I don't think demand for engineers is necessarily that elastic - even if candidates were willing to accept less money, it would take a long time for companies to respond by hiring more and they might never match supply.
I've personally applied to several jobs offering less than $80k TC (government, nonprofits, startups) and heard nothing back. That's a small sample size because I'm currently employed and only looking at particularly interesting positions, but I'm also only applying to good fits, writing an individualized resume/cover letter, etc.
Anyways, I agree with GP that there seems to have been a breakdown of the old post job -> cold submit resume pipeline. You have to have some kind of an in these days.
My anecdotes last year and the year before was that when I was looking for my preferred jobs - full time positions at cloud consulting companies and a couple of product companies as an “architect”, I had a 100% response rate.
When I looked for my Plan B jobs - just regular old C# enterprise dev jobs looking for AWS experience paying less - crickets.
It’s seems harder to get interviews for jobs you are overqualified for than ones you are slightly under qualified for.
I've personally applied to several jobs offering less than $80k TC (government, nonprofits, startups) and heard nothing back. That's a small sample size because I'm currently employed and only looking at particularly interesting positions, but I'm also only applying to good fits, writing an individualized resume/cover letter, etc.
Anyways, I agree with GP that there seems to have been a breakdown of the old post job -> cold submit resume pipeline. You have to have some kind of an in these days.