I was also puzzled by this earlier in my career. If tech is so hot why is it hard to get hired? I will now share the answer I spent years looking for with you, perhaps it will help.

There’s an enormous shortage of software developers. What there is not though, is an enormous shortage of software developer applicants. By this I mean people who heard programming was good money, went two weeks to rockstar coding ninja boot camp react JS and are now applying to job postings that say “lead engineer”.

So you are a hiring manager trying to find a team lead for your next project, you put out a job ad and you get 500 resumes for folks who can’t code their way out of a CS1 exam. In reality you need to reject all of them. But you can’t reject all of them, because if we could implement a hiring manager with a mail rule what would we need hiring managers for?

So instead we set up some convoluted method to reject nearly all of them that is not obviously equivalent to a mail rule. Phone screens, coding tests, five rounds of interviews so if in a desperate moment we do hire this idiot at least four other people at the company signed off on it.

Somewhere in this stack of resumes there will be exactly 0.3 people who can code their way out of a CS1 exam. However they will have things to do besides engage a kafkaseque hiring process, like, I don’t know, writing software for a living. Once they realize this they will not participate in the process, self-fulfilling the prophesy that no good candidates are ever in the pile.

Meanwhile in another part of town, someone is leaning on the existing engineers until they cough up a name of an (un)happily employeed lead engineer who can be poached from his dysfunctional organization to work for ours, which is not-at-all-dysfunctional, stop-talking-Jim-don’t-spook-him. Depending on the size of the organization that person will be hired either openly skipping whatever bizarre paper-pusher hiring process is nominally in place, or in some cases “HR makes us do this but it’s just a formality”.

The moral of this story is, if you want to be hired, a) ignore pretty much anything that purports to be hiring process for programmers, b) befriend engineers who will cough up your name under pressure.