In Canada the problem has mainly been that the government aren’t allowed or willing to pay software engineers enough to compete with industry, but they are allowed to spend seemingly arbitrary amounts of money on services provided by external firms.
To give an idea, we have a big scandal right now related to IBM and other contractors charging the Quebec government a lot of money for defective software for the car licensing and insurance website (SAAQClic). The final cost of the SAP based product was 1.1B CAD$. Meanwhile, they hired a new head of digital services at SAAQ, a job that would involve potentially dealing with future fallout from that fiasco, in addition to new projects etc. The posted salary range was 140k - 180k CAD$. I know many engineers in Quebec working on eg standard web applications etc making more money than that! They aren’t leading 1B$ product development!
That's okay though because the company will then hire subcontractors in Quebec through an agency. So instead of Canada paying 150k for a dev with experience, they pay a firm 200k to pay an agency 100k to give a junior dev in Montreal 50k for the work.
To give an idea, we have a big scandal right now related to IBM and other contractors charging the Quebec government a lot of money for defective software for the car licensing and insurance website (SAAQClic). The final cost of the SAP based product was 1.1B CAD$. Meanwhile, they hired a new head of digital services at SAAQ, a job that would involve potentially dealing with future fallout from that fiasco, in addition to new projects etc. The posted salary range was 140k - 180k CAD$. I know many engineers in Quebec working on eg standard web applications etc making more money than that! They aren’t leading 1B$ product development!