I disagree with this article&#x27;s thesis, that the industry is incorrectly framing the talent problem. Whether people <i>are</i> talent or <i>have</i> talent is philosophical; the truth of the matter is that it is really hard to find software practitioners that can come in and do the job and do it well.<p>The problem, IMO, is that we don&#x27;t have a good and clear understanding of what is the professional skill set. Even companies like Google, etc have lamented the very difficult problem of interviewing and identifying talent that correlates to on-the-job success.<p>I know (believe) that there is an acquirable skill set of a professional software practitioner that maps to real value. It&#x27;s just that we as an industry haven&#x27;t successfully codified it yet, we haven&#x27;t yet shown which of the practitioner&#x27;s skills are the most valuable, and we haven&#x27;t shown how to measure and evaluate those skills in a candidate.<p>Only when we can be specific about what is the talent, the skill set will we be in a better position to consider the shortage (or not) of that talent; and only then will we also be able to be specific with individuals on how to acquire that skill set.