> We are not seeing the evidence we would expect to see if this was a tight labor market.
The evidence of a tight labor market is in remuneration. If the appropriately skilled labor was so abundant, then there’s simply no way to explain the remuneration.
You can use some pretty simple first principles to explain the hiring practices. If you were advertising a high salary position in a tight labor market, what would you expect to happen? I would expect a huge amount of low/no skilled applicants to apply, and a small amount of appropriately skilled ones. Anybody who’s tried hiring to a decently paid engineering position has seen this for themselves. How would you expect companies to deal with this? I’d expect to see rigorous evaluations being performed on candidates.
The software industry also has some additional confounding factors, in that it’s filled with low quality products (although for which there is still plenty of demand). The average software product is low quality and poorly coded, because that’s the only kind of product that the average product manager, technical leader or software engineer knows how to make. Software is a very immature industry, and a result of that is it essentially has no consistent standards for quality. So if you want to implement your own standards, you have to content with the fact that a majority of the labor market won’t be able to meet them.
The evidence of a tight labor market is in remuneration. If the appropriately skilled labor was so abundant, then there’s simply no way to explain the remuneration.
You can use some pretty simple first principles to explain the hiring practices. If you were advertising a high salary position in a tight labor market, what would you expect to happen? I would expect a huge amount of low/no skilled applicants to apply, and a small amount of appropriately skilled ones. Anybody who’s tried hiring to a decently paid engineering position has seen this for themselves. How would you expect companies to deal with this? I’d expect to see rigorous evaluations being performed on candidates.
The software industry also has some additional confounding factors, in that it’s filled with low quality products (although for which there is still plenty of demand). The average software product is low quality and poorly coded, because that’s the only kind of product that the average product manager, technical leader or software engineer knows how to make. Software is a very immature industry, and a result of that is it essentially has no consistent standards for quality. So if you want to implement your own standards, you have to content with the fact that a majority of the labor market won’t be able to meet them.