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

Leetcode implies complex, contrived algorithm scenarios presented to be taken apart in a brief interview (usually at most 40 minutes for the coding question). Real world scenarios do not resemble leetcode questions, and hard real world problems are solved with more time and careful thought.

This creates serious inertia. Once you are 3-4+ years into a job, you probably haven't done much leetcode studying in a while outside of you doing interviews yourself. Interviewing at other companies is actually a pain in the ass, so it's often not worth the bother.

> 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.

Is that a sign of monopoly? When a handful of corporations have vastly more resources than the rest of the industry?

> Are any companies actually trying to recruit like this? And is it successful beyond just throwing up a hiring post and not getting anything?

During an active season (spring, fall, usually) I get one of these a day, or every other day at least. Other times it slows to a trickle--1 a week or so. Usually it's some "I have an urgent requirement for a 6 months contract position for $45/hr. with (litany of skills/responsibilities that screams shitty Dilbert-esque cesspool). This is for in person only at (place on the east coast which would require me to uproot my family and move across country)" style content. Some of the more amusing ones are for contract positions in the Bay Area--those usually have people who, bless their hearts, think they're making an effort with $75-$80/hr rates.

You can't talk about a shortage of something if you aren't specifying the price you are offering. It's like me saying there's a shortage of new Porsche 911s because I only have $20,000 and can't seem to buy one anywhere. If I had $100K in my pocket, I would not observe any shortage. Same thing for tech workers. You can't just offer the usual compensation and standard benefits and then say "See, we just can't seem to find anyone! Obviously there's a shortage!"

I've mentioned this on HN before, but I have 10+ years experience, a BS in CS from a top 10 school, worked as SWE at Google for over 3 years, I've done 100+ leetcode questions, studied grokking the systems interview/designing data intensive applications, I live in the Bay Area, and I've _still_ failed 90% of my onsites last few years at the top tech companies (Stripe, Lyft, AirBnB, Square, Dropbox, etc).

Reasons for failure vary, you don't get much feedback but when I've gotten it it's been distributed across coding/systems/behavioral.

I've also been rejected at resume round by companies like Instacart and Coinbase.

The interview bar has gotten insanely high it seems. And I left Google way back without anything lined up assuming in this job market I could waltz into a good job with some modest prep but that has not been the case.

I objectively have top credentials, and I find tech interviewing an absolute nightmare. The standards have gone through the roof and one slip up and you get dinged. And the system is way more arbitrary and subjective than anyone admits.

Now, this isn't a woe-is-me story becasue to your point, there's a lot of companies paying top dollar and I have a decently paid job. Furthermore, I'm not failing interviews at random startups but as senior engineer at top companies that would probably offer $400k if they made an offer. They have the right to be extremely picky and subjective, but let's at least admit that they _are_ extremely picky and subjective.

The "I'm a HM and can't hit dev targets", reeks of ignorance as to your own process. I wonder if you do things like tell your interviewers "a false negative is better than a false positive" ? Or let one interviewer use some arbitrary criteria to dock a candidate and then pass on them because of one bad score? Because you probably do lack perspective on how many good devs your company is rejecting if you're only sitting on the HM chair and not seeing what it feels like to go through these rounds as an IC SWE.