> she's seen more recruiters being hired

This is a good sign for the whole industry at large, considering how bad the tech job market has been for the last two years.

That or forcing people into offices will make the best leave.

Interest rates got cut.

Is there really that direct of a relationship between hiring and interest rates?

Yes. If the short term rate banks can lend to each other (the fed funds rate set by the central bank) is lower, then all downstream longer term rates / bond yields tend to fall:

https://www.cnbc.com/bonds/

This is simplified, but:

Say you have a billion dollars in cash. With rates at 0% and inflation at 2%, you might as well spend that cash by hiring some engineers and chasing a hit product. Or an OK product.

With rates at 5% or so and 2% inflation you can make decent money keeping your cash in a savings account paying 5% YoY. Unless you're sure you have a good idea, you might as well park the cash and skip out on all of that "hiring engineers" business, which may not result in a good product anyway.

Spotify is a good employer but they don't pay tier 1 salaries.

Haha. I just checked levels.fyi and they get paid way more than I do. Anyone know if they are hiring for Haskell/Gleam/Rust/OCaml?

Interestingly the only software engineering position I see on their site is on site.