In a narrow sense, that's the thrust of the case we're trying to make here: if veteran engineers didn't frequently have competing offers, they wouldn't hold the

In a narrow sense, that's the thrust of the case we're trying to make here: if veteran engineers didn't frequently have competing offers, they wouldn't hold the amount of power they do. That being said, the experienced engineers who can get that kind of attention have other desiderata in their job search beyond just "get an offer". "Get -an- offer" is a goal more typical of a new graduate or someone trying to break into the industry than it is a goal of experienced engineers. To people who are sure they can get a job, there's a big difference between a 150k offer at a company that has none of the workplace traits they want and a 200k offer at a company that they'd genuinely love to work for. And right now, they can't necessarily tell the difference between those jobs before going through a bunch of application steps. The example we mention in the post - of a highly credentialed and very senior engineer who kept having his time wasted by recruiters who refused to admit that they couldn't offer what he was worth - wasn't cherry-picked. It came up organically while we were doing user research, because it's a really common problem, and was echoed further by a number of other senior engineers we spoke to. (Of course, we care about the folks just starting their career, too, so I don't want to totally ignore the importance of solving problems for them. But I think we are solving an important problem for senior devs here, too!)