I'm not sure on the root cause. Like I said, there's several people that I know who are all experiencing the same things. I have 20 years experience and a phd. Others in my friend group have no degree whatsoever, but have a decade of experience. Several years ago, we were all offered multiple jobs at a time. Now, we are not even getting requests for interviews.
EDIT: adding that, because we all live in a non-metropolitan area, we all have been remote, and are continuing to look for remote work.
I think fully remote expectation in non-metro areas can be a big hurdle. I know many startups here in SF who are looking to hire good candidates. But they want in-office presence at least a few days a week.
Someone summed it up nicely for me - remote work gives you speed. Colocation (typically office) gives you velocity. A startup needs velocity.
With modern teleconferencing tools, it doesn't matter.
If you feel that in-person time is important, then do what we did at my current company: They hired me. I know everyone at the local state university, from professors to students. We hired from that pool. Everyone is still remote, but our local group gets together once a week for lunch. For $100-$150 a week (yes, it really is that cheap in this area), the company maintains a culture and personal interaction for a team of talented programmers (from me, who has a PhD and two decades of experience, down to the best students who just graduated, and others in-between) without the cost of maintaining an office.
We all work on different projects in the company.
Velocity happens with communication. Communication doesn't need to be in-person, but it does need to be real time. So use Teams, Zoom, Hangouts, or whatever. We have the tools for this already.
Final note: The company didn't intend to have half a dozen people in the same city, they just intended to hire me. It just so happens that I'm really good at finding talent in the places that everyone else is ignoring.
> With modern teleconferencing tools, it doesn't matter.
Speak for yourself? I personally find Zoom to be extremely lacking. No eye contact, no body language, people having problems with wifi or other device issues, no serendipitous chats around hallways or watercoolers etc all affect the quality of communication.
As I said, founders and CEOs are already voting with their choices. Most of the big companies have already embraced RTO. A majority of the new startups I am seeing insist on at least few days in office. There are a few which are fully remote but they seem to be a minority.
That is the key. By looking for a remote role you are competing with large pool of workers.
Are you ready to accept a new role as a contractor with 100k USD annual salary and no benefits? How about 60k? Many skilled developers will accept such offer for remote role.
EDIT: adding that, because we all live in a non-metropolitan area, we all have been remote, and are continuing to look for remote work.