I don't think it's been dead for 10 years. I'd place it at maybe 3? I teach at a mid-ranked university and the majority of my fresh out of college students were getting good-to-great entry level offers just a few years ago. The top 5-10% were getting well into six figure offers from FAANG or similar companies. But the entry level job market really tanked in mid 2022 when all the big tech companies did rounds of layoffs, and it's been much harder since then.
We should factor in the hiring sprees that really distorted the market from 2020-2022..
2020-2022 was not "normal hiring", it was much higher than normal.
Even the large, conservative, boring enterprise where I work was hiring about 5 new developers a week in those years.. I know because I did the "Welcome to our department" technical onboarding workshop and I saw everyone coming in the door every week.
Before 2020 I ran that workshop once a month or so? Probably 10 times a year at most.
So of course then the layoffs came when ZIRP ended, as everyone had to adjust back to real world conditions and grapple with the fact that the team sizes they had now were not sustainable (or necessary?) when free money ended.
Couple that with "efficiencies" from AI and generally more conservative scope and ambition by a lot of companies in these uncertain times, and the market looks drastically worse than it did in 2020-2022.
But if you compare the market today to 2018 (for example) instead, it's still worse but definitely not as worse.
Lastly, hiring is also very broken today due to AI, with candidates using it to flood companies with applications and then companies using AI to auto-filter that incoming flood (and likely losing out on good candidates in the process) simply because they can't handle the volume.
I have a lot of sympathy for folks coming right out of university trying to land their first good job. I'm sure it's the toughest it's been in a generation...
This was pretty much the height of the “bootcamp” era, and while some were still great at teaching solid programming skills, many people who were mediocre coders saw it as a quick way to make money off those who don’t know better. In my opinion, companies started noting more and more that they were hiring people who can barely code in a real software environment but had focused training on resume padding and interview prep, and that many of the college graduates weren’t any better off, so they ramped up to far more rigorous testing, live coding projects, and more and more rounds of interviews just to weed out all the people who had been taught how to BS their way into a tech job. Now the interview process has become so cumbersome that it is more worthwhile to filter out nearly every applicant immediately.
More like, "Money isn't free anymore, so let's try and automate away some more labor". It's very much not setting the money on fire from business POV - it's the opposite actually. It's also a constant in history - the more expensive human labor gets, the more effort is put into eliminating the need for it (whether by automating jobs away or redesigning the product or the entire business to not need them in the first place).
