They just know the keywords the EMs and C suite sent them in the headcount request.
Now that money isn’t free, they think the problem is too many engineers.
This really isn't new. A look at Slashdot will give you similar complaints as far back as at least the 2000s. I'm sure someone older than me will dig up Usenet posts with exactly the same complaints and tell me to get off their lawn ;-)
My 3 months experience searching - and getting only ~3-4 initial interviews - is the New-AI-Kids-on-Da-Block think software-engineering is just another plumbing for their Artificially Great Intelligence. One CEO even used the exact word.
waw. Plumbers make real good $$$..
Well when the discount plumbing they are getting put in starts to leak shit all over the place there will be a premium again in actually knowing how to do it properly.
If you don’t have specific experience with some CTOs favorite esoteric API or don’t have experience in the same, specific corner of some insurance or usury industry, your ability to actually engineer solutions is considered irrelevant.
It’s as if the industry has forgotten that building software is about the application of algorithms to data structures to accomplish some user need. Instead, company after company wants to hot glue some service via some API using some framework on some cloud platform. And because the MBA decision-maker can write Excel macros with GPT, we don’t need programmers to build systems anymore. Just wire up foo SaaS to bar SaaS and MVPFailFastLeanAgile our way to success!
Sorry for the rant…