Or there is a shortage of developers in your area.
My previous company was offering competitive salaries, good environment, challenging work, and we had trouble filling position with decent developers...
Raise salaries and attract developers from outside your area.
The problem was that you weren't actually offering "competitive" salaries, you were merely offering what may have been standard for your area but no longer was sufficient, by your own report.
Raise salaries and attract developers from outside your area.
Admittedly, your local real-estate market might be too wound-up (think NYC, Bay Area, Boston, or LA) for raising salaries to do anything but raise land-rents.
When someone says "there is a shortage of oil" it is indeed true that oil costs skyrocket. It is also true that there is a shortage of oil. Shortages cause prices to increase, so much so that many people might not be able to afford a resource at all. It's a bit silly to say "there are no shortages! Only cheap consumers!"
But the point is that if you drive to a gas station, there is gas to buy. Imagine you drive a delivery truck, the price of gas goes up, and you go out of business. It means you didn't have a profitable enough business to handle the reality of the market you operate in.
Companies that complain about not being able to afford decent developers are just saying they don't have a strong enough company to cover the costs of the inputs to their business. It doesn't matter if the input is oil, steel, baking powder, or software developers.
Companies that can afford high developer salaries when there is a shortage are the ones that get a high enough ROI on a developer's time that they can actually buy more of that time at the current market rates, and still have enough left over to pay the executives.
The point here is that if you can't find programmers at a given salary, that salary is not in fact "competitive".
You can decide that you can't afford actual competitive salaries, but calling your salary offers competitive when they are not will not help you in any way.
Someone else should immediately retort with "At what price?"
>It's a bit silly to say "there are no shortages! Only cheap consumers!"
It's only silly insofar as shortages result despite the existence of consumers willing to pay market rates; these generally involve state-imposed price ceilings. What is silly is conflating "shortage" with "someone somewhere wants something but isn't willing to pay the market rate".
if you're having trouble finding people you are, by definition, not paying enough.