Bad times? Only lazy bums like me and poor H1s are still sitting at our old BigCo (life work balance is amazing, plus there are too few of us left who is doing the stuff so we are treated pretty soft and accurately :) . Anybody who left during the last year and a half got minimum 300 (junior and/or really incapable engineers) with the normal engineers getting 400-500K and that isn't in a red hot AI and the likes. The money is just sloshing around. Granted everything comes to an end, and we're definitely due for the one, yet it definitely didn't happen yet.