Why has it been so difficult to hire tech professionals?

Only willing to hire people with 5 to 10 years of XYZ.

Leetcode and other hazing-based hiring practices.

Shitty office space (when onsite is required).

Shitty communication during the hiring process itself - random delays, ghosting, ignoring my stated scheduling preferences, inability to communicate simple, important things like what kind of health benefits you're offering (in your exploding offer you coughed up after 6 weeks of radio silence, no less).

Nonsense perks like "unlimited vacation" or free food.

A lack of willingness/ability to communicate what's important about the role and the kind of person you really want to hire (smart, gets shit done, not an asshole). Instead of fetishing 5-10 year of XYZ or larding with buzzwords.

Recruiters. Everyone hates them.

Every year more tech jobs are added and not that many more people get into tech. The demand for tech workers starkly outpaces supply, especially in the United States.

On top of this this a small number of companies operating in the Bay Area now make up a sizeable chunk of the global economy. Their revenues and profit margins are so large that they can afford to pay sums that are quite high compared to what other employers were typically used to paying. These large tech companies also have effectively an unlimited demand for talent so this drives up prices quite a bit, especially at the top of the market.

People in tech often have pretty comfortable jobs too. Switching costs are high. They already have a good job, they might even already have a great job - it's hard to lure people away from that.

Not answering the question that was asked, but:

In the current environment, it's a competitive advantage to be the place where people want to work. I don't mean foosball tables and beer on Fridays. I mean managers that have a clue, and aren't a jerk to employees.

Software is becoming more complex and sticking around longer which increases our expectations for candidates. Meanwhile many organizations have near zero ability to train and onboard junior level candidates and those that do see them leave within 12-18 months.

Are you actually having trouble hiring, or are you looking at the claims of thousands of unfilled positions?

It’s not specific to tech, many fields have labor shortages[1].

There are a number of likely reasons:

1. The demand side of the economy picking up faster than supply. Many businesses were not producing during the pandemic. But consumers had few expenses and sat at home accumulating cash. When things open up, every consumer surges on the market and there’s no supply or people to fulfill those needs.

2 - Unreliable child care: schools and education haven’t been reliably open. Many are not going back to work cause they’re taking care of the kids.

3 - Many re-examining what they want out of life. There’s a lot of people that sat back and decided their prepandemic job wasn’t what they wanted out of life. Some moved industries, others retired early.

I found this article helpful when looking at reasons: https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/22/politics/what-matters-labor-s...

1 - https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomspiggle/2021/07/08/what-does...

The complexity of software has gone way up. Nowadays, your run-of-the-mill internal corporate web app with maximum of 2 concurrent users (on a good day) may be written in Angular or React, deployed on Kubernetes, built with Bazel and have backend done in haskelesque Scala (this describes my current job). All these technologies are very complex and require a lot of time to learn them well. Unfortunately, we cannot just hire any programmer and expect him to perform well on our team - the required catch up could easily take a year or more. Hence, we're looking for hyperspecialists who can "hit the ground running", and there's few of them.

Most likely you arent paying enough