I am not asking for a job, please don't interpret this as such, this is a rant of pure hatred against FAANG hiring practices.
I am talking about leetcode problems for software engineering positions. People with a lot of experience are being forced to git gud at competitive programming, which has almost nothing to do with the job that is being asked.
It's like judging a mathematician by how quickly he can invert a matrix by hand, or an architect by how quickly he can build a fence out of his own feces.
As somebody who did work as an applied mathematician, but most recently as a software engineer, these problems are both boring and completely demotivating to the point where I would rather change my entire job field than have to do another one.
While I am all for including people who did not have access to formal education, since a lot of software engineering doesn't require anything past high school computer science in a lot of instances, asking people who are experienced to be able to solve arbitrary puzzles in an incredibly short amount of time perfectly, which becomes rote at that point is kind of insane.
It is insane to the point where people literally have to take off work to devote time to these problems that involve skills not even tangentially related to the everyday work that they are actually applying for.
If you are motivated to be a good corporate stoogie, then you can go here:
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/
Memorize the solutions and bam, you're a software engineer worth 200k+.
Even if I die poor and homeless, I would rather flip burgers (nothing against people who do this, this is an honest job and I think they deserve their due respect as well), which is more meaningful than writing CRUD apps and being 'agile' anyway, than have to pump out another segment tree in < 30 minutes using the same recycled code.
So no, there is not a talent shortage, you just don't want to have to hire the 30-40 something who is completely disillusioned and problem motivated to do your dirty work, which usually involves holding a monopoly over hardware and renting it out anyway.
There is a surfeit of “old” engineers and washed up mathematicians who can no longer sell enough crack to make it by as “data scientists”/”data engineers”.