[cornholio]

The only notable data point is the precipitous drop for software engineering from 40-60 days historical averages. lt basically says that tech has become just like the rest of the job market, competitive for applicants and heavily gatekept by insiders, and that will be quite a reckoning for those who never experienced in their professional life a "normal" job seeking process.

The rest are just noise.

[Ultimatt]

I actually think there is a different effect at play which is the technical need is growing in seniority and complexity as people have large established software systems. The junior market has high accessibility but the senior actually takes a while to get anyone through the door. My current job had been advertised for 6 months, it needed a relatively insane set of knowledge and skills where I only really had maybe 50-60% of the ask. I literally had to learn all of GCP from scratch and I was still a better fit than you're likely to find. I think this is also the same trend AI is making worse as the demand for junior also goes down you'll see these averages climb as most hiring becomes more senior.

[cornholio]

There is little debate the tech job market is currently bad, for juniors worse but for seniors too, widespread layoffs from large companies, etc.

What you are describing sounds more like the extreme pigeonholing the industry has been practicing for years, where companies expect 100% productivity from day one, use automated screening for keywords like "MongoDB" or "GCP" etc. How much effort does it really take to learn GCP enough to handle a certain given product, perhaps string together a few Cloud Run instances, a PR triggered CI pipeline with Cloud Build, add a few Compute Engine workers, bind everything together and protect it with Armor and IDS etc.? Not the entire GCP, just what a given company would need; it's adult Lego for god's sake. It's beyond insulting to take a candidate with good swe foundation, that also list advanced degrees with mathematics and quantum physics, or perhaps a top grade in philosophy, and think they won't be able to handle the Google Cloud GUI.

The industry moved away from "smart and get things done" because companies were unwilling to invest the few months to half a year required to get a new person to peak productivity, since the labor was so mobile and relatively expensive. Maybe with a less mobile workforce, this will change but I won't hold my breath.