Trying to hire in 2020-21 was impossible. You would get people between interviews get massive offers (days/week apart). 50/50 whether even after accepting the offer they'd actually turn up... If you saw someone that had a decent shot at coding you needed to hire right then and there. Reddit/HN was absolutely filled with devs making hay while the sun was shining job hopping and say things like 'if you're not getting a 30% payrise...'
Now the credit crunch has just switched the tap off. I'm about to contract out a small bit of work via one of the freelancer sites and I'm going to be very interested to see what it's like getting freelancers now....
Neither did I until it became a neccessity. Did 4 job interviews in 7 years and got them all in one go. Then I quit, and there was a long drought of people just not wanting to hire me for 6 months. The first rejection I took personally, but after 10 interviews with crazier and crazier questions you can’t do anything other than see it as a numbers game. Anything else destroys any sense of self worth you have.
I also make middle-of-the-trimodal-graph comp, though, not FAANG/finance tier.
Since then I've taken 3 interviews and gotten two great offers in the 50+% percentile for US based software engineering roles. I'm a not-that-bright grug-brained developer, so I'm sure it wasn't because I was blowing people out of the water with my brain power.
I'm not sure I have the energy to do a numbers-game applicant strategy. I hate interviewing generally, and live coding causes my brain to lock-up. So I only apply places I am genuinely excited to work for, and places that I reason would be generally excited to have a good team player who is nonetheless a grug-brained developer.
I can get genuinely excited about pretty run-of-the-mill work though, and have strong opinions very loosely held. I think maybe those two qualities are my secret sauce.