Interviews, Salaries and Skills
By far, the most complete material I've seen for prepping for a technical job interview can be found at https://www.techinterviewhandbook.org/. In addition to the technical aspects, there's also great details on recruiting process, jargon and salary negotiations.
As a note - there are a lot of reports of scams in hiring, especially remote interviews. Expect to see a lot more in-person interviewing, even for remote jobs. I found in-person pairing sessions to be invaluable for hiring in the past, and I think we'll see a lot more of that kind of thing going forward.
You can find salary information at https://www.levels.fyi/.
You can track layoffs at https://layoffs.fyi/. Note that it's not uncommon for a company to do layoffs and then in 3-6 months open up hiring again.
When it comes to overall skills, https://www.freecodecamp.org/ is an excellent resource. You can check out that site, or you can go straight to the YouTube channel. Some of the material is bordering on insane - for example, this 65 hour course on generative AI - but if you are looking to develop skills, what a resource.
You can check FRED data for tech unemployment, but in practice this is only useful as a high level data point - for example, if you have a skill set in the technologies needed to work with LLMs, that's a much hotter space than, say, traditional enterprise CRUD apps. This leads to a very confusing salary space, such as the observed trimodal distribution.
The level of uncertainty around everything - AL/LLMs, interest rates, geopolitics, etc, etc, etc - makes planning very challenging. More data like these sites is always helpful. My guess is that we will see a lot of exits from tech careers over the next 1-3 years. It's entirely possible that due to the exits (and students choosing other majors) in 2-4 years we could see a big demand for tech again - or the entire sector might just become increasingly specialized and/or turn into some sort of "LLM manager" role.
In that world, expect a combination of soft skills and technology skills - especially troubleshooting - to be paramount.
