this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2025
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The first sentence of the article shows the problem.
I worked in tech for a long time, at a bunch of different companies, and I never once worked anywhere that there was a glut of jobs and “not enough bodies” to fill them.
The problem wasn’t ever “bodies,” which people have always misunderstood. It’s qualified workers.
The people going into these careers includes a large number of people who want the money but aren’t qualified do what we’re looking for.
Its more than that; companies also continuously propagate the message of "shortage of workers" while continuing to raise the requirements for entry level positions more and more. It reaches a point where "entry level" is not attainable for most fresh grads to get experience, and keeps their starting wages (and continuing wages) very well depressed due to the high supply.
Its a very targeted campaign to make sure educated workers are oversupplied, tied down with student debt, and don't get too many ideas of independence in their heads.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. A lot of college grads I've interviewed come out expecting to be senior level when they don't even have a basic foundation of IT. Don't expect to get paid 6 figures right out of college when you have 0 experience and can't even provide basic answers to questions that help desk people know. Colleges have lied to them that we(the IT industry) needs them and that they're special. Show me you have the foundation before telling me how the industry works.
University is not a job training program though. A degree demonstrates that you have the skills to figure things out, not that you already have everything figured out. Even with decades of experience, it takes me a bit of time to spin up on a new library, framework, programming language, etc.
Companies are supposed to provide this training, not just to new hires, but to all employees. It does take a little extra time to teach new hires, but their salaries are also lower so it should balance out. And if they want to keep those employees around, then they should give them generous pay increases so they don't just jump for a salary increase.
Sorry but a degree just demonstrates that you can pass exams and follow rules. Almost all new graduates I knew had a big ego, a lack of critical thinking, that combined in a massive Dunning Kruger effect. They are better middle management material than engineers. They can't even RTFM, like c'mon. And AI is just making all this worse.
Exactly!
And that's why I generally ask about FOSS work. If you're contributing to upstream projects as a hobby, then you've demonstrated that you can jump into a larger codebase and figure out their procedures and style guidelines, which means you can probably do the same here.
Failing that, I ask them to apply the theory they learned in school to practical problems, like "how would you use design pattern A for problem X? What about pattern B? How do you decide between the two?" Most people can't tell me what A or B is, and they can't even solve problem X with their own methods... I don't care about people knowing arbitrary design patterns, I care that they can reason about problems, consider multiple approaches, and decide between those approaches given the larger context of the project.
So many people just fall flat on their face in an interview on concepts they should have learned in their third year, which even our people who didn't go to college can do since they've been on the job for a few years. Show me you're better than a self-taught person and a few years of experience if you want anything other than an intern role.
I don’t mean “doesn’t know the flavour of Linux” I mean doesn’t conceptually know what a web server is so can’t restart the service running on the box.
Yeah, it’s going to be a couple years before you break into the high earner. The problem is that silly valley was hiring tech grads at $300k total comp when money was cheap. Money isn’t cheap anymore.
AI money is stupid cheap if you know who to bullshit. And, y'know, have no principles.
God this is true.
I've seen some real snake oil projects get massive finding and everyone on board getting promos.
At least in our university, web dev was an elective, not a required core CS class. It's totally reasonable for them to not know how to deal w/ a web server when all they've done up to that point is algorithms.
We had a Ph.D work for us who struggled w/ that type of thing. They were absolutely brilliant in their niche (complex 3D modeling of fluid simulations), but integrating their work into our web stack was a nightmare for them (but fairly trivial for us). I asked them to structure their code in a way that would be easy for us to plug in to our web stack, and they looked at me like I was speaking Latin, when all I wanted was a simple entry-point with clearly defined inputs (give me a function to call that doesn't need a bunch of magic numbers).
If you want a web dev, hire someone w/ web dev experience or be willing to teach them. Not everyone in CS has that experience.
Not to mention that many IT degrees are basically worthless as far as practical experience is concerned. You'd be better off spending $100k on certification training.
There's a LOT of training you have to do to get a new grad up to speed. But they can go far once the first couple of years.
I knew of a company that listed an internal tool as a job requirement so they could claim a skill shortage and hire foreign workers. They coached them to put that tool on their resume.
That's ridiculous.
I'm glad my company doesn't mention specifics. We mention some details about our stack, but we've hired people with almost no experience in anything in our stack and we've been happy. We want competent professionals who are interested in learning our stack.
It doesn’t help that conpanies lie on their requirements in job postings. Even entry level retail jobs are asking for 2-3 years of retail experience. That’s just insulting to those with retail experience and an impossible “entry level” requirement. Leads people to just ignore any requirements.
It's not just that. HR departments (who, let's be honest, were never exactly super-clear on what tech roles are or do because they're busy with everything else) have been infected by AI to the point that no one can just see a job and apply for it unless they rearrange everything in the resume to match the job posting verbiage exactly.
Everyone who makes it past that hurdle are sorted lowest-to-highest salary requirements. Oh you have seventeen years experience? Fuck you. Everyone after that is sorted by age/race/ whatever. It's the perfect system for fucking up tech hiring.
Unless you rebrand everything you do as AI. Then you'll get 100 million dollars from Zuckabug. (It used to be "cloud" but that was a long time ago now). So the tech manager who knows what they're looking for gets a bunch of applications from newbies who talk like AI is everything and they don't want that.
It's super fucked.
How much is it that these companies don't want to train. I have a hard time believing your job is so advanced and technical you couldn't find someone qualified at any point.
Training people up would be a great idea when you have the attitude that you're going to keep working there for 30 years. Those old "company man" jobs are all but gone. If you stay at a job 5 years, people start to wonder if there's something wrong with you. That's just starting to be enough time for training to be worth the investment.
If tech was unionized, and the union had the attitude that they are basically a trade guild that will build up your skills, that would change things.
In my experience there is a huge gap between those that are smart and enthusiastic and those that are just average. I consider myself part of the former group and I can't blame coworkers for just doing their job and go home. But it means the gap just widens.
This has been my experience as well, since I started in community college in the early 2000s.
There is an unfortunately large difference in tech between a person who has an innate interest and someone who is checking the boxes to get and keep a job.
Both would get the job done wouldn't they?
But one you can underpay and abuse because they are excited. The other has a lot better idea of what they'll accept and will leave when it's not worth it anymore.
Not in the same way… which is the issue.
It’s a skilled profession, so ideally you want someone who is more skilled, and the person who has interest is more skilled.
It works similarly with other skilled professions like carpenters.
I've been in both industries. Hiring carpenters you're hiring people who have qualifications and experience. The way it should be.
You're not trying to make the carpenters calculate the roofing truss cuts through convoluted 3 days of interviews.
I believe Tech hiring is more about ego of the hiring managers and team more than it is about hiring qualified people.
Average in my mind is what the hiring process should be looking for. I would think the average one is someone who gets the job done. Like there is some diminishing returns trying to find above average or hire. The effort needed to get that best of the best turns into what we have now. Plus what I see, the best of the best are job hopping anyways.
And this is why I'm not worried about my job, but I do recommend people stay away unless they really like it. I've interviewed far too many people who just can't hack it, yet they have multiple relevant jobs on their resume.
This is SO true. I'm hiring for a software engineer position right now. We've been looking for MONTHS. Recently, we've finally managed to fill the first head.
So many applicants just can't even code. My company is not a place where you learn how to code, it's a place where you learn all the stuff which you didn't think you'd have to do as a software engineer.
We still have a qualified applicants shortage.
This to me is actually the “secret” of software engineering: it’s frequently doing the stuff you didn’t think you’d have to do as a software engineer.
The hard part is often finding someone who can do both while also wanting to work at your company.
Hit me up if you want a job where you'll be forced to learn about inter-satellite laser links (free space optics)!
You guys hiring remotely?
unfortunately definitely not.
my team has a strong emphasis on working with hardware. remote work doesn't really make sense
That's fair, a solid reason for requesting office presence at least.
May I ask which country? The work seems super interesting, but unfortunately some countries aren’t too happy with foreigners right now, even if I’m whiter than mayonnaise.
You can probably guess, but the US
I figured.
Sounds like these businesses should be training their employees instead of expecting the employees to train themselves.
College is a great scam because it puts the onus of training onto the worker, not the business. And like good useful idiots, the average person feels pride in being taken advantage of in this way.
One issue is that you can’t just take a person and train them. Not everyone will excel, so you want proven people instead of playing the lottery. It’s great because now only senior engineers get hired and nobody trains more of them, increasing the shortage so now they want to stay importing them.
Job shortage? Or too low pay?
I have. My first job wasn't the worst at this but it happened to some extent. My last company had such a huge disparity between work and employees that every single one of their IT projects (dunno about the rest) was in constant state of delays, hotfixing and putting out fires. Things were so bad people were moved between projects on daily basis and at one point management decided to throw everyone in the department (including folks who just joined the company and newbies with little to no programming experience) to triage one of them.
That's not to mention poaching team members from projects they promised more bodies to (only informing the client about the latter decision) and many other issues. They absolutely needed more people but the way the company is run does little to help with that.
The worst party? They're still growing as a company while their burnout rate stays unchanged. So yeah, it's a thing.