It seems plausible that there is a dearth of exceptional programmers, and that it would be difficult to rectify this by training more. But scarcity is a fact of life in any market; is there anything special about the labor market for high-end programmers? If the CEO that pg mentions really wanted 30 programmers tomorrow, why doesn't he attract them from other companies by offering them higher wages? Before you dismiss this as naive or impractical, let me point out that this approach has been empirically validated: Facebook was able to massively scale its developer workforce by poaching employees from Google.[0] I'm not even arguing for or against more immigration; it just seems strange to me that this essay is ignoring the elephant in the room, particularly when there's been a well-documented conspiracy among the biggest companies in the valley to suppress developer wages.[1]

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/google-offers-staff-enginee...

[1] http://pando.com/tag/techtopus/