Discussion: Job seekers can't find a job and Employers can't find an employees

At that point your best option is to open an office in India/Israel/Eastern Europe because at least people don't complain as much, you get similar productivity (depending on what you pay), and you don't need to deal with a lot of these headaches.

The same thing happened to the CPA/Accounting industry in the 1990s.

> Employers have already shifted enough of their job training costs onto universities and their unwitting students. The free ride is over.

I'm fine with this model, but will applicants be interested in earning a bit above minimum wage for 3 years as we train them from scratch?

This is the model that the Indian and Chinese tech industry uses - hire everyone, pay them a pittance, make them work insane hours, and the ones who survive and build relevant skills graduating to European level salaries in Asia.

1. An explosion in international applicants due to the shift to remote since Covid. This means job posting that used to get an overwhelming number of applicants (100+) are now getting so many applicants (5000+) it's literally impossible to properly evaluate.

2. It has become trivial to apply for a job. Aggregator sites like Otta and Cord send you alerts as soon as they've scraped a new job posting. As such, applicants are spraying their CV to every single job they get notified about.

3. ATS usage has skyrocketed (the ATS startup space has exploded as a result), because of 1. and 2., forcing even early-stage startups to use an ATS just to be able to screen the candidates. As an applicant, if you don't hit the keywords, your CV wont even be seen by human eyes.

4. Because of 3., applicants are polluting their CVs with keywords and resorting to ChatGPT to build their CVs. As a hiring manager, you use the ATS to narrow down a list of candidates, then look at the CVs, and they're useless for actually evaluating the candidate. (Keyword chasing has always been the case, but it's gotten to ridiculous levels at the moment)

5. Fake jobs. There is not a company on this planet that would not want to speak with an ex-Googler if one was interested. As such, in the hopes someone exceptional applies, they keep job posts up even if they're not recruiting, and fewer companies are labeling them appropriately (open role/wildcard/other).

6. Hyper-specialization of companies. We're seeing fewer and fewer companies willing to embrace a multi-product mindset, who are pigeonholing themselves into a very tight niche.

7. So, so much of the work you would need a dev for in the past, has now been delegated to SaaS driven by a non-dev in the company. Think Rudderstack, Mixpanel, Customer.io, Squarespace, etc.

8. The ROI of hiring software engineers specifically has gone through the roof. A single dev is able to provide immense value given the SaaS tools they have access to now. You would think this means companies would want more devs, but 6. and 7. means companies have less and less dev work required to reach PMF and profitability.

9. There is a massive segment of the software engineering talent pool that can only build integrations and simple CRUD applications. Because of 7., demand for them is diminishing. A lot of these devs have been doing integration work for a decade, and are now finding themselves competing for the same jobs with actual computer scientists, leading to very confusing outcomes (someone with 20 years of experience unable to land a job, someone with 2 years of experience doing better at a technical interview than someone with 10).

English fluency and/or Employment Laws are a big issue as well.

Most companies have already had an Israeli or Indian subsidiary since the 1990s-2000s.

Most didn't start entering Eastern Europe until the 2010s, and much of that was in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus thanks to EPAM and the massive Soviet Diaspora in the US.

Poland, Czechia, and Romania are known quantities, but newish (late 2000s/early 2010s), and the larger ecosystem (not just engineers but lawyers, bureaucrats, accountants, etc that you need to run a subsidiary) don't have working English fluency and in some countries are Indian bureaucracy level headaches (looking at you Bulgaria) with the added lack of an English speaking ecosystem headaches.

In all honesty, if the Russia-Ukraine War didn't start in 2014, much of the Eastern EU's tech scene would have been much weaker as it's largely powered by the UKR/RUS/BEL diaspora who emigrated the moment all 3 countries entered an economic and social tailspin.

At a previous employer 5-7 years ago, we had an office in Czechia, but most of the Engineers were Russians or Ukrainians.