I think this is an important factor. Developer salaries have been bimodal or trimodal [1]. I have really good former colleagues who have difficulty finding jobs, but they are looking for 120k+ USD/Euro jobs (remote, outside SV). I also have friends owning companies, having difficulty filling positions, but they are in the 50k-70k USD/Euro range.

It seems like the difficulty of finding a job is in the second mode. But the people who had jobs in that mode are hesitant to apply in jobs corresponding to the first mode, not only because the pay gap is substantial, but it can also be bad for one's resume and perhaps less satisfying intellectually.

[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

That kind of makes sense, but doesn't. I'm aware of the fact of the bi-modal / tri-modal distribution of the software dev. salaries. However, in the case of my friend, software is not the only option for him. My friend refuses to get lower paying software eng. position ... because he can make the same lower money by doing the thing he likes, in his case - working as a luthier. Another friend also were refusing to get lower paying software jobs and instead were working 1+ year as secretary for a wealthy person. My point is that some lower paying jobs won't be filed ever, even if there are plenty software developers without jobs. It's more wise for some people to leave field temporarily or permanently.

Your friends are lucky. But I don't have anything like that and I don't want to drive Uber because I think that would be torture.

One problem with hiring juniors (from an employer perspective) is that they take a while to get trained up, then leave after 1-3 years, meaning that they require investment which never gets paid back. You can argue that the company should give them raises to keep them, but it goes against the zeitgeist (so it’s tough), and also means that there’s no advantage to hiring juniors.

This seems like a stable (though undesirable) equilibrium, and I do not have a solution.

It's short sighted. Eventually the seniors will retire and die off. It very much feels like 'we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas'.

seniors will retire or die off is what is short-sighted. I have been a senior for the past 10 years and am planning on hacking another 10-15, don’t need money any longer, just love what I do. 60% of just my team is the same (give or take few years)

Most companies are trying to hire people with more than 2-4 years of experience, but not 0-2 years of experience. They are far from losing all candidates to death or retirement.

If no one hires 0-2 how many 2-4 will there be?

That’s definitely a problem right now, but it’s still not worth hiring people just to train them and have them leave.

I think this one of the reasons for the popularity of H1B, as this new normal isn’t worldwide yet.

That's why I said they tried nothing and are out of ideas.

The problem is that labor laws and practical considerations make it so that most other options are infeasible and/or illegal. Business model innovation in employment is basically illegal.

Professional sports take interesting and varied approaches to the subject, but even they are facing challenges (see ‘free transfers’ in the European football market).

This is just excusing a complete lack of creativity. If they won't adapt they deserve to fail.

It’s not just the zeitgeist. It’s problematic when relatively junior employees start to overtake more senior employees on salary (because word will go around). And raising everyone’s salaries often isn’t an option either, obviously.

In the last couple of weeks we posted a job for a junior .NET dev and got over 800 resumes within days. The automation is killing both the employer having to sift through it all and the employee possibly getting lost in the mix.