You too can get a job as a developer!

Last time I looked, the U.S. unemployment rate was 8.1 percent. Yet as InfoWorld’s Andrew Oliver noted a couple of weeks ago in “Is a computer science degree worth the paper it’s printed on?” the unemployment rate among developers is more like 5 percent — which is considered pretty close to full employment.

My, how things have changed. What happened to the hue and cry of just a few years ago that offshoring would eventually gobble up every last U.S. programming job?

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Right here on the edge of Silicon Valley, there are way more open reqs for programmers, developers, and software engineers than there are people to fill them. Offshoring is still going strong (just ask the software giants IBM and Oracle), but regardless, plenty of positions in the United States go begging.

So how do you fill all those jobs? Or more to the point, how can unemployed or unhappily employed people learn the programming skills companies want?

At times like these, when talent is in short supply, opinion leaders like to blame the “skills gap” on limited access to higher education. But the main point Andrew Oliver made in his article is that the traditional higher education system in the United States does a poor job of teaching theory and programming — with an emphasis on old languages like Java rather than popular newer ones like Ruby or Python — and charges way too much money for the privilege. As an employer, he would actually prefer to hire self-taught technologists like himself who learned by doing.

But not everyone can bootstrap themselves to that degree. In his piece, Andrew noted a nimble training organization known as the Starter League in Chicago, which by his estimation does an excellent job training people to program in a matter of weeks rather than years.

Well, there’s one. A casual Google search turns up hundreds if not thousands of others, including for-profit colleges that have come under investigation for charging exorbitant tuition and delivering poor education.

Fair evaluation of programming and computer science training programs and educational institutions is extraordinarily difficult. Teachers are obviously crucial — and they change from year to year. Public institutions, such as city colleges, sometimes do a great job at minimal cost, but many now hang by a thread. Some for-profit organizations deliver the goods on some subjects and fail badly with others. Plus, many graduates believe they’ve been well taught, but their employers end up having a different opinion.

Online courses are easier to vet. A nonprofit aggregator known as Coursera partners with 33 well-known public and private universities to deliver free online learning across a broad range of subjects, with (at this moment) 66 computer science courses, including Python and Scala courses. Despite Andrew’s critique, it’s obvious that certain universities lead the way in various areas of computer science, and the fact that many now provide free education online is a beautiful thing. Adam Fletcher, a Google site reliability engineer who writes a blog called the Simple Logic, recently took at shot at assembling a four-year curriculum based on Coursera’s offerings. It caused quite a stir on Reddit.

Nonprofits also offer ways to gain experience. One of my favorites is Code for America, which gives young developers the chance to help improve the way city governments work using Web technology. Dubbed “a Peace Corps for geeks,” Code for America offers participants a living-wage stipend, health care, and expenses-paid travel to their assigned city.

But even excellent education and experience doesn’t guarantee you a job at the company of your choice. In part, that’s because employers’ expectations have a tendency to lean toward the unrealistic. As InfoWorld contributor Martin Heller once told me, “Two years after Java came out, I saw job postings asking for five years experience as a Java programmer.”

I think a bigger reason developer jobs go begging, though, is that today’s job requirements are frequently quite specific, asking for everything from expertise in Web app performance optimization to special knowledge of Android “Jelly Bean” to fluency in the Node.js platform.

That specificity reflects today’s explosion of new technologies and opportunities, beginning with wild world of mobile app dev. Not to mention big data and the demand for R programmers and developers with Hadoop skills. Plus, all the popular cloud services with rich APIs that demand programmers who know how to exploit them. And how many developers can claim to know their way around all the new NoSQL database choices?

Such multiplicity and high demand leave us back where we started: How can we bridge the gap between what companies need and what would-be developers can learn how to do?

Aside from pleading for education to be cheaper, faster, and more current — or advising people to buy a book or take an online course and teach themselves — I have no idea what the answer is. But I’d love to figure out a way for InfoWorld to play a part in it, because the needs of both job seekers and employers are great. Feel free to use the comments section below to offer your ideas.

This article, “You too can get a job as a developer!,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Eric Knorr’s Modernizing IT blog. And for the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld on Twitter.