I am sick and tired of hearing tech companies complain about developer shortages

NYC senior engineers typically earn $150k-$250k in salary.

Unless you want to be a lifeless drone for a HFT fund. But then living expenses aren't that high in NYC, compared to Bay area.

Upwards of 90% of applicants for many roles - talking about external postings, it's usually only 50% for internal - have clearly (in my experience) not even actually read the job posting, let alone have an understanding of what the job would entail or any of the requisite experience to be successful in it.

Many of the remaining 10% have read enough they'll try to fake the requisite experience or understanding of it, but on the job would fail almost immediately (and not in a coachable 'oh yeah, we use bit x instead of y here', but in a 'have no idea how to use the calendar App we use, despite claiming years of hands on experience). Only a couple % of applicants for a public posting will have the actual experience and ability to do the job.

And that is before we start talking about fit with others/ability to work in the culture effectively, and other soft skills.

I've had candidates apply for senior Java developer positions that couldn't write out the most basic class structure on a white board while claiming 10 years of experience (like class Foo {}), candidates applying for engineering managing jobs that struggled with basic arithmetic, candidates applying for executive admin jobs that had no idea how to process an inbox at all (except to sort everything with a billion filters - except I needed them to, you know, actually figure out what needed to happen and sort out the junk, not categorize the junk for me to sort through), and a million other weird things like that. I had a lawyer who wasn't a lawyer once. That one I filed a criminal complaint against.

Sometimes it may be brain lock, but in many cases I think it was fluffery and 'fake it till you make it' thinking.

A large part of being a successful company is figuring out how to filter out the frauds/incompetents/won't actually fit or work outs, from the people who can get things done and can work with everyone who is already there without making a giant mess. It's surprisingly hard. Most don't do a good job at it.

Not surprising to me, It's a field that pays an insane amount of money for such low barriers to entry (notably, it does not require expensive credentials). And there's swaths of stories out there about people going from 0-100 in a matter of months.

Additionally, this may be a popular opinions, but there are a lot of places where you don't have to be particularly competent where you can earn more money than you could otherwise.

How else is an underpayment problem going to get fixed but by demanding better? This is more of a “both and” situation in that there is not one “real” problem but several problems which are not part of a zero-sum game.

Hard to take this seriously with all the straw men and broad generalizations.

Reality check: there has never been a hotter seller's market for software engineering talent. The fact that you have not landed a job does not mean that supply is not short in general. Rather than blowing your stack at some recruiter who you heard on a podcast interview, you might want to reflect on yourself and how you might be coming off in job interviews.

As far as low pay goes, yeah, welcome to the labor market. It's easy to write a blog post about how companies need to pay more, but hard to reconcile the reality that if they don't have FAANG cash flows, "market rate" for developers may not be viable, regardless of management's good intentions or lack thereof.

And with regard to bad interviews, remember interviewers are individuals, with skillsets all over the map. Once you get more senior it gets even more frustrating to be judged by someone who has a fraction of your experience. Trust me when I say there is no value in dwelling on this or getting your undies in a bunch. Suck it up and figure out how to play the game (read CtCI, practice on interviewing.io, ask for feedback) and land the job, then do the best work you can every day. Angry screeds will not change anything about the industry and will not help you.