>Also pay was relatively decent but much less than what you saw even 5 years ago.

IDK, I'm not from the US/Bay-Area, nor does my country have any big-tech/FANG jobs to distort the market for what constitutes a "high wage" in tech, it's all the same.

>in the back-half of COVID.

Sure, but Covid was only a short blip, a temporary exception, not a baseline norm for wage/job growth, like the years prior which was a longer period of getting a job was easy, like 2012-2020.

For me where I live now, the career depression I saw came in 2023 already when jobs become less abundant and harder to get, and it only got worse later when mass layoff started. So we're already 3 years in the decline, longer than the Covid boom lasted and things aren't going better yet.

I entered the workforce in around 2012-2014 and it was significantly easier to get a callback from sending a resume than it is now where it's mostly automated rejections. When I say "easy" I also mean you didn't need 7 stages of interviews to get a job back then, you'd have 2 stages and those were pretty chill and get a call back from every 2-3 resumes sent. Now you need to send dozens. I guess "easy" is relative.

>Also pay was relatively decent but much less than what you saw even 5 years ago.

Inflation also happened in that time.