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>>5426
That's the thing, though. It's not actually true that there's more supply than demand, anywhere in the world. The demand for programmers is huge, and new ones are not training fast enough, let alone to those absurd requirements companies ask for for entry-level positions. It's not like those companies that get swamped with applications fill the positions quickly. Quite often those positions stay unfilled even when they stop processing applications.
The reasons for this are complex, but I think it has to do with a combination of circumstances are are unique to software:
* Software engineering and computer science has had since its inception and doubly so since the Internet a culture of open sharing of information and techniques.
* Therefore a lot of programmers (IMO the most skilled) are self-taught.
* Therefore it is difficult to gauge a programmer's skill without expending significant resources.
* Therefore employers started to push for credentialism.
* "When a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a good metric." Although it may have once been true that good programmers were much more common in the graduate population, when people started to get diplomas just to get SD positions this ceased to be the case.
* So it turns out that a fresh graduate from a four year program in computer science or software engineering doesn't really have that much relevant knowledge, if all they did was take classes.
* So companies started adding further requirements. Past a certain point everyone realizes that there's at most one or two people in the world capable of meeting them (and they probably already have jobs).
* So literally everyone who sees the posting applies.
I've thought about it and I don't really know what the solution is. At its core, this is a problem of lack of trust and information asymmetry, on both sides of the employer-employee relationship.