Thanks, at least in part to a strong perception of a bad hiring market for programmers, I've not needed to hire for the last three years.

I say perception, not to diminish those having a tough time, but because everyone in my contact list who changed jobs this year had a tough time, but wrapped their search with better pay and benefits from the role they were laid off from. (And the known numbers indicate that all the highly publicized layoffs put a fraction of a percent of a dent in the demand for programmers.)

So something fishy is going on, and it is coordinated market manipulation by the CEOs of the big employers.

The effect, is real though. My lack of need to hire this year is completely opposite of the previous decades, when I needed two or more rounds of hiring per year, to replace the folks who left for higher salaries.

So, manipulation or not, the market for programmers is probably the coldest it's been since 1980. By which, to be clear, they're changing jobs much less frequently and for mere 25% pay increases, rather than their historically frequent 50% to 200% increases.

That said, everyone predicting the end of the "programmers are hot" trend are too new at this to remember when "programmers are hot" ended forever in 1970. And in 1986, and in 2000, and in 2008.

But I heard it's real this time because anyone can write code with ~~C~~, ~~BASIC~~, ~~C templates~~, ~~Visual Basic~~, ~~now that Visual Basic for Applications is built into Excel~~, ~~Modern Code Generation Tools~~, ~~Web Frameworks~~, ~~small scripts using Microservice APIs~~, Artificial Intelligence.