I was reading yet another article about Yahoo and Marissa Meyer this week. Apparently she’s fixed the company’s biggest problem – talent. Read all about it here on QZ

I pulled a couple of insights from this article that I can’t help but comment on. First, the long tenured Head of HR at Yahoo was replaced by a former private equity exec. Then, they went on a buying spree, but not for market share or synergies, which drives many acquisitions, Yahoo bought 37 companies including Tumblr for over a billion dollars – for their talent. For other CEO’s who have “talent” as a goal, and they all should, this is an interesting strategy right? Their CFO was quoted as saying they lost a lot of talent and companies didn’t even want to be acquired by them so they had to pay a “Yahoo Premium.” Apparently their reputation has been repaired to a certain extent because the number of job applications more than doubled in the past year and they are the third highest paying company for engineers in the Silicon Valley. I’ll get to the pay issue again later but one other interesting place that Yahoo doesn’t score well is being a great place to work. Mayer’s ideas in that area haven’t been as big a hit. According to Glassdoor, which provides the salary info too, Yahoo did not make the 50 best places to work list like their other high tech peers.

Now let’s talk turkey. If you clicked the link to the QZ story above, I hope you noticed the table that lists average base salaries for engineers. If you didn’t, let me enlighten you. I remember when I was growing up, not that long ago by the way, the cool careers were law and medicine. They came with good pay and prestige – the two most popular TV shows were St. Elsewhere and L.A. Law. I wanted to be a lawyer for a very long time – until I bombed the LSAT and did some internships that is. I have friends who are doctors, that’s no picnic either, lots of headaches with insurance and patients. Here’s some advice for you parents out there – get your kids into software engineering or let them develop their own social network app.

At Juniper Networks, the highest paying company in the Silicon Valley, the average base salary for engineers was $159,900 last year. LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook all pay over $120,000 a year.

Oh, and by the way, there is no end in sight to the demand for software engineers. Everything runs on software and everything will for the foreseeable future. Remember, Yahoo bought 37 companies to get their engineers. Forget clarinet lessons and getting into the Ivy League, let your kids absorb and learn to love technology because we need them to take care of us so we can eventually retire.