As an employer, I find it extremely hard to find qualified people, and my entrepreneur friends are having even harder times, with people showing up for their first day of work either drunk, or not at all.
The 3.7% unemployment rate in Germany is considering something doing a part-time job for less than €400 per month as employed and the long term unemployed people are not part of the stats, the youths are also not in, etc. They are very good at removing many from the stats.
If you look at the industrial core of Germany, the Rhein/Ruhr region, you see cities after cities cut in two, one side with 35% of population living from social support and the other side with just 5%. When you "start" your life in the wrong side, you are out of the employment stats right from the start.
Note: I am French, living in Gelsenkirchen (such a typical city) and here, we have really hard time finding good engineers even with very good compensation and at the same time we have parts of the city where Doctors without Borders opened a station because the situation is catastrophic.
I can't find any reference to this station online (neither operated nor planned) and have never heard of anything remotely close (I work in the field). On the contrary, currently capacity is being reduced in the region due to permanently vacant hospital beds.
There are some stations for people without health insurance (usually undocumented people that fear detection). The nearest one should be in Duisburg operated by Malteser. Note that those are not because of low capacity but due to documentation requirements at regular hospitals.
> They are very good at removing many from the stats.
This is done by each and every single country, Germany is nothing special here. Very detailed numbers of all those groups usually "excluded" from the main headline statistic are published along with it. There is nothing being hidden. There are also ILO unemployment statistics calculated with the same methodology worldwide, they too look very good (and improving).
As a German I'm astonished, there are no hospitals?
This list gives 6 hospitals:
https://www.kliniken.de/krankenhaus/deutschland/ort/gelsenki...
Hospitals full?
Too many people without home who have no health insurance? (Main reason here in Berlin for doctors working in their spare time outside hospitals) Most people - with the exception of failed entrepreneurs - should have health insurance - you must have one if you have a job and there is one if you're on social security payments.
Any links? Doctors without Borders and Gelsenkirchen does not turn up anything in Google.
Everyone thinks they are offering good compensation, regardless of whether it actually is. Somehow, I doubt you'd have the issue if you offered 100k.
Numbers like 170k aren't seen too often in software engineering in Germany as far as I'm aware.
If you offer 100k (or 1M or whatever) you just move one engineer from another company to yours. So the other company now has a hard time finding a good engineer. If you increase your salary scale you will get an engineer who is moved away soon by another company which pays more money. In an optimal market, with p% missing engineers you will have p% of your positions open.
You can't plug holes with this strategy. The holes move around while salaries are increasing.
I've worked for a company that payed at the top 10% of salaries and we still couldn't find enough engineers.
But we would need to measure the elasticity of the engineering job market.
E.g. how much more people are becoming engineer if the average salary is going from 150k to 200k, as the salary scale compared to others is already high and should already pull people in.
If people aren't choosing the field, no matter how much you are offering new grads, it's an outreach problem and you solve it by making sure people have that information when they are making the decision. Or any other information, really, do you offer relocation assistance? Are your potential hires aware of that? Etc.
It seems to work relatively well for oil companies (else they wouldn't be doing it, right?).
>You can't plug holes with this strategy.
It's too late to be looking for crew when your ship is sinking.
>The holes move around while salaries are increasing.
Yes, of course. But eventually the 'musical chairs' make people move to a higher paying position, and the hole isn't even in your region/country anymore. At least not in your company. The issue with the strategy doesn't seem to be that it doesn't work, just that it takes too long to.
>I've worked for a company that payed at the top 10% of salaries and we still couldn't find enough engineers.
As the other poster mentioned, 10% of what? If the best people from France and Germany are already in Switzerland, you need to compete with Swiss companies, not the local ones that just take what's left.
With salaries in Berlin of $80k and >$100k or $150k in the valley, they currently don't think there is money made in that field? Wow. I do consider $100k a lot of money but YMMV.
"offer relocation assistance?"
Yes everyone I know does this.
"Are your potential hires aware of that?"
Yes.
"It seems to work relatively well for oil companies"
I have no data on oil companies or any experience with oil companies and if they have problems with finding enought good engineers or not. If you have any data, would be interesting, especially on the elasticity of that job market.
I can only speak about software development and hiring people for 20+ years, no clue about other fields.
"you need to compete with Swiss companies"
So I increase the salary to compete with Swiss companies, they increase salaries, holes move around.
Aside from that I assume Swiss companies already have their own holes - at least considering all the executive search calls I get.
You only can plug the holes with more engineers, not higher salaries (above a certain point). And it's questionable you can pull in more people into CS when salaries are already very high compared to most other occupations (but I have no numbers on the elasticity of the engineering job market).
Also: If most ads do not show salary information, how can I get more good engineers interviewing with higher salaries? The problem was not getting good engineers when they showed up for an interview, the problem was getting enough resumes - a problem everyone has outside Google,FB,...
We did some A/B testing on job ads, including salary information did not help. I'm a proponent for
https://stackoverflow.com/company/salary/calculator
But yes, I would double the salary and let go of half of the people if joining a company as CTO, I'm not against increasing salaries, but they don't close holes from my experience.
Are you sure about this? Here germany is not listed as country where they are currently have projects.
https://www.aerzte-ohne-grenzen.de/unsere-arbeit/einsatzlaen...
You can find plenty of people with a high school education but training one of them is less efficient then spending more time looking and more money on a qualified person. Which translates to nobody using a large swath of the labor force.
Uh is that statistical? Or just like one drunk person?