[eva1984]

But it is also very difficult to hire a qualified candidate. There is also data suggests that SDE's salary has been hiking for several years in a row and beyond inflation rate. If there is no shortage, how so?

https://www.fastcompany.com/3051405/the-future-of-work/the-2...

I don't think paying 110k+ in Bay Area for a entry level is unfair, but from what I can tell, my company has a hard time finding one candidate and often the ones we like also get multiple offers and prefer big companies like Google/Facebook, etc.

Yes, 'qualified' is very subjective standard, however, if you ask 5 experienced people, their opinion towards the same candidate barely changes dramatically from one and another, it is either unanimously yes/no, very rarely in between.

So, I think yes, there is a lot of STEM students, but how many of them actually have actual engineering skills is question left for debate.