The missing piece is salary is way down. With FAANG no longer paying $400K for engineers and hiring at an insane rate, the rest of the industry isn’t trying to play catch-up and compete on pay.
I used to work FP&A for a 2nd or 3rd tier tech company and it was hard competing to get engineers to join us. A kid out of college from a decent school for a $100k signing bonus from Facebook. I have since switched to a lower tier company but it has great work life balance, but we’ve lowered our salary on all open reqs because we know we don’t need to compete as aggressively and our average time to fill a role hasn’t changed.