Is this the case in other countries as well? Is there a reason for it?
In my opinion, this will get much worse over the next few years. Today's school leavers come to us without any prior technical knowledge and with outrageous salary expectations.
It is always suggested to them that "If you have a problem, just watch a tutorial video on Youtube and solve your problem with it".
The problem here is the lack of neural networking in the brain to solve complex problems on their own and strategically go about finding a solution. The youth is not stupid, they just do not learn to solve problems effectively and sustainably.
This is reflected in the quality of the applicants. We have more and more work, the quality is dwindling.
So HR has to hire such "mediocre goods" and we have a spiral that pulls us deeper and deeper down.
This is - in my opinion - a worldwide problem. Solvable only by a lot of commitment from private organizations and people who deals with the youth and promotes here again know.
The school system will not be able to do this.
Australia has a tech job shortage. Australia is a tech dinosaur a good 10 years behind the UK.
It’s either low payed startups, with no funding, no equity for the risk+low pay, not that strong a product or it’s large corporate big data jobs (ETL) with all the issues of large old corporate companies where IT is a cost center and layers of management and staff churn.
Since Australia has closed the borders they haven’t been able to import developers. Likewise salaries have remained stagnant. People in good jobs are staying in good jobs with no temptation to move for better pay or more exciting projects.
If there's an actual shortage, it's their own fault. Everyone wants to hire senior developers and nobody wants to train junior people to become seniors.
There's supposedly a 'tech shortage', but I just went through a job hunt myself, and while I got contacted by 3-4 times more recruiters than I ever have been in the past, it felt like I was pulling teeth just to get the average wage offered to me from before the pandemic, let alone higher than that, and also interviewed for at least a half dozen companies that were still super picky, had really long interview cycles with multiple coding assessments, and were clearly looking for any minor reason to disqualify me and my 10+ years of experience.
I was also still getting about a third of the recruiters trying to tell me that 100-120k (no equity, no bonus) was the max the company they represent could do for senior engineer or sometimes principal engineer roles, and tried to convince me that it's the best I would find in Chicago (it wasn't).
If companies think they can still play games like this, there can't be a tech shortage. Fast food workers seem to be getting courted more than software engineers right now (not in absolute wages, obviously, but in percent differences in wages, perks, and flexibility).
Levels.fyi claims 155k base and 217k total comp as the median for a Solutions Architect in Chicago, about the closest analog I can find on their site.
https://www.levels.fyi/Salaries/Solution-Architect/Greater-C...
Now that I think of it, it could be that richer countries are hiring remote from cheaper ones, as they're hiring remote anyway. But it doesn't explain why Australia has a shortage.
It’s hyper competitive out there for anyone in the middle of the normal distribution.
Is that a shortage? Kind of. It is in some sense, it is not in others.
I've noticed this as well. The trend of sending 5x followup emails when I don't respond drives me up the wall. I get something like 10 recruiters reaching out to me a week, and most of them do not deserve a response.