We are still in the post-pandemic hangover.

If you look up M2 money supply on St Louis fed - that chart has more influence on the job market in the US than anything.

The macro whiplash compounds this problem for people like OP in a few ways:

- cheap money leads to hiring frenzy (cheap capital costs lead to investments in human capital in software)

- developers get conditioned to artificially high demand and assume it will be like that forever

- artificially high demand attract people into software dev for the money instead of love of the art (increasing supply)

- when capital gets expensive again companies have to correct for over-hiring with layoffs and hiring freezes

- developers are stuck in a market with crashing demand (because of higher cost of capital) and over-supply (people attracted to work when cost of capital was cheap)

Everyone says it's about AI, but AI is more like the flavor & scapegoat, the substance is all a consequence of macro policy.

The next time the fed does quant easing labor market will kick up again.