Yes, I can get all the engineers I want if I pay a million dollars a year. But if they are also employed as engineers somewhere else, the lack of engineering talent just moves to those other companies.
Say there is only a car in the entire world. I could buy it for more no more money, but ultimately there is still a shortage, in the sense that even if we had 5 people willing to pY 5 billion for the only car I. The world, they would all not be able to get it. In cars, this is fixed by the fact that we can build cars easily: It doesn't take that long to make another car, and eventually you can build thousands a day.
So if we look at the system overall, we have to consider unemployment in the profession, and how many people just don't want to go I to stem because it doesn't pay enough.
They say I see it, pay in CS specifically is pretty darned good, compared to alternatives in the US. Any lack of developers we have today doesn't come from them choosing other occupations because programming doesn't pay the bills: We just have way too many people getting paid a lot less, or unemployed altogether, that either can't afford the retraining to be programmers, or just. can't do it altogether.
So it's not, IMO, as if the shortage of good pay is the problem: Remember the dot com boom, when a lot of borderline incompetent people were getting a ton of money and achieving very little? That,s the best we'd get if we just multiplied all tech salaries by 10x. Our real problems are far more complicated.