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Comment by djha-skin | Hacker News Reader

If skills shortage is so prevalent then why is the job market in the toilet?

That's because the shortage is of underpayed tech skills.

That is normally reported to the candidate as him/her being too skilled for the job :-)

Is the job market in the toilet? "Friday's job report may mark longest stretch of sub-4% unemployment since early 1950s"

https://www.marketwatch.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-...

> With AI ‘sucking the air out of almost all non-AI investments in the whole tech world,’ companies are cutting what they believe are unnecessary jobs

Not enough AI on your CV. Is there a php or perl scripting AI yet? I imagine a future of lots of little AIs that know their own out-of-fashion domain talking to a bigger AI. Maybe layers and layers of AIs. I wonder if they'll have meetings or chats.

Maybe we can give them ambition to self-automate or create new layers.

Going by the article, I guess that would be because the applicants don't have the skills that are in demand. The top one being "Business AI skills (i.e. prompt engineers, low/no code developers, business analysts)". Much fewer respondents cited a gap in "Software development skills", which I guess is what most applicants here have.

We just experienced the low end of the 10-15 year cycle.

Do you think it will bounce back? or was 2021/2022 the peak of a long and slow decline in tech jobs.

Ask people in 2000 or 2008. Peaks and troughs, peaks and troughs with salaries going up over the long term.

And it's certainly possible that CS/programming/etc. largely remains a solid engineering/engineering-adjacent career but some of the geo- and large tech-specific compensation is mostly an anomaly.

Agreed, I’m not in a HCOL location and that’s my experience.

I will say the BLS growth trends for SE/CS/IT/tech degrees are not showing as strong of job growth as they were 10-15 years ago.

Causality is the other way—the job market being in the toilet is causing the skills shortage. Why don't companies staff up, then?

Yeah, good question. I think they're trying to see how long they can ride along on "what we've got now is good enough" and then when they've find out they can't, it's going to hurt.

It's mostly not except to the degree that for some things expectations were set unrealistically high compared to any reasonable historical norm.

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