The IT skills shortage is really a complexity crisis in disguise
DavidLinthicum · x · 2026-10-31
Veteran technologist David Linthicum argues that the decades-old "can't find the right people" conversation in tech organizations is usually not a dry talent market — it's a system problem.
Years of deferred refactoring, undocumented dependencies, legacy platforms, one-off customizations, duplicated data, and cloud migrations that merely relocated old complexity have produced architectures only a handful of people can understand. Organizations then hunt for unicorns who know the mainframe, microservices, legacy ETL, the security model, custom middleware, and three cloud providers at once.
His conclusion: that's not a skills shortage — it's accumulated complexity showing up as a hiring problem.
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