It's not a talent shortage, it's a hiring problem

I just went through a long job search process in San Francisco, and I actually feel exactly the same way.

I told several companies "no thank you" after going through their interview processes, where the only thing they did was asking one whiteboard coding question after another. None of which had anything to do with the real-world domain of their business. The company that I ended up joining didn't ask any - their questions were no less technical, but they were experience-based, rather than quiz-based.

My current reading of the job market around me, and I may well be just in a funky mood so forgive me, is that all the IT job listings seem to itemize all the ways you won't be allowed to be creative, and also list a bunch of surprisingly general, and contradictory, experience requirements. They promote any kind of actual CS knowledge as being a masters degree skill only needing 10 years in direct experience in a 10 year old technology. This combination sounds like they have a bunch of old crap that they've built up to be so complex that no one wants to maintain it, and it will take a year for anyone to understand it anyway. So that's the total message like "here, you take this," but the HR people can only translate the requirements into someone that doesn't exist, because they want someone to hit the ground running, on an amateur complexity study.

I used to passive-agressively mention this to our HR department and my old job all the time. The basic "Software Engineer" posting has "At least 3 years of desktop or server software development" as a requirement. I always liked to point out that I (and everyone else they hired out of college) wasn't qualified for the jobs we were doing.

They're in Michigan, so finding development talent is a little bit harder so I don't know why they're discouraging college students from applying by having pointless job requirements that don't actually matter.

Yes, there is something wrong. I had a good friend put himself on the job market six months ago. He has the total package -- has worked on and shipped well-known products, has reviewable open-source projects and contributions, great academic pedigree, nice guy, even good looking -- I said something like, "You'll have five offers at the end of this week".

Three months later, no offer. What was most interesting was how few interviews he received. He went with the cold resume drop approach. It's almost as if no one reads them at all.

He eventually just took a job with someone he knew from a company he worked with in the past. And in fairness he has several open door offers (I've told him that if he ever wants to work with me, just email me a start date).

But the fact that someone who I would actually describe as top 1% of devs I've worked with can't get a job without relying on his network is kind of scary. Imagine if you want to ever change from one sub-industry to another. And some of the companies he applied to are the same ones you'll hear complaining about the lack of qualified talent, yet they didn't even do a phone screen on someone who I am confident is a lot better than 90% of their current workforce.

I had this exact same experience. It sucks. I actually didn't start getting job offers until I spent a week basically memorizing my entire computer science education.

It doesn't matter what you've accomplished if you don't remember what a red-black tree is you don't know how to program.