[Magmalgebra]

This is situational - as a strong engineer I have more leverage than ever to demand ever more eye watering compensation.

Weaker engineers and junior engineers are in more the situation you describe. This is tough and I feel for these folks but it is possible for many people to become stronger engineers if they choose to put in the work.

I'd encourage you to not take on a feeling of hopelessness here.

[justrudd]

I agree with you to an extent. I was recently laid off (start up out of money) along with the rest of the engineering team. So I’m going through loops. The hardest part of the process for me is getting past the initial recruiter. Once I get past whatever “wall” they’ve put in place, I do pretty well. So I wonder how many recruiters now are using AI to screen applicants? Given the hundreds (thousands?) of applications, probably some of them.

Anecdotally - I’ve been through 2 technical screens where they asked me to use an AI prompt to solve a problem. For one, it was a pretty trivial problem (running an hmac over some values) so I just solved it directly. They asked why I didn’t use AI, and I told them honestly that I’ve done something like this hundreds of times, why would I use a prompt for it? Didn’t make it to the next round. Now it’s totally possible that I didn’t make it because of something else. And maybe those were outliers, but it seems like I’ll need to brush up on prompting…