Direct consequence of programming gold rush of 2010s and esp. 2020Q3-2022. When you have choirs of people whining about how companies are "desperate to find anyone being able to solve Fizzbuzz"... when influencers are making videos about how they supposedly (in some cases - actually) do 1-2 hours of work per day in FAANG campus... when even some technical people honestly believe that average salary of developer is $150k per annum... when completely random people with blue collar backgrounds are looking to get into software development... when bootcamps are making claims about making random people hirable in software in six months there is a problem. The gold rush problem. What we as industry and community were broadcasting for a long time is that making money is easy in software, but that is not true and mostly never was. What the masses are hearing is "six figures in six months". What ends up happening is that for many positions there are large number of juniors, freshers, aspirants, wannabes, bootcamps grads, some opportunistic chancers and even some blatantly fraudulent imposters. Imagine posting a junior dev position and having a flashmob of 100+ people instantly appearing, yet the objective is to hire one person. One way or another, rest of them have to be told off. It's just mathematical reality that is made even worse by end of ZIRP and significant slowdown of VC money.