where are the programmers ?

Lately I've been asked to find someone to expand our software department, and this turned out to be quite a difficult task. We'd be happy to find someone from our local area (we're looking for someone to become part of our team "forever", the focus has always been on people more than on processes) but apparently programmers are basically non-existent today at least around here. When I say programmers I'm talking about real code... of course it's easy to find someone that self-defines him/herself as a programmer, but for which the only "programming language" is HTML.
I find this quite disappointing, but even worse is the impression I get when looking at the projects made in high school; I keep bouncing in stupid "multimedia projects" that are just HTML and may be some form (wow!). The suspect then becomes that the problem is not that the good ones actually flew away from this place, but that they indeed never existed.

I keep seeing people doing their final thesis at university that in newsgroups about C / C++ ask questions or show code snippets that are by themselves a crystal clear proof they suck *horribly* at writing code. And when they get out of university way too many think that the key is to be able to draw an UML diagram, the rest are boring details for the bozos.

But seems to me that in this picture there's something wrong, high school guys will do the nice websites, and university guys will draw nice powerpoint slides about wonderful projects. But where's the meat ? Who is going to actually write the code ?

huh.... looks like i got older

All of a sudden I feel very old deep inside. I have all those little pains, I can't sleep well, I forget things. I can't see anything clear without my glasses.
May be this is how one should feel when turning 39 :-). Bah. Sometimes it sucks getting older, but the alternative doesn't look that interesting either.
I started wondering if I'll ever run the New York marathon or not; now I always feel a pain on the side of my left knee after running a few miles.
But something that really made me feeling older was chat I had with a friend. It all started with a discussion about the new electronic piano I bought (an entry-level one, for about 1000 euros; I'm still terrible at the piano and I probably forever will, a 7000 euros piano wouldn't change that) and on how crappy it is (like how crappy is my computer, my graphic card, my shoes, my chair, Chopin and basically my whole life) and right after that I happened to get a chat message that wasn't meant for me... followed by a rather shocking "whoops... oh well, take a look you too... it could help".
The mistyped message was a link to someone that makes strange noises and burns CDs to sell them. I suppose that's meant to be music but I cannot avoid to compare what Chopin (forced to use more or less just twelve frequencies on a percussion instrument) was able to do compared to what that guy can do now with the total exact control of the waveform. The total control in those hands just produced crap. Stinking distilled crap. *THAT* made me feeling older. I'm sure that "music" will be forgot at the speed of light even from the relatives of the author.

Probably what my grandpa thought about rock.

I also felt offended. Really truly offended. Offended only like a very old person can get. I'm not going to get over it without excuses. I'd say this is also a sign I'm old... but indeed I used to get offended easily even when I was a youngster.