I have a few different perspectives on this. When I was at Travelocity a million years ago I was involuntarily reassigned from a design job to a developer job.

I have a few different perspectives on this. When I was at Travelocity a million years ago I was involuntarily reassigned from a design job to a developer job. I had to teach myself how to program. I did horrible that first year and got a horrible annual review. Then came the economic disaster of 2008 mortgage crisis following on the tail of $4/gallon of gasoline fuel crisis. Mass layoffs followed and a ton of people were pushed out the door. Not me. As a front end developer I was essential and hard to replace. This was before jQuery and giant frameworks that did your job for you. You just had to be vaguely competent and nothing was going to do it for you. I have noticed in hiring compatibility is more important than competence. For example you could be a brilliant developer who solves amazing problems and delivers greater value than entire teams of developers. At most corporate employers those are talking points for late in an interview after you have survived resume death and leet code filtration. Far more important is whether you can write Java like a fresh college grad with 30 seconds of experience. Shortages can happen when nobody wants to work in that kind of environment or when prospective employers dismiss talent looking for something that resembles the interests of that Java loving fresh college grad but with 10+ years of experience doing actually important things. We can call that poor expectation management, bias, or misery looking for company. Sometimes employers hire people just because they need bodies in seats. They need people pounding on keyboards typing things because there is menial work to be done. These people do serve a purpose, but they are expendable. Easy to hire is easy to fire. You can still have critical shortages of people who actually write original software, which is confusing when everybody has the same title and gets paid roughly the same.