are complaining about a "talent shortage" when a typical 35-year-old software engineer can't buy a house in the Bay Area. You tell a shortage by price signals, and useless bikeshedding executives out-earn engineers by quite a bit, but no one takes this (I hope) to mean that there's a useless-meddling-executive shortage. This concept of a "talent shortage" is hereby banned until we're seeing 25-year-old software engineers buying third homes. When we're at that point, we can start worrying about this so-called "shortage". There is a shortage of talented people doing useful things for society, but that's more of a job shortage than a people shortage.