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by Keetron 1712 days ago
The biggest surprise for me in the current market is how employers and companies are complaining about the lack of skilled people but are unwilling to shift their own behavior to become more desirable to workers.

For example, they ask for a Sr Developer that ticks all the boxes and needs to come into the office in the inner city in a European capitol every day of the work week. The compensation is meh and not substantially different from any other company out there.

So the great resignation is hitting those that fail to realize wages need to go up to attract talent especially in the light of the growing wealth of the 1%. Pay well and substantially more than your competitors and people will be more reluctant to leave for greener pastures. The ability to work from home once in a while is not a favor handed to those that behave well, it is the other way around: I'll come in if there is a clear need for me to be there and do not expect me to wear noise cancelling headphones to try and concentrate on coding in an open office. Finally, grow your own skilled and experienced people, you had years to develop a pipeline of less experienced engineers. The complaint: "I train people just for them to leave" is stupid, ask yourself and them WHY they leave and then up your incentives.

But anyway, I am leaving a team in a week, there is no replacement for me and development on this component will basically halt as there is nobody else in the company that can do the work I did as those people are all busy on other things. Product Management is pulling out their hair as to how it could be this way and when I try to explain their continuous push for functionality over maintainable code they ask me how I would fix that. There is never a technological fix for cultural problems so yeah, I left.

4 comments

> The biggest surprise for me in the current market is how employers and companies are complaining about the lack of skilled people but are unwilling to shift their own behavior to become more desirable to workers.

I don't think it's really surprising - what makes sense for the business does not necessarily make sense for the middle management writing the hiring requirements. Bob doesn't want to deal with remote subordinates because he has no idea how to. He also doesn't want to hire outside the US because he's never done it before and doesn't want to learn.

Of course, Bob isn't going to go to _his_ supervisor and say all this - that would be career suicide. So we get all sorts of silly excuses about why they need people in the office or only hire from X country.

And all that is going to persist until people like Bob are forced to adapt or lose their jobs. The real question is this though: how much are developer salaries inflated because of stupid, self-serving requirements from people like Bob?

It also seems that companies don't want to train people. Everyone wants people that are seniors and experts in all the technologies.
Everyone should be a full-stack developer, so the company only needs to hire one developer per project. Or maybe one developer for multiple projects.

Maybe one day, the typical software company structure will be an inverse pyramid, with one developer at the bottom, and hundreds of managers on top of them. That would certainly solve the problem with shortage of skilled developers.

> The complaint: "I train people just for them to leave" is stupid, ask yourself and them WHY they leave and then up your incentives.

Also worth considering: what if you don't train them and they stay?!

> The biggest surprise for me in the current market is how employers and companies are complaining about the lack of skilled people [...]

They do complain about that, but would anyone agree with such statements? I do participate in tech interviews in my current company and we get tons of applicants. Now, sure, the company I work for is raising the bar every year and is only looking for "the best of the best" (honestly, we don't need that, we are an average tech company). I don't think there is a lack of skilled people: it's just that every damn tech company out there thinks they are Google.