both are markets that can be accurately modeled using search and matching theory and one can add housing to this. Mortensen et al won the 2010 Nobel Prize in economics for modeling this phenomenon.

This equation is from Mortensen's 2010 Nobel lecture and has a lot of explanatory power. Mortensen's lecture focused on the labor market

R is the "reservation wage", or the minimum wage the job seeker will accept.

b is the unemployment benefit

lambda is a poisson variable that describes how often an employee makes contact with a company (interview, phone screen, etc)

and the integral is a weighted average of the utility of being employed at a certain wageW(w) -U across the probability of getting a job at a wage wage spectrum dF(w) The poisson parameter, lamdba, is the key here. The friction associated with search and matching markets like dating, employment and housing markets can be viewed as the inverse of lambda. Remember that a poisson variable represents the number of events occurring in a fixed interval of time.

Digital services like dating apps, online job postings, and Zillow have driven the number of events or hits, that market participants can get in a fixed number of time which is directly proportional to the reservation wage or reservation price.

Lots of people are honing in on this from different angles. This is what economists would call a "search and matching problem". Problem in which the good, whether it be a house, a job, or a relationship are each different and require spending time and effort to investigate.

Time for another round of Dale Mortensen, Peter A. Diamond, and Christopher A. Pissarides won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Economics for their work on markets with search frictions, the exact issues that everyone seems to be complaining about today:

https://x.com/Bonecondor/status/1940400521032216761

the proverbial "stem talent shortage" is fundamentally a geography problem. There may be a surplus in engineers, but not in the very few places where the acute demand is.

Investment is not evenly distributed across the country therefore the jobs are not either.

Engineering education is relatively evenly spread out across the country because of the all the state schools in all the states.

So the "i can't find any engineering jobs" people may be correct if the additional condition: "that are located where I already live"

The "I can't find any qualified engineers" people may also be correct with the additional condition: "that are willing to live where my company is located and accept the wages and workload that I'm offering"

Work visas partially solve this issue because their recipients necessarily move to where the jobs are and accept the market wage/ working conditions.

The real question to ask is "why are these jobs so geographically concentrated?" and "why are people so hesitant to move across the country for an engineering job?"
The answer to the first question best given by urban agglomeration economics. Regional economies specialize in specific industries, build a labor force skilled in that industry and then attract investment in that industry.

Software engineers are now experiencing what mechanical engineers experienced in the 1970s and 1980s when FEA and CAD applications began to automate much of the calculation and drafting work that previously defined the profession. Writing code by hand will be an educational exercise and something that is done in the earliest stages of prototyping and for fine tuning nearly finished designs much like how manual drafting and hand calculations are used in mechanical engineering today.

there is so much opportunity in heavy industry and manufacturing right now. it's unreal

imagine PCs from the 1980s compared with the PCs of today

imagine cars from the 1980s compared with cars from today

many factories are still using technology from the 1980s and they're going to speedrun 40 years of technological development in the next 5 there has been lots of chatter about open source CAD recently.

this is new. and important for building the foundation for distributed and modular (and possibly LLM assisted) mechanical design

https://twitter.com/nyxtelius/status/1728085428077490459