If you worked for a venture backed startup between 2018 and 2021, you saw the massive growth. Engineering teams doubling every 6 months. New teams spinning up left and right. Excess amounts of junior/boot camp developers. DEI/Employee experience/People Ops teams standing around doing nothing. I for one welcome the steady more tactical approach to hiring.
Decades of experience does not equal an old COBOL programmer. Personally I'm pretty up to date, with latest backend and some frontend frameworks and languages, rails, next, rust, clojure, etc, and even quite a bit of self-studied Torch, LLM tuning, plenty of mentoring, team-leadership and so on, and extensive system-design in enterprise, investment banks, etc.
I do have the disadvantage of living in a 'developing nation' while being a westerner (therefore expecting more than a rice-bowl salary).
But you can think it through step by step.
No-one is hiring, therefore no-one is getting hired, regardless of skills or experience. Meanwhile, it takes time to clear the decks and for sentiment to improve.
So you are right about the vagaries and dis-function of "the market".
Management typically doesn't have the engineering chops or in-the-trenches experience to properly discern "low value" engineers from "high value" engineers.
I doubt being able to solve real problems for other people by using technology is a skill that will go obsolete any time soon.
Unfortunately at the moment we have several trends in the industry that interfere with matching up people who have real problems and people who can figure out how to solve them.
Years of cheap money have flooded the industry with low-skilled workers, completely broken recruitment, destroyed any kind of trust between employers and employees, and created astronomical expectations of compensation in some parts of the industry that were never competitive outside their own bubble.
Then there are the hype cycles. Right now the big one is AI. As usual there are plenty of people in management positions who don't really understand the issues at all but have delusional expectations of game changing results that will let them dramatically downsize their teams without losing effectiveness. Obviously sooner or later they'll learn or they'll fail but in the meantime it's another barrier to good people finding good problems to solve and getting real work done.
If you're good and you're looking for interesting work then I suggest considering smaller employers. The era of the Big Tech free lunch is over and it's probably not coming back any time soon. Meanwhile there are people all over the place still trying to solve important problems who will value experienced colleagues who can get things done.
I definitely saw the overhiring with junior devs, but I also saw those junior guys take over a couple of shops just by sheer numbers.
They were more willing and able to deliver shit fast (which management obviously loved) at the expense of making terrible architecture choices that really crippled productivity in the medium/long run.
So, from management's perspective, you have like... a bunch of younger cheaper people getting more done. What's not to love?
