Comment by dam_jackalopes

I'm not a SWE, (I'm a data engineer) but this jives with what I saw while looking for work. I'm not a particularly good DE, so I was out there for 18 months. There were still plenty of listings but not many of them were in "tech" companies in the traditional sense. Part of this was leaving a tech hub for what is very much not one, but the biggest issue that I found in landing work was that I was now competing for relatively boring $100k+ jobs with guys who were working $200k+ jobs in 2020 - 2023. The 3 - 6 "tech" orgs that used to employ these folks regionally just aren't really hiring that much.