Yeah obviously. Whenever a company says "we can't get enough X workers" they implicitly mean "at the price we want to pay".

But that doesn't mean they were wrong. Programming is still an amazingly well paying and low stress career. Being replaced by AI is a little worrying, but I think by the time AI is good enough to really replace programmers, it will also be able to replace most white collar jobs - HR, finance, etc. - and society will have bigger problems.

exactly, "reserve army of labour" is a tale as old as capitalism.

Just that the IT industry has run a very effective propaganda campaign for it

They dont usually have benefits (eg: health insurance) or time off

That's because the agency gets half for basically doing nothing