> I work in a FAANG-like company. Talent shortage is real - we are having to hire entry level grads where we originally wanted experienced candidates. We are even going out of the way to hire candidates from non-traditional backgrounds and train them.

I am currently applying for an entry-level position at a FAANG company. I had "in-person" remote interviews a few weeks ago. I was told that I passed, and I should expect some "team fit" interviews the following week.

Except over the intervening weeks, I've had zero team fit interviews, because - as far as I can tell - the recruiter handling me hasn't been able to persuade even a single manager to agree to an interview. This is not a situation that screams "we are experiencing a worker shortage, and we will even lower ourselves to hire inexperienced workers that we have to train". It would tend to suggest that the company is swimming in far more applicants than it wants for every role.

That's news to me.

In December, I applied to a number of blue chip companies for frontend positions and only got callbacks to three of them despite a lot of work experience writing JS for real applications including a YC company. Some YC companies also said to me they wanted someone more experienced in Vue/React instead of potentially allowing me time and space to ramp up my knowledge of it. So clearly there were other applicants who had both a lot of work experience AND the precise tech knowledge they needed, so they didn't have to take a risk on someone who didn't perfectly fit the position.

I eventually landed a dream position, but a huge reason why they looked at my application in the first place was because I knew of a long time employee. Obviously I had to pass the technical and behavior interviews, but they had a deluge of applicants and my application would've been lost to the ether had it not been for that connection.

The "talent shortage" is self caused by FAANG. Your company does not invest in education, yet expects people to be experienced. Accreditation for compsci and others is sorely out of touch with the tech industry, and university programs are not funded. We are literally strangling the life out of young adults with course materials that don't matter, expenses they have to work manual labor to pay, classes that don't teach, and making them have to sort through dumpsters to find an Arduino. It's that bad. What do tech companies do when asked to sponsor a program? No response. They don't care unless it's from a FAANG employee themselves, if that.

These companies are meant to be heavily taxed for how much they are taking from society, with those taxes put back into education. Yet here we are.

Maybe your company is the exception.

The fact that there is a talent shortage seems to point to a long-term issue regarding barriers to entry across the industry.