I know a number of smart, hardworking engineers who cannot find jobs now, even when they are doing everything they can to make sure their skill sets are up to date. The unifying factor among them is that they are not kids anymore, and have wives and families. Yet I still keep hearing about the supposed &quot;talent shortage.&quot;<p>One guy is in his mid-40s, and was a UNIX sysadmin whose company went bankrupt in the dotcom bomb. He&#x27;s survived several recessions. He&#x27;s quite proficient at Python scripting, and he&#x27;s learning JS and Ruby. But companies won&#x27;t hire him, I guess because of &quot;culture fit&quot; which seems to be a code phrase for &quot;we want our team to gel around interests and work styles common among single millennials.&quot; The worst-case scenario is when a company thinks &quot;culture fit&quot; means &quot;we only hire hipsters proficient in Amazeballs framework and BeardyScript.&quot;<p>Some other problems I&#x27;ve observed: finding mentorship is tough, particularly for women and minorities, because the very people in a position to be great mentors are the same people running startups, and don&#x27;t have time to mentor. It&#x27;s a Catch-22.<p>If there really were a tech shortage, you&#x27;d see salaries rising and more training and mentorship instead of the collusion among major companies regarding salary caps and non-poaching agreements. A lot of US-based companies are afraid to train qualified people, like some firms do successfully in the UK (training humanities students from Oxford or Cambridge in software engineering), because they think other companies will poach their talent and therefore their training budget will be spent on their competitors. I think that&#x27;s a short-sighted view, but that&#x27;s what I see now.