I don't know what it was like before, but I can't help but think it's different than what it used to be. I'm a recent grad in computer science and I've been job hunting for a few months now. My resume isn't stellar, sure, but it's not abysmal either. I stopped bothering to keep track of how many resumes I've sent once I passed ~300ish two or so months ago. All to entry level positions, but otherwise across all sorts of things. I've tried remote and in-person across the country, lowered my salary expectations $10k/yr under the bottom quartile of starting salaries in my field, made it clear I'm willing to relocate, and had friends at a few different companies try to get me an in. I've yet to hear back from anywhere.

Gotta think that one of the big downsides of everything being remote in CS is that now everybody everywhere can apply for every job. If I find a posting on LinkedIn with less than 400 applicants on the first day, I consider it unusual. Seems logical that if 100x more people are applying for each post, you'd have to apply to 100x more places. Some very nice people on here offered to throw me in their referral system, but I chickened out last second. That probably wasn't the smartest move, honestly.

Anyways, didn't mean to turn a reply into a personal vent session, but yeah, I can't imagine that it's always been like this. It's completely maddening. The very reason I went into CS instead of fucking physics or philosophy was specifically because nobody shut the fuck up about how much demand there is for coders and I was too naive to really understand that when you hear that, it's usually more about collapsing wages than filling positions.