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Comment by jandrewrogers | Hacker News Reader

To put it a bit more precisely, there is neither a developer nor labor shortage. There is a skill shortage. Companies don't pay you for being a "developer" or "labor", they pay for specific skills and the ability to apply them effectively and competently.

There is a persistent shortage of many skill domains in software. The barrier is that, in many cases, there are few paths to acquiring those skills aside from years of diligent self-study and experience, so it isn't simply a case of manufacturing them on demand. These are the highly paid jobs that are going unfilled even with stratospheric wages, and the demand in some of these skill areas is growing rapidly with no matching increase in supply.

In some skill domains, the market clearing wage for an experienced developer is around $1M right now. I would think that should provide sufficient incentive if increased pay could solve the problem.

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> Companies don't pay you for being a "developer" or "labor", they pay for specific skills and the ability to apply them effectively and competently.

Companies tend to be way too specific about the skills required and any learning curve is not permitted. I've used just about every desktop UI framework under the sun and a whole bunch of web ones, but companies that need react developers won't look at me for instance. There might be some highly specialized skills that can command a premium but those are mostly rare exceptions.

Along with companies not training there's also been a shift away from specialized roles and requiring all devs be experts in every tech the company uses past, present and future. When they hire someone that knows x "just in case" they're shrinking the talent pool available.

> Companies tend to be way too specific about the skills required

This is true at least for finance and (technical) hedge funds.

Having observed from the sidelines over the last few years, a common pattern has emerged. Companies realise out that they have a skill or functionality gap (good), figure out what an ideal candidate would look like (fine), carve out a very specific pigeon hole in their organisation chart for that person (wait what), and then start hiring to fit that pigeon hole exactly.

I guess that makes sense if you can afford to wait for and/or poach the ideal person. For mere mortals it feels absurd.

Sometimes, sure, but not always. High-performance data infrastructure, for example, is a rarified skill set in practice, and the people that know how to do it have been doing it for years. If you have this skill and are good at it, you can make much better than typical FAANG wages because the demand so exceeds supply. But there are very few people with these skills generally and the supply of new people is not meeting that demand. You definitely can’t learn these skills in a short period of time, the skill set is very deep.

I’m using the above domain as an example because I work in it and see the calculus but there are many others. If the number of people that could do the above doubled tomorrow, they could be absorbed instantly by the demand. In a sense it is a market failure in that the demand signal is clearly there with pay to match but very few people with the necessary skills manifest.

What kinds of technical skills do you see as particularly specialized/uncommon and necessary for high-performance data infrastructure work? Curious for some detail there

What skill domains are the hottest right now?

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