Do you think it will bounce back? or was 2021/2022 the peak of a long and slow decline in tech jobs.
Ask people in 2000 or 2008. Peaks and troughs, peaks and troughs with salaries going up over the long term.
And it's certainly possible that CS/programming/etc. largely remains a solid engineering/engineering-adjacent career but some of the geo- and large tech-specific compensation is mostly an anomaly.
Agreed, I’m not in a HCOL location and that’s my experience.
I will say the BLS growth trends for SE/CS/IT/tech degrees are not showing as strong of job growth as they were 10-15 years ago.