Understanding what's in the frequently reported and discussed high demand in IT specialists in Germany - is the IT Fachkräftemangel real? So far, I can observe the following contradictory evidences what I perceive from the media.

Statement group #1. In the press, there are repeated reports from different sources about missing specialists in magnitude like many ten thousands - keyword here is the IT Fachkräftemangel. They write about growing numbers of open positions etc.

Statement group #2. In social media, like comments to such articles, especially on heise.de, they say it would be kind of employer propaganda to attract more people to the market (through studying and immigration) to be able to pay less. So, actually, the demand is much more for cheap workforce to save money.

Evidence #1. If I check salary statistics from surveys and also hour rates in Gulp, and what I know from my HR contacts in many companies, payment indeed grows a little bit but high salaries are featured for almost unrealistic profiles, which in my opinion would mostly likely map to two-three people both by skills and responsibilities range (but do not correspond to a two- or threefold salary of course).

So I from the above I could judge like the following. From what I know about the market laws and demand/offer correlation, actually growing real demand in workforce should lead to exploding salaries and hourly rates or at least growth comparable to growth of market leaders , shouldn't it? Which renders the statements group #2 to be closer to the real situation?

Are the above evidences enough to judge like proposed, or have I missed something?
is the IT Fachkräftemangel real?


It is not. Reports fail to filter out the abundance of fake job posts with which intermediaries saturate --and obfuscate-- the labor market. This is the actual reason why intermediaries hardly ever give candidates any concrete information about the alleged job positions. Consequently, reports headlining a "shortage of skilled professionals" are meaningless.

To a great extent this also happens in the U.S., Canada, and perhaps other regions. But the fact that one same position is advertised by several intermediaries (very often their list of requirements being the same, verbatim) obviously does not mean that there are several open positions.

The broad unawareness regarding this issue allows for air castles when it comes to discussing the pseudo "shortage" of labor supply in labor markets.