It's not that the pool is running dry, it's that they're burning through the pool. Places like banks and most hedge funds are usually really bad to work for, a

It's not that the pool is running dry, it's that they're burning through the pool. Places like banks and most hedge funds are usually really bad to work for, and they aren't paying that well compared to FAANGs and unicorns (who they are competing with for talent). The exception is a few of the HFTs: they can have good engineering-focused cultures, but you will still work 50 hours per week or more. These companies are more selective about who they hire than FB, Netflix, or Google, and almost universally, the talent they want is having them bid against very high-paying tech companies. The last few times I spoke to a recruiter, I asked for salaries over $500k because that would make it worth it to go there instead of staying at Google - I was making more than half that at G, and working 20-30 hours a week. Most of them said that they would not offer near that. The ones that would wanted me to be the next coming of Bjarne (in terms of C++ knowledge) to pay that rate. They were hiring a lot of people from defense contractors at the time. Anecdotally, a lot of developers who enter one of those firms early and stay tend to get to the $500k-1M range pretty easily, but they seem to be a lot less willing to hire in that range. Comparatively, Google and Meta are happy to make $400k+ offers.