There's such a flood of qualified labor that employers can afford to arbitrarily shrink the pool of applicants without significantly worsening their outcomes. Their behavior indicates that just the top N% of the market is enough to fill the needs of all selective companies. "Top" can be a semi-random filter, since the pool of basically competent people is much deeper than N.
(There's also a much larger flood of people who aren't qualified, which definitely complicates the process.)
All else equal, if employers simply stopped rejecting qualified applicants for arbitrary reasons, they could solve the "shortage" overnight and pay much lower wages that developers would still accept. But all else isn't equal. Their past decisions shaped the playing field, so now external-but-related factors like the housing market and competitors' responses limit their options in practice. They can't just take a bunch of people and drop wages, even though they "could", without disrupting other things that aren't worth disrupting.
Edit: Too late to delete, but this is not a good analysis. Companies are clearly feeling some pressure to do something, but there are too many unknowns in this to draw the conclusion, and a ton of factors I've ignored.
Not exactly. If every employer randomly threw out 80% of the resumes without looking at them, and then perfectly evaluated the remaining 20%, then you would expect that all qualified developers would have a job (they just might have to apply to several jobs to get an offer).
I don't think the filter is literally random. It's a poor predictor of success, applied inconsistently.
Just from what I've heard and experienced, I'd guess that if N = Q (percentage of qualified workers), everyone in N would find some job as you describe. Alice gets Apple and Google but not Netflix, Bob gets Netflix but not Apple.
Could Alice do Bob's job at Netflix, or vice-versa? Absolutely. Does Apple care they could have had Bob? Does Netflix care they could have had both? Not really.
Everyone in N lands somewhere, eventually, enough though a better process could have had a better outcome overall. Maybe Alice really wanted Netflix; maybe she picks Netflix-like projects at Apple that aren't Apple's best use of her skills. Maybe that rejection shook her confidence or maybe she's distracted getting ready for another Netflix interview next year. (She's learned she has to study really hard at who-knows-what to prove she's capable of doing a job she's already doing.)
Does Apple care? Not really. Her manager might, but not Apple. Inefficient allocation is death by a thousand cuts.
The greater problem is when Q > N and the difference keeps growing. If you take the Googler joke of PhDs as protobuf jockeys at face value, that's where we've been for a while. But I don't know if we are.
There's such a flood of qualified labor that employers can afford to arbitrarily shrink the pool of applicants without significantly worsening their outcomes. Their behavior indicates that just the top N% of the market is enough to fill the needs of all selective companies. "Top" can be a semi-random filter, since the pool of basically competent people is much deeper than N.
(There's also a much larger flood of people who aren't qualified, which definitely complicates the process.)
All else equal, if employers simply stopped rejecting qualified applicants for arbitrary reasons, they could solve the "shortage" overnight and pay much lower wages that developers would still accept. But all else isn't equal. Their past decisions shaped the playing field, so now external-but-related factors like the housing market and competitors' responses limit their options in practice. They can't just take a bunch of people and drop wages, even though they "could", without disrupting other things that aren't worth disrupting.
Edit: Too late to delete, but this is not a good analysis. Companies are clearly feeling some pressure to do something, but there are too many unknowns in this to draw the conclusion, and a ton of factors I've ignored.