[afuchs]

For a rough anecdote, what I've heard consistent from my network is that the current job market is wildly different depending on experience level.

From what I've heard and seen, anyone hiring a junior engineer is getting overwhelmed with applicants the moment they advertise it. Going up in experience level, the same places that are overwhelmed with junior engineers are begging for senior and principal engineers and are leaving these positions unfilled due to a lack of applicants.

[glangdale]

Agreed. It's hard to hire senior people with experience in anything much. I strongly suspect that our industry has a self-inflicted injury where we make developers - even people who are meant to be doing deep algorithmic stuff - do web stuff and devops and 80 other ancillary things - then we jump up and down because we can't find people with experience at higher level things.

Even at a very senior level, I've been asked to do some ridiculously sysadmin-ish stuff that I'm not good at, and I've seen more junior people loaded up with web/testing/devops/admin work to the point that the majority of their time is no longer being spent on what is ostensibly their job.

[sokoloff]

Isn’t much of the job/industry “web stuff” though?

[glangdale]

I shouldn't have made it sound like I was sneering at "web stuff" - just that people I work with who are meant to be doing other things have been regularly dragged into fairly menial "web stuff" (i.e. they're not specialists at that, and they're meant to be spending their time on other things). If you are doing a bunch of random firefighting then you don't get good at what your chosen specialty is (it would be similar to having a bunch of web specialists and making them do sysadmin chores half the time).