There isn no pilot shortage. There never was.

Paying your dues is not old fashioned, nor is experience. I've met several first officers who couldn't understand geographical coordinates, and more than a few who couldn't navigate off a magenta line.

The collective skill level and experience base is slowly slipping into the toilet with a generation of those who never had to work to get there, who bypassed the traditional lines of experience, and puts many in airline seats squarely int he same boat as foreign countries; a sad state of affairs. Pilots who have never experienced an actual emergency, who don't really know weather or ice or contingency, who know only what they've seen in a simulator, who come from one job or no job with no background, nothing but a fresh ticket and the same narrow path.

So far as hiring; that movement in the industry, and hiring takes place, does not equate to a pilot shortage. There is not.