If you're a skilled developer, I urge you to exercise your negotiation power. You have much more than you think.
The problem is, most people aren't willing to walk from job offers. Walk. There are more.
skilled developers are much more common than people think. We get the impression of rarity precisely because we limit the search pool to local areas where very often many top companies are competing for the same talent pool.
But at the end of the day there are a ton of super smart developers in EU, China, India, Japan, South America or even lower to mid COL areas in the U.S. who are more than happy to take 50% of Silicon Valley pay and just do as well of a job.
At the very end of the day vast majority of software engineering is far from rocket science, and you don't need someone who can re-invent MapReduce out of thin air just to refactor that clusterfuck of Redux code.
[0] - https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/employment-so...
* ~900 million people for where they use companies (and probably in the low tens of million of possible employees)
* probably ~2 billion people for where they use contracts (and probably some more low tens of millions of possible employees)
Those are <<huge>> pools of people.
This might not mean much for someone who made their career in SV, but certainly means a lot to an Indian, Russian or Brazilian developer.
If this bubble bursts then yeah painful changes will likely come.
Recent numbers at my place of work (looking for a couple of senior hires):
3 months, 200 applicants, 35 full-day technical interviews, 2 offers. 1 accepted. The guy who rejected had a competing offer.
I'm poking around currently, and there's definitely an appetite for companies to get strong candidates in for interview. However, I keep these numbers in mind. The odds are against us.
1. Your line of development is popular (I wish PL/I developers good luck with their job searches!)
2. That you're geographically located in a "hot" location and you can easily relocate (which is frequently not the case, due to family concerns or other concerns) <<or>> you like remote work and are good at it.
3. That you can easily handle interview stress (a ton of people can't) and that you're good at interviewing (which you can improve at, but you need to spend time, plus see: stress).
I'm probably forgetting a bunch.
In any case, the balance is tilted a lot more towards big companies.