If this were true, then engineer salaries would not be rising so much. The demand for good engineers vastly outstrips supply.
Also, any explanation that requires you to posit mass irrationality is usually a bad one.
Then: is it an extraordinary claim to suggest that the hiring processes used by most tech companies are doing a bad job of selecting candidates? Are engineers hired through these processes but then fired within the first 6-9 months a rarity? Is turnover generally low? Is hiring so risky that companies working in the middle of a "talent crunch" are demanding that candidates take temporary contracting roles so they can evaluate performance? Is the typical startup engineering team staffed by engineers uniformly capable of production? Are tech company hiring practices carefully designed and executed, or is it more the norm that they're delivered by whatever engineers happen to be available for candidates when they show up? If the latter is the case, isn't it instead an extraordinary claim to suggest that these processes could work at all, given that they're essentially stochastic?
Heh. Somebody had to say this. I don't know what the difficulty is all about. In the SV I have been more to more than 1 interview where I solved all the questions(in a day long interview) and didn't get the job.
Not sure what the high bar is all about.
From where I am standing engineering salaries have stagnated for the last 5 years, possibly even 10.
(http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9237985/IT_gets_its_g...)
In a lot of places there might be extra, hard-to-satisfy demand because their processes for sifting through the supply of developers is poor or not working.