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Anecdotal but I felt it was worst during the mass layoffs in late 2022/early 2023. It has been very slowly recovering since then.

The late 2020 period was the absolute best time though. I got multiple offers almost instantly, and after I signed on it felt like the org was bloated with engineers just fiddling away on meaningless projects.

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That's always the effect of free money.

This is not surprising. The companies received grants during covid lockdowns, so they started listing a lot of fake jobs. When the money dried up the layoffs followed, which was an expected outcome. Media does not let people know about the grants and presents everything in such light that it seems like the market is getting absolutely destroyed, while in reality it only slightly declined.

The bigger problem are HRs employed by big companies who autoreject every application and take no responsibility for doing this.

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