IDK, I'm not from the US/Bay-Area, nor does my country have any big-tech/FANG jobs to distort the market for what constitutes a "high wage" in tech, it's all the same.

>in the back-half of COVID.

Sure, but Covid was only a short blip, a temporary exception, not a baseline norm for wage/job growth, like the years prior which was a longer period of getting a job was easy, like 2012-2020.

For me where I live now, the career depression I saw came in 2023 already when jobs become less abundant and harder to get, and it only got worse later when mass layoff started. So we're already 3 years in the decline, longer than the Covid boom lasted and things aren't going better yet.

I entered the workforce in around 2012-2014 and it was significantly easier to get a callback from sending a resume than it is now where it's mostly automated rejections. When I say "easy" I also mean you didn't need 7 stages of interviews to get a job back then, you'd have 2 stages and those were pretty chill and get a call back from every 2-3 resumes sent. Now you need to send dozens. I guess "easy" is relative.

>Also pay was relatively decent but much less than what you saw even 5 years ago.

Inflation also happened in that time.

Things can be easy or difficult at different parts of the hiring funnel.

Towards the end of covid, it was easy to convert a resume into interviews, and successful interviews into a job.

But in the 1990s the tech industry hadn't yet invented the five-interview, live-coding, culture-fit, hiring-committee gauntlet. If a hiring manager liked your resume there'd be one interview, and it wouldn't involve any coding.

What I hear about today seems crazy hard.

2021-2022 was pretty good as well.