[Spooky23]

We do a shitty job at educating people, so it’s hard to hire qualified people in many industries.

Try finding a master plumber or electrician. Or a mid level IT person. They don’t exist.

Companies run so lean there’s no pipeline of internal candidates either. Where I work, it’s impossible to hire competent managers with technical skills. The normal places you’d look are full of young/inexperienced and old/stagnant.

[user5994461]

I am working at a place now with plenty of old and good managers who started with coding. If you call someone who stayed at a company more than 5 years "stagnant", you will never find a good manager.

Anyway. They've got good pay and good power in their positions. They rarely change jobs, you won't see them much in the job market.

[iamdave]

I can't speak to plumbing and electrical work, those aren't my industries but

Or a mid level IT person. They don’t exist.

My knee jerk reaction is to say "I absolutely refuse to believe this is true", but I will concede that the problem (here, I am defining problem not as a shortage of qualified talent, but a shortage of qualified talent that actually progresses to getting hired) exists because of symptoms you correctly highlighted "pipelines" and "competent managers". I will admit-however-to being biased as someone who's worked in IT for decades and later became a technical recruiter with an agency who wanted someone on staff that could have conversations with tech professionals on a meaningful, personal level.

Unrealistic or otherwise unsustainable hiring manager expectations and offensive constraints on salary compared with demanded skills seem to have created artificial scarcities of talent in IT hiring (pipeline). Candidates are expected to come in the door having every bullet point in a 120 bullet point job ad satisfied as to core-competencies, and when hired, they're given a workstation and sent off to the grind with just enough training and grooming to know the name of the product and the ability to rattle off a list of libraries and frameworks used. Skill gaps get resumes thrown out, even if it's some middling gap that with time and support from senior techs can be rapidly closed with a dose of on the job training. Something that seems as extinct as the pterodactyl nowadays.

Heck, just last week I had a talk with a recruiter who was looking for a DevOps Engineer (not strictly IT in the traditional sense of the phrase, but I bring this up to highlight my point) and we joked about one job spec that was looking for a senior level expert with five years experience in Kubernetes (competent managers). Let that one soak in. The hiring manager demanded a five year expert in Kubernetes, which hasn't been around for a full three.

My recruiter friend told me they dropped this client after a few more job specs like this because they couldn't get a single candidate past a pre-screening due to hiring manager expecting the world-and they were preparing to do the same to a few other clients for the same reason. I asked if she were worried about what this would do to their billings "No, because we have other clients who pay us more, but have much more manageable expectations on job candidates."

I wish this were the exception versus the norm but if I have to hear one more time that there aren't qualified IT people I will probably rip what's left of my greying hair right out of my head because if this is true, it's not the fault of IT personnel, it's the fault of everyone involved in the hiring process refusing to manage their own darn expectations.

[RhodesianHunter]

"offensive constraints on salary"

This is the entirety of it right here. There's only a shortage when your pay is below market.

[user5994461]

This relates to my experience from within a company. When recruiters don't want to work with you anymore, there is something wrong going on with you.

There was also the issue with salary. You won't find any senior DevOps with a clue because anyone who can ssh to a server moved to contracting and is paid double what your perm job is offering.