1. Poor signaling. There is a bunch of noise in both job requirements and resumes.
2. Unclear goals. Many technical job postings are not clear in what they want. This is not really the fault of the employer but more of an industry failure to identify qualifications.
As a result you get super talented people that cannot find work and simultaneously grossly unqualified people who easily find work that is substantially over paid for the expected level of delivery and responsibilities.
The unclear goals point is important too. When a role isn’t well-defined, hiring ends up optimizing for proxies rather than outcomes. Do you think this is mostly a language problem (how roles and experience are described), or a structural one where teams don’t actually agree internally on what success in the role looks like?
Most employers need a person in the seat doing the work and will lower their preferences to find enough candidates for a selection. Government does not do that. If candidates fail to meet the requirements for a government contract the seat just remains empty.
Consider how engineering works. An engineers resume will just list employment history, education, and awards. There is no need to fluff things up because engineers are required to have a license(s) and that demonstrates qualification. Software does not have that, so people have to explain their capabilities over and over.
Do you think the absence of clear baselines is something the industry could realistically converge on, or is software work too varied for that to work in the way it does for licensed engineering?
Then there could be additional specialized qualifications above the base qualification, for example: security/certificates/cryptography, experimentation, execution performance, transmission/API management.