My view as a European dev:

I’ve seen a major regression in quality of tech offers in the last couple of years.

Some factors include:

- most worker-friendly hiring sites are gone. Those recruiters were legitimate talent seekers and coaches, we’re back to spray-and-pray copypasted messages on LinkedIn.

- remote opportunities are going away as well, which considering the living costs in large cities is an effective significant cut in the offer. Few people are willing to leave their remote job for a non remote one.

- direct application as a dev is pretty much impossible. You can’t search offers on the main sites because they get drowned in AI spam and removed in minutes. The remaining path is each company’s careers page, which tends have abismal ratios in terms of applying friction vs reply chance.

- processes are very worker unfriendly. Particularly for northern European companies (klarna, Spotify and others) I’ve passed months of rounds, from usual leetcode to IQ tests, only to be ghosted for months after passing, either because they’re keeping an always on pipeline just in case or who knows why.

There's a lot of references in the report to companies "reporting difficulties in filling vacancies" with no clarity on what constitutes 'difficulties'.

Also, the data notes that 83% of the companies surveyed were small enterprises (with 10-49 employees or self-employed persons). It's no surprise that these companies find it more difficult as they tend to be more budget-conscious, meaning they struggle to compete with bigger company salary levels.

There is no such thing as a talent storage - it's always a pay storage.

Does this make sense? Anybody can confirm this?