I believe the concept of padding resumes have been in existance for a long time, but American recruiters have been careless to hire such individuals.  Additionally, due to a messed up immigration US policies, a lot of Indian IT professionals are looking to stay back in India, rather than come here.  Also most of the professionals who were in these fields have moved up the corporate ladder to managerial position..... so it is not you..... yes there is a problem out there.
Stanley S.

Richard,

I’ve got a small consulting company in the Kansas City area, and it is about the same here.  IT lost its appeal after the dot com bust and computer science enrollment fell off significantly.  All the decent people I’ve found recently have come to me via networking.  I plan on stepping up my involvement in local IT User’s Groups to stay connected (and anything else I can think of).  I’m not really the networking type, but I make myself do it out of necessity.  I got lucky on my last project because a local company was downsizing and some people I knew wanted to take a severance package.  Networking payoffs in unexpected ways sometimes.  The power of networking never fails to amaze me.

Steve M.

You are correct, we are facing shortage of qualified candidates. Part of the problem is H1B visa limitations, and secondly some of the programmers are moving to business analyst or project manager work. We are solving this problem with offshore resources if we do not need the person onsite.

Thanks

Dilshad

Richard,

We too are finding a shortage of Java and .NET developers. I sit on an advisory board for a local college that has seen significant reductions in
Computer Science candidates as well. Most of this is due to the offshoring of large development efforts that created a gap in low level positions here
in the US.

I concur with our colleague, Steve, that our greatest success is networking with our consultants who know Java and .NET.

Good luck.

Joe G.