At one end of the spectrum I have a few friends who are tech employees at senior-to-executive levels in major tech centres in the US. The way they talk it sounds like any of them could easily get five offers within a week or two all for a huge amount of money via their networks.
At the other end of the spectrum I have other friends with broadly similar experience and skill levels who do freelance or contract work here in the UK. That market has been wrecked by IR35 and Brexit on top of the same COVID problems, global economic conditions and rampant inflation as everyone else. There are fewer opportunities now. Maybe 80% of those that remain require a strange contract arrangement where you get none of the benefits of being an employee but somehow end up paying all of the overheads of both an employee and a large employer. And the regulatory change happened across the whole industry literally overnight so with the smaller market as well there doesn't seem to have been enough competition to push rates up to compensate.
Unsurprisingly several of my friends in the UK have considered going back to being permanent employees or already made the jump. But then the only way to make even decent money by US standards in the UK was to be an independent or to start your own business. So basically we have people with 10 or even 20 years of experience who might be staff/principal engineer level or senior engineering managers but whose total comp is about the same as a newbie starting their first job at a FAANG in any US tech centre.
Both groups find it hard to believe what's happening to the other but that doesn't mean either is wrong. They're effectively operating in entirely different markets with entirely different constraints.
Many people are bad at evaluating themselves. I've seen countless posts by juniors apparently "grinding hard" to get a job, and you just take 1 look at their resume and everything makes sense. Zero research on how to write resumes, zero prep, projects are garbage, shotgunning on indeed without some creativity etc.
None of this has ANY effect on competent software engineers. Most of my peers keep getting massive offers left and right. Nothing has changed for them.
This is the job market equivalent of "it works on my computer."
Shopify laying off 10% of their workforce could have an effect with Ruby developers.
Maybe in your part of the world or the industry. I know at least a few excellent people with excellent track records and previously excellent career paths who have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time since COVID and its aftermath, just like I did in the GFC and the Dot Bomb before.
They say pride comes before the fall. I imagine that over the next couple of years some relatively young developers who have coasted along on the wave of tech growth through the 2010s and never experienced a big bust in the industry before are going to learn that those nice salaries and equity-backed top-ups aren't nearly as valuable or guaranteed as they've become used to.
Can you define both what "horribly wrong" looks like and what "not horribly wrong" looks like? Because I can't.
The problem with a "proven track record" is that nobody believes what you write on your resume and nobody wants to bother looking at your code. That leaves hiring on "feel" and I have no idea what somebody needs to put in their cover letter and/or resume to "feel" right to a recruiter, an HR rep and a hiring manager all at the same time.
That's nonsense.
It's quite straightforward actually: go through the CVs of engineers working at top companies and look how their resume looks different from yours.
Chances are that they're actually selling themselves properly, using lots of jargon, using strong action verbs, and following the advice that has shown to work for the last decade.
If you're feeling generous, you can email it to me at soft.desk0874@fastmail.com. If not, no hard feelings.
My record is impeccable. I build highly reliable software fast both as part of a group or as a solo freelancer. Much of my work is in the public domain on GitHub so it's easy to verify all this and check my code quality, automated tests and PR review history.
One question though: how many of those years 10 years have you worked in a full-time position?