Csdrhrt

There is a shortage of 25-years old developpers, more skilled than John Carmack(or Linus Torvald, or Grace Hopper, or whoever is your absolute reference), who accept to pay for working instead of getting a salary, have the best diplomas you can imagine, and have 50 years of experience in every possible domain of IT(including the ones that are not out yet), yes.

Budgets are limited, and positions open for mere human beings as us are therefore open in limited numbers, too. But Businesses that hire IT professionals like to communicate about the market being in shortage. It pushes more people to enter the market on the developper side, hence pulling salaires to the bottom(offer-and-demand law). It's a way to reduce costs, and a communication primary aimed towards political deciders who think "we need to train more IT workers!!! all the time!!!".

Shortage is also real in the sense that they are always hiring. But they are so picky in hiring that shortage has no meaning other than "I always want better than what I currently have".

Back in the day, you might have hired a developer with these criteria:

• Linux server experience


• CVS or SVN experience


• Java, preferably up to 1.3, including experience with Swing

There wasn't much variation on the above. Replace Linux with Windows occasionally, Java with a small handful of other widely used languages at the time, and that was about it.

These days, the language, framework and tool pool developers are expected to know has skyrocketed, as has the complexity of those languages. Companies these days don't just need someone who has a basic knowledge of SVN and Java 1.3, they want:

• Java 8, including all the latest stream developments


• Spring, specifically with Spring boot


• Play framework, because we also have a solo project someone started once that uses that


• Tomcat/Glassfish/Undertow experience


• CI experience, particularly using Jenkins


• Git, including how to use it properly (not just checkout, push and re-download the repo if anything goes wrong)


• 5 years experience of the latest specific "in fashion this second" JS framework that's only existed for 2 years in a stable state


• AWS (hey, we don't use our own servers anymore! You need to know about EC2, Lambda, Cloudfront, Cloudformation at a a minimum)


• DynamoDB (hey, we use AWS, why would we use SQL? That's old!)


• Rockstar developer status (whatever the hell that means)

So yes, when every company has a list of skills this specific and transient, they're always going to find a shortage of developers that match what they need.

It is a real problem, but perhaps not exactly how you think.

There is a huge shortage of motivated developers with a good work ethic. These are the ones that employers are trying to find and retain.

There is no shortage of developers (however brilliant) with a mediocre or feel-entitled work ethic.

In the large picture and not undergoing what every specialty might be like, yes, there is shortage. One out of five position get filled. According to the same source, 44% of developers have no related academic qualifications for being a developer. And it's getting worse year over year, with schools teaching computer science at a regular pace while the market demand is rapidly growing.

You even witness it yourself :

I certainly see new .NET postings almost daily.

Now to come to your questions :

why are employers behaving as if they can pick the cream of the crop?

Employers like to think they are offering exceptional conditions that can justify them being picky. Also, I wouldn't be surprise some companies put in place a vetting process just for the sake of valuing the employee and keep them in longer. Or perhaps you took employers that have very high expectations : I know I haven't been through heavy processes myself.

Is my age a barrier?

Yes and no, there is in industry an unhealthy younthism but it's not shared everywhere, and it's also a result of many younger people getting away from industry at some age. Because there is shortage though, you should still be able to get many jobs, but perhaps not where you used to look. Don't get discouraged !

Around here in Finland, the case is a bit different. At first, we had a massive oversupply of developers after Nokia/Microsoft went birds-up, and the secondary damage was to small IT shops that had Nokia as their major client. When that bubble burst, we suddenly had more than ten thousand unemployed professionals (roughly 20 % of the IT workforce!) - some with Master's/PhD's - and no place to go. So the salaries plummeted and the famous 2000 EUR / month (= just barely above half of the national average salary of ANY profession - plumbers could earn more!) engineer was born.

Now little by little, the situation has started to improve and today the market is again turning normal in certain regions (Capital area and three hot-spot cities). Because the market is very healthy in the Capital region, we are now in the situation where employees have so much choice that they don't need to take up just any kind offer. They can choose. And because of that, employers that have a bad reputation will have a really hard time to get half-decent employees to consider them. And the majority of those bad employers are fairly large companies, even international ones. So they create a lot of noise in the news along the lines of: boo-hoo, we cannot find developers, there is a shortage! all the while people are happily employed at good companies.

I think that is the main source of the false appearance of a shortage. Basically, there is a shortage of the good, cheap, and immediately available developers that are willing to work for questionable employers.

Bob Cringely did several articles on this topic.

See Here:
https://www.cringely.com/2012/06/14/an-it-labor-economics-lesson-from-memphis-for-ibm/

And here: https://www.cringely.com/2015/06/15/the-h-1b-visa-program-is-a-scam/

And here: https://www.cringely.com/?s=H-1B

In short, it's a feint to drive wages down and give the jobs to H1Bs. Employers spec a job in such a way that it's impossible for an American dev to fulfill all the qualifications. Once they've rejected a few applicants, they have cover to offer the job to an H1B whose resume is all bull at a lower wage.