I am still convinced that before anyone can confidently determine if a talent shortage really exists, they must first fix the transportation issues. I've made this comment a few times already, but if I had a magic wand and made a BART-like bullet train materialize that connected San Francisco to San Jose, Danville, San Ramon, Mountain View, Palo alto, Cupertino, Foster City, the "out-of-reach"'ish areas of SF like where SF Zoo is and where the House-Of-Air is located, and the Persidio... we'd would be having a very different conversation.
In short, I believe it's the commute that engineers don't want causing a big part of all this gentrification and talent shortage talk. Personally, my Linkedin says I won't take any job that I can't walk to from a BART station. Google is an exception though; the whole GoogleBus at MacArthur BART situation.
I don't know if I'm one of the great engineers PG and others are talking about but I have no interest in living in the Bay area, whether as it currently exists or with even more people.
You can solve the "transportation" issue by avoiding having to transport anyone in the first place, which is exactly what the author is speaking to when they suggest remote working arrangements.
Or maybe even transporting some of those opportunities to areas closer to you. Starting new VC-backed companies in Detroit, Denver, Boston, Durham, Austin, Memphis, Nashville, Louisville or other regions would give you access to some great talent that simply prefers to live in other areas of the country.
For an industry that often derides 'monoculture', the SF tech scene sure resembles one.
In short, I believe it's the commute that engineers don't want causing a big part of all this gentrification and talent shortage talk. Personally, my Linkedin says I won't take any job that I can't walk to from a BART station. Google is an exception though; the whole GoogleBus at MacArthur BART situation.