[filoleg]

> Which may well be true, but conflicts with the narrative that there is a severe shortage of people.

It might seem this way, because the narrative is almost intentionally simplified to the point of being vague enough to support almost any narrative.

Shortage is real, but what often is omitted is the fact that it is the shortage at the senior level. At the entry level, shortage isn't really a thing. It isn't an insane oversupply either, unless we are talking the few popular FAANGs, but it isn't a shortage at the entry level.

[jjav]

> Shortage is real, but what often is omitted is the fact that it is the shortage at the senior level.

There's more possibility of shortage at the senior level and in more specialized areas.

Still, I'm not entirely sure how real it might be. Depends how it is measured. I'm in very senior and somewhat specialized roles, so that's my perspective. I see lots of companies opening reqs in my area and never filling them. The same job posting will stay open for years, sometimes.

Now, is that a shortage? Obviously they are continuing to do business just fine for years even without filling that position. Presumably they are interviewing tons of people and never hiring anyone, because they don't really feel any pressure to fill the position (otherwise, they would).

So it's worth considering, does that opening even really exist? Technically it's posted, they might be interviewing, but if nobody is ever good enough to hire and they continue to operate without ever hiring anyone... it feels more like a phantom req. Should such phantom reqs even be counted towards stats of companies trying to hire?

[filoleg]

I 100% agree with you.

Just a generalist qualified senior engineer alone is something that is in shortage. If you dive into senior specializations, the shortage is even stronger.

My point was that the media and people tend to forget about the whole senior/entry distinction when it comes to shortages, and loudly proclaim "there is a shortage in tech" without specifying at which level, and then get a ton of entry level fresh grads yelling at them "no, there is no shortage, we struggle to get jobs".

>Should such phantom reqs even be counted towards stats of companies trying to hire?

If they are genuinely trying to hire someone for that position, but just have been unsuccessful to find a qualified candidate, then yeah, absolutely it should count. And I don't doubt they are trying to actually hire. Because why else would they spend tons of engineering time and money on interviewing people with zero intent to actually hire anyone.

Even where I work, we get tons of applications due to the company's high profile. And even when my team was desperate to hire a mid-senior level, we had to interview close to 50 people just to fill one position. It wasn't a competition for a single slot either, we were just looking for someone who was baseline qualified. If more than one emerged, we would have hired them all and just rerouted them to our sister teams who were looking to fill some positions as well, or to elsewhere in the company. But getting that one baseline competent person (we ain't talking about some 10x rockstar engineer type) was already a struggle.

[jjav]

> Because why else would they spend tons of engineering time and money on interviewing people with zero intent to actually hire anyone.

Not so much zero intent, but I see groups who keep job postings open for ages just perpetually holding out for that perfect unicorn that doesn't actually exist and can't exist (you know, the person who has 20 years experience in low-level kernel development but is also a UI design god and a full-time devops guru on the side; I exagerate but only slightly).

So technically they can claim shortage of experts, can't hire anyone. But meanwhile the team continues operating just fine for years even though this magical person can never be found.

So to those job postings, I consider them essentially fake. They just inflate the count of positions that can't be filled by a position that never will be filled.