The problem was that her reports were all leaving her project or leaving the company. The company was responding to the staffing difficulty with outsourcing, moving her entire project to Israel. Directors were squabbling over the most capable employees and twice she was approached about switching departments.
She has a friend who nominally is an architect, but is instead doing the work of a frontline dev. He's about to jump. Recruiters have made the job market liquid enough that businesses can't meet their objectives with the coders they hired.
In some sectors, coders right out of school can command six-figure salaries, and they're only going higher. In the larger job markets, firms are moving en-masse to consulting companies to meet business needs. The developers are following suit. 5 months ago, I worked at a marketing company as an in-house dev. I now work for a consulting company, my old company hired a consulting company to do my old job. I am somebody whose natural tendency is towards loyalty. I want to find a nice position at a nice company and just stay there for years. The current job market makes that impossible. The siren's song of getting a 30% pay bump every year, sometimes twice in the same year, is impossible to resist.
Make no mistake about it, the US needs more developers. Immigration is an excellent solution to the problem. Protectionism is only going to make it worse. If businesses can't meet their objectives, then end result is going to be a recession. No one comes out better in one of those.