It's kind of funny -but more like funny-weird, not funny-haha- when I read some of these articles.
I don't mean that in a bad way. The article is well written and, to some extent, well thought. The problem is they usually -as in this case- extrapolate a fairly limited experience to a very general explanation of just about everything. This can be also noticed in some of the absolutely tiring clichés of engineers being Trekkies and dorks and whatever. But more than that, it usually ends up being that the conclusions reached are mostly a mishmash of reasonable things which miss the point, at least as a general explanation.
But, as I can't consider myself an expert in the USA job market -or should I say "the quite specific USA FPGA / RTL design engineers job market"-, I'll do something else instead. I'll paint you the picture of a very different market, the Spanish IT job market. The common point is they also whine a lot about an engineer shortage and a lack of available skilled force.
Here the market is defined by the following:
- The market is mostly dominated by a handful of big players. At the tipping point, there's maybe 6-8 large companies that hire a lot of developers -even though I personally think they don't really need so many-. These are, mostly, bank and insurance. There's also one or two more directly IT related.
- The market is actually layered through a pile of leeching^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hconsulting companies. There's an initial layer of larger "IT consulting" and "IT Integrators" who provide the above banks and large companies. Then there's the smaller ones which mostly provide bodies to the bigger ones. It is not uncommon for a particular job to involve at least 2 subcontracting steps. It's also not uncommon for them to lie about it at the beginning of the hiring process.
- Salaries are being contained or even lowered right now. It's hard to break around this because of hidden price collusion. Right now, as I said, salaries are low. Every time someone mentions "talent shortage" there's at least half a dozen of comments saying "well, pay more" or "don't pay so low, then". Personally, I'd say that most IT related jobs, and particularly those that actually create/operate/maintain the things, are being pushed into being considered as an "operator level" job. Low pay, easily disposable. Experience is, generally, an uninteresting trait beyond 2-3 years, and job offers reflect that. Entry level jobs are, again, paying low to very low. I know it can't be but it all feels kind of orchestrated. I mean, it can; it has been done before, but I'd rather think it can't be.
- Job offers hardly even mention anything. I've seen some hiring companies which will simply not put any details at all, not even technologies involved or anything. In any case, there must be fierce competition there because they all tend to be more secretive than usual. Not only will they not give you the name of the company -which may be understandable- it can sometimes be hard to even get general information like what sector it works on or an approximate location. This is most frequent, obviously, when it is not one of those big, few banks or insurance companies.
- Hiring processes are mostly clueless. They are heavily focused into that "operator mode" and usually ask for stupid things like very specific versions of tools -e.g. like "I see Spring Boot mentioned in your resume, but which version? You don't mention which and I'm looking for version 2.5.x" or "I need to ask you exactly how much experience in years you have with Angular 8 and how much with Angular 11"-. You can easily have to go through technical tests -and I mean things like building a 40+ hour demo project- even before they will even talk to you at all. In a couple of cases these were so specific and large one could even wonder if they were actually getting some smaller tools done for free through this.
- Job security is mostly a myth. During 2020 and 2021, quite a few of the big hiring companies and many of the body providers simply dropped hundreds or thousands of developers with little more than a snap of their fingers. To some extent they are trying to re-hire now, but not as much and, naturally, with lower salaries.
- There is, sure, a smaller market where smaller companies hire. This is a bit of a hit or miss. Most of them don't/can't pay too much but are, usually, better places to work at. There are also a number of startups -and companies calling themselves "a startup" because it's cool-. Most of these come and go, of course, and only a few of them aren't working on yet another "customer experience optimization" thing -i.e. tracking and advertising- or on "online gaming which actually turns out to be online gambling". One or two of those startups have even thought about a business model that is not crossing their fingers very hard.
- There's also the "agile market". Even if you like Agile, this is a circus. I've seen ratios of "agile coaches to sw engineers" which would make anyone wonder if anything is done at all in there. And the answer is no, obviously. I spent some months watching one of those big banks which don't want to be called a bank any more and it was absolutely ridiculous. I vividly remember some sort of retrospective meeting or whatever they called it where literally everyone was lying to avoid saying no progress at all had been made in the last 3 month period. And everyone knew everyone was lying. And still, these "agile coaches" were doing some happy dances and saying "good, good, this is very good, we're doing very well". I don't mean this as an attack on Agile, but more on the fact that it has been co-opted to burn loads of money at some of these larger companies. I mean, it's business as usual, but now under the name of Agile. It's sad.
All in all, here in Spain the answer to why it's hard to find engineers right now is... it isn't. But some players have twisted and broken the whole system so much that the job isn't that interesting any more.