Hell, I've worked with a lot of people on the US side of the pond who have experience or are educatied and they can't rub two keyboards together to ship a product.
My observation has been the opposite: no matter how much you offer, a lot of companies STILL cannot hire enough engineering talent.
The first couple of jobs I had the interview process was a conversation with barely any technical content (let alone being asked to write a single line of code). Nowadays there is a generally a barrage of technical testing.
I think companies are realising the huge difference between having top 20%ile programmers versus the rest. Where I am currently although we get plenty of applicants we simply can't fill all of the spots.
Agree with the overseas talent comment as well. The amount of technical debt they create is massive, the overhead in communication is too high, and the people aren't invested in the products the code they are creating.
Technical debt: As an oversee talent, cleaning up the technical debt created by (now left) US employee, we can see that both yours and mine experiences are anecdotal.
Slack Communication Me: 1. Question A, 2. Question B, 3. Question C US employee: answers half of the question B, general ramblings about A and C
Zoom communication Me: Lets get on zoom and figure this out right now US employee: lets schedule the meeting on 2 days, throw a PM and two more developers in it, so they can waste time too
So, I guess, lets agree that generalizations are not ok.
Perhaps you’d like to expand on this technical debt you’re cleaning up?
I've worked at 7 different silicon valley companies in my 35 years of employment, though the last 20 have been at two particularly high flying companies. Approximate half the staff is foreign born, some US educated and most foreign educated. I see no pattern to skill levels between US born and foreign born coworkers. Maybe it is because these companies draw top talent, and can afford to pay for it, I have this experience. You might be cynical and think I'm a "meh" level employee who is easily impressed, but my pay grade and annual reviews say otherwise.
Also, time and again we see posts here lamenting the hiring process in this industry and we haven't cracked it yet. This adds to the demand-supply gap.
Anecdote: I have interacted with some of the 'overseas talent' and they were excellent programmers but lacked communication and hadn't fully figured out the mechanics of working in teams. Others from the same background but who decided to get a higher education from US had better exposure and generally fared better.
Interview processes at so many software companies don't do a good job of selecting for it. They still look for algorithmic competence and next to nothing about teamwork and structuring software projects.
In this way software engineering resembles traditional craftsmanship more than any other discipline.
Whereas programming itself has somewhat solidified, most of the programmer management/learning/etc. state-of-the-art still deals in nasal demons, i.e. much is still seat-of-the-pants experimental.
If you pay the buck you can hire excellent engineers in India, China, Eastern Europe & other parts of the world. No wonder Amazon/Google/Microsoft have a large developer presence in these markets.