I'm not sure what the tech job market is like in other parts of the world right now, but in the UK it's dire.

I'm a contractor here and I consider myself fairly lucky to still be in work right now. A lot of my contractor friends have been really struggling to find work recently and none are inexperienced. It doesn't surprise me that OP hasn't found work.

Another thing I'll note is that Java is still a fairly popular and respected language here. My previous three clients used Java on the backend and my current client uses Kotlin (so still very much in the Java/Spring ecosystem). I don't really know why so many people here are saying Java is the issue because in my experience it's one of the best languages to know when looking for work as a software engineer here.

OP, I don't want to be too pessimistic, but I don't think the market for tech jobs will return to the 2010-2020 days. There are three large shifts happening right now:

- A general move away from bespoke in-house software development to cloud based solutions. Shopify is an obvious example of this and I've seen entire departments made redundant over night after making the switch from an in-house development team to Shopify. But also I think just the general API ecosystem is hurting the demand for developers today. Why pay a team of developers $100,000 a year to build something when you could just integrate with a 3rd party API quicker and cheaper? Quite often these days I find most of the heavy lifting has already been done and I'm just plumbing in software that's already been developed.

- Ever increasing numbers of new tech talent. When I started my career aside from a few weirdo college friends I didn't really know anyone who wanted to write software for a living. But plenty of teenagers today want to be software engineers and almost all of them have some basic experience doing it from school. There's no real shortage of people entering the market today and even if you look at people with 10+ years experience it's just not as hard to find those people when compared to say 2015.

- AI is going to slowly eat into demand for programmers. Even if we assume AI won't fully replace us and there will always be some demand for software engineers, the need to hire large teams of developers to build simple CRUD applications will likely soon be behind us. Software engineers in the future will probably need to oversee automated tools and communicate decisions to stakeholders. They might need to write some niche pieces of code here and there, but I very much doubt they will be spending 20+ hours a week writing test cases for a company's CRUD application.

I think we all need to be assuming that the job we're in now could be our last good gig in this industry. I'm sure there will be work out there for us for a while yet, but wages are going to continue to come under pressure and working conditions for software engineers won't ever be what they once were.

Something we don't like to admit to ourselves is that our financial success as software engineers isn't because of our smarts, we just got lucky. We were in the right place at the right time. We rode the waves of the adoption of the internet and the rise of big tech.

Things might improve a bit next year (or they might not) but long-term I feel confident in saying that 2021 was the peak for our trade. Software engineers are not going to be that special going forward.