[brailsafe]

> for experienced devs there's still a lot of opportunities

Meh, maybe, but that's a pretty big and abstract qualification. I'd agree that if there are opportunities, the way to get them is not by cold applying at this point, but whether any of the other options are viable or not depends pretty much on a bunch of stars already having aligned many years earlier, or lying, which I wouldn't fault anyone for atm.

But anecdotally, if a company is hiring, they'll at most have one posted. Recruitment emails have entirely dried up—even the shit jobs, even the in-site jobs, even the really shit jobs at companies that obviously abuse employees—but they're laughably far from an offer anyway, most of them just being a funnel for a HackerRank test as the first step if it even gets that far. To be fair, I guess at this point I should be spending all my time grinding leet code on the off chance I encounter that, but that's not really experience more than it is trivia reps, but probably worth grinding anyway because that's the system.