The companies that I know of that are hiring still can’t find people.

It’s quite possible for hiring to be terrible for both employers and candidates at the same time. It doesn’t have to be easy-peasy for one and terrible for the other.

Programmers are not interchangeable parts, and neither are programming projects. Some people really do much better on one sort of project than another. But the way hiring works – keyword scanning, resume review by people who don’t know the project, etc. – does most of the “search work” in a way that pretends that both programmers and roles are manufactured objects with a single easily measurable quality metric.

Quite a lot of tech hiring doctrine tells the candidate, “It’s your job to look like you’re good at everything, so you don’t get passed-over on a webdev role in favor of someone who wrote their own BIOS once” and tells the employer, “It’s your job to hire only the best, so you don’t get stuck with dweebs who can’t FizzBuzz or who give up on a production problem once the network stack is involved.”

Both of these are dopey.