IDK, I also think a lot of engineers are actually just not good - but the overhiring that happened over the past few years really brought down the overall quality at MANGA. Now you have a bunch of "MANGA level" engineers / other employees who are all mid tier and feel "underemployed" at whatever job they have now. That does play into your easy to game comment.

I say that because I'm aggressively not a good engineer. When I joined FAANG years ago I couldn't get hired as an engineer. I joined the company working in Operations and both myself and that side of the house benefited from me being able to script out automation or describe to internal Eng exactly what needed to be built. I chose to not role as an engineer to work at FAANG.

While there, I watched the quality of hiring erode drastically over the years. With that, came a lot of super mid employees including on the business side who were frankly extremely entitled and felt like they had justified that they were actually great hires because they worked at MANGA. That shift was really quite annoying to be around, since it became a game of B players hiring C players hiring D players.

Leetcode is fucking awful though, I'm confident that if you could solve "hiring incredible engineers" you'd have a great business venture. Also, I don't want to say that the hiring market isn't tougher than before right now, but maybe that it is a good thing that will push qualified engineers to companies that can't pay MANGA salaries and where they'll be very valued.