Its more than that; companies also continuously propagate the message of "shortage of workers" while continuing to raise the requirements for entry level positions more and more. It reaches a point where "entry level" is not attainable for most fresh grads to get experience, and keeps their starting wages (and continuing wages) very well depressed due to the high supply.

Its a very targeted campaign to make sure educated workers are oversupplied, tied down with student debt, and don't get too many ideas of independence in their heads.

It's not just that. HR departments (who, let's be honest, were never exactly super-clear on what tech roles are or do because they're busy with everything else) have been infected by AI to the point that no one can just see a job and apply for it unless they rearrange everything in the resume to match the job posting verbiage exactly.

Everyone who makes it past that hurdle are sorted lowest-to-highest salary requirements. Oh you have seventeen years experience? Fuck you. Everyone after that is sorted by age/race/ whatever. It's the perfect system for fucking up tech hiring.

Unless you rebrand everything you do as AI. Then you'll get 100 million dollars from Zuckabug. (It used to be "cloud" but that was a long time ago now). So the tech manager who knows what they're looking for gets a bunch of applications from newbies who talk like AI is everything and they don't want that.

It's super fucked.

And this is why I'm not worried about my job, but I do recommend people stay away unless they really like it. I've interviewed far too many people who just can't hack it, yet they have multiple relevant jobs on their resume.

(...) I never once worked anywhere that there was a glut of jobs and “not enough bodies” to fill them.

I have. My first job wasn't the worst at this but it happened to some extent. My last company had such a huge disparity between work and employees that every single one of their IT projects (dunno about the rest) was in constant state of delays, hotfixing and putting out fires. Things were so bad people were moved between projects on daily basis and at one point management decided to throw everyone in the department (including folks who just joined the company and newbies with little to no programming experience) to triage one of them.

That's not to mention poaching team members from projects they promised more bodies to (only informing the client about the latter decision) and many other issues. They absolutely needed more people but the way the company is run does little to help with that.

The worst party? They're still growing as a company while their burnout rate stays unchanged. So yeah, it's a thing.

How much is it that these companies don't want to train. I have a hard time believing your job is so advanced and technical you couldn't find someone qualified at any point.

This is SO true. I'm hiring for a software engineer position right now. We've been looking for MONTHS. Recently, we've finally managed to fill the first head.

So many applicants just can't even code. My company is not a place where you learn how to code, it's a place where you learn all the stuff which you didn't think you'd have to do as a software engineer.

We still have a qualified applicants shortage.

Job shortage? Or too low pay?

a large number of people who want the money but aren’t qualified do what we’re looking for.

Sounds like these businesses should be training their employees instead of expecting the employees to train themselves.

College is a great scam because it puts the onus of training onto the worker, not the business. And like good useful idiots, the average person feels pride in being taken advantage of in this way.