Recently, I was talking to a friend of mine who works in the same industry; software development. We were talking about the fact that the more time passes, the more difficult it’s becoming to find some good developers on board to get some work done. The argument was that the company he’s working for had to decline some work due to the fact that they simply do not have enough developers in order to get around and deliver this work within a reasonable time frame.

During the same argument, I’ve also mentioned the fact that we, as developers, are always getting messages on platforms such as LinkedIn in order to attempt to poach us. I understand that these people need to recruit people in order to get their monthly wage; I’m not saying that they should not be doing their job. What I’m saying is that it seems that the amount of demand for developers is higher than the actual amount of developers that are ready to work here in Malta. What’s going on?

At my workplace, I’ve noticed that the typical recruitment that occurs during the summer (recruiting new graduates) did not as well as usual. There were some new faces, but then I discovered that they were actually students / interns, not full timers! It seems that even us, we’re finding it very difficult to get more developers on board with us. We can also talk about the high turnover that’s obviously present, but that’s an argument for another day.

We must then ask another question then: what happened to the new graduates? I have no idea on the amount of graduates per year in Malta, but I’m pretty sure it’s not THAT bad. So, are they being poached by bigger companies (iGaming) with huge salaries? Are they working on their own projects? Or maybe, the new graduates are sub-par to the industry standards and end up un-recruited?