I see a similar problem even in software jobs. Employers frequently advertise for highly specific skill sets that almost nobody has. Then when nobody or only fraudulent people apply, they reject them all and claim a skills shortage. The problem seems to be a basic misconception about how transferable software skills are. An excellent programmer with no experience in Python will be out performing a poor Python programmer in a matter of weeks, even though they have had to learn an entirely new language. This idea, however, seems entirely lost on most HR departments, and the result is an almost entirely "fake" skills shortage.

It's not just HR. I did an interview with a YC startup that obsessed over my lack of Rails experience. I have several years of industry relevant professional experience in Java, Python and PHP, but only ever dabbled in Ruby and Rails. Their offer (which did come through, grudgingly, through many repetitions of "so will you commit to teaching yourself rails before starting?" (No, I won't.) was quite a bit on the low end, but I'd probably have turned it down anyway for that strange lack of comprehension of programming skills.

I've had a lot of encounters with YC founders, most of them negative.

This anecdote well encapsulates the impression I had of a lot of them.

I'd really like to meet the better of the crop, because I can't imagine PG and Jessica (she's usually the expert on character and personality in YC interviews) are intentionally picking petty people.

I'm not the only person in the startup industry who's had this impression either. They remind me a lot of underqualified legacy Harvard kids who think they're god's gift because they snagged a status symbol.

Maybe the better founders are too busy shipping product to run into me :)

Nope, I totally disagree. Developers hate paying for things and love to build things themselves. There are a few successes, like GitHub, but they are outliers and on the whole developers are a terrible group to try to sell into. Your best bet at getting a developer product to succeed is to sell the tool to someone in another role (product, marketing, sales, etc) and have them convince the developer to use it.