This is the obvious point which needs to be repeated till it sinks in. We are not seeing the evidence we would expect to see if this was a tight labor market.
As a point of contrast, consider American industry in 1942, as the nation mobilized for war. It doesn’t matter what profession you look at, the attitude everywhere was “Just show up and we can train you.” That applied to welders and bolt tighteners and also the engineers who designed tanks and aircraft. Every company was hiring and every company was willing to hire inexperienced workers and then train them.
I've gotten a couple of those "show up and we'll train you" jobs but with a catch - the hiring people didn't believe that "anyone" could be trained quickly to do it. But I convinced them that I could.
Now that I've been on the other side of the table for a while, there's no shortage of candidates looking for job, but there's a (real or not) perceived shortage of quality candidates. And the thing that makes it really screwy is that we don't even know how to train developers very well. CS programs don't teach the "art"/"instinctual" part of it, bootcamps don't, even many jobs don't. Yet the difference between a bad codebase and a good one can have impacts a project that persist for years after those first developers have moved on...
> We are not seeing the evidence we would expect to see if this was a tight labor market.
The evidence of a tight labor market is in remuneration. If the appropriately skilled labor was so abundant, then there’s simply no way to explain the remuneration.
You can use some pretty simple first principles to explain the hiring practices. If you were advertising a high salary position in a tight labor market, what would you expect to happen? I would expect a huge amount of low/no skilled applicants to apply, and a small amount of appropriately skilled ones. Anybody who’s tried hiring to a decently paid engineering position has seen this for themselves. How would you expect companies to deal with this? I’d expect to see rigorous evaluations being performed on candidates.
The software industry also has some additional confounding factors, in that it’s filled with low quality products (although for which there is still plenty of demand). The average software product is low quality and poorly coded, because that’s the only kind of product that the average product manager, technical leader or software engineer knows how to make. Software is a very immature industry, and a result of that is it essentially has no consistent standards for quality. So if you want to implement your own standards, you have to content with the fact that a majority of the labor market won’t be able to meet them.
As a point of contrast, consider American industry in 1942, as the nation mobilized for war. It doesn’t matter what profession you look at, the attitude everywhere was “Just show up and we can train you.” That applied to welders and bolt tighteners and also the engineers who designed tanks and aircraft. Every company was hiring and every company was willing to hire inexperienced workers and then train them.