Are Software Engineers In Short Supply?

Always in the news, but is it real?

Photo by Pressmaster from Pexels

Us progressive engineers are often subjected to the now-familiar recruiter narrative that we are always in desperately short supply and should therefore always take up an offer of a ‘chat’ with the dangled carrot of a ‘spec’.

Companies are also advised to ‘hire now!’ and not to ‘miss out’, by the recruiter maelstrom present on various social media-driven job hiring platforms.

Simplistically, are you looking for…

• An experienced software engineer with a specific and reasonable skillset?
  You’re in luck.
  Front the requisite wonga, get your engineer, job (will be) done.
• A ’10 years of experience with a 5-year-old technology’, ‘contributor to 300 open source libraries’, and ‘Nobel laureate’ that’s usually on a ridiculously over-engineered splatter-gun spec?
  You’re out of luck, they don’t exist.

Recruiters, hiring ‘managers’, be better.