I don't have much in the way of ideas for you, but I did want to comment to offer solidarity. HN is full of bravado and braggadocio, and acknowledgment of holes in the software labor market is rare here. And here your post has been downvoted into the grey.
We have become inured to the Times's anti-journalistic practice of "simply repeating claims" for years now, but it's still a problem worth pointing out.
You're forgetting the dropouts. For every online student who graduates from Flatiron, there are many—maybe a dozen, maybe more—who drop out. Flatiron bills online students monthly, so they're raking in a good deal of money from dropouts who can't get their money back.
I've applied to about 500 jobs. I'm 46 & returning to coding after years of absence. I get better response rates outside of engineering (e.g., teaching, program management). This year, I won a teaching job and a technical writing job and was denied both due to ageism.
I received a one-month contract—teaching, not developing—from a subsidiary of a large education company. I had to consult a lawyer and fight with them for a week over the contract's overly broad IP claims. They basically wanted ownership of teaching ideas I—or my partner (!)—came up with in perpetuity! I eventually got them to change it to my satisfaction, and had a great teaching experience with a cool group of students, but it really soured my relationship with the company and now i can't imagine working with them again.
"This is the first time anyone's had a problem with this," the subsidiary's h.r. rep told me. This approach impacts people who have had experience with contracts and lawyers, and thus aligns with age discrimination.
Any ideas you disclose to your company while your an employee could surely belong to you, that's reasonably standard.
As for 'your partner' - that seems pretty crazy, and I don't understand how that would hold up for a second in court.
As for 'perpetuity' - meaning - ideas you had long after employment? Or - that they'd own the ideas you give them while employed, forever. If the later, well, again I think that's somewhere near standard. If the former, that's beyond crazy and I think not even enforceable.
But the 'partner' bit alone seems beyond creepy because their lawyers are not stupid, they must know it's a pretty wobbly thing not likely to stand up in court, ergo it's kind of a scare tactic.
Let's clarify that 'your take on the demographics' was an article about Australia that was not specific to the tech industry.
Here's a relevant piece from the Los Angeles Times.
'One example: Google's own data showed women were promoted less often than men because workers need to nominate themselves. Women who did so got pushback. Based on her studies, [Joan C.] Williams [law professor, UC Hastings College of the Law] found that women are rewarded for modesty and penalized for what men might see as "aggressive" behavior. Google began including female leaders at workshops to coach everyone — men and women — on how to promote themselves effectively. The gender difference among nominees disappeared, Williams said.'
I've heard about the similarity between orchestral auditions and whiteboard interviews before. As someone who has prepared for whiteboarding interviews at a Big Five firm, I'm fascinated by the comparison. For a while I couldn't figure out how the similarity arose. Today it occurred to me that while in classical music the crisis was caused by the maxing out of demand, in software engineering perhaps it's the rapid growth in supply. By either mechanism you have a slots-to-candidates ratio crisis.
