Unless you have a lot of flexibility in terms of where you work, this type of advice is becoming less relevant in an IT job market that's in free fall.
Much fewer devs can just jump ship at will than between 2003 - 2022.
Much fewer devs can just jump ship at will than between 2003 - 2022.
Usually when people are putting broken code into the code base it's a wider cultural problem, that you're not realistically going to solve.
Citation needed. Good developers are just as in demand now as they have ever been.
My point, the result of interviewing a good developer is potentially random. There is perhaps less probability of a bad developer having a random outcome as well, but certainly can happen.
Though.. define "good". Some people are incredible only when in the right team and environment.
Company says "looking for an expert on X"
Expert on X walks into the room.
Interviewer: "How good are you at Y?"
Expert on X: "I know a little about Y, but not too much. I mostly use X for my work; I could show you how to solve the problem using X."
Interviewer: "Thank you for your time; goodbye."
When I tried to figure out why this happens, the answers are usually something stupid like: "HR posted the job announcement, they have no idea what we really need", or "yeah, we are still looking for an expert on X, but we need an expert on Y more urgently". (The latter still does not explain why they rejected the expert on X without asking him anything about X, but to the person who said this it seemed to make perfect sense.)
And even then, there is a famous story of the dev of the popular MacOS FOSS package manager, Homebrew, failing his interview at Apple.
He was the creator/designer and main dev of Homebrew, the OSS <<package manager>> almost every dev on MacOS uses.
He took an idea to completion, made it production ready and used by probably millions of users.
I don't care about raw coding ability (Carmack style), if building such a large project doesn't prove at least development abilities, nothing does.
Citation needed.
There are other data points to consider:
- higher interest rates and less VC money equates to less startups and less hiring
- large tech layoffs
To your point of demand for 'good' developers - I suspect that is likely true. I don't know how to decouple that from the problem of interviews not able to identify good developers. A 'good' developer is a function of the individual, what is happening in their life, the team, the codebase, leadership, process, tech debt, etc..
The entry level market is getting more and more over saturated. It is bleeding upwards to mid level slowly. But if you are a skilled senior you are still in high demand. If not your resume probably sucks or you are not as skilled as most seniors.