> The market is pretty efficient - people wouldn’t bid for jobs that are worse than their current situation.
This still seems like an oversimplification. It's easy to label FAANG, "frontier AI companies," whatever else, but the vast majority of jobs and the vast majority of engineers are in a soup that's maybe able to be split between "startup world" and "enterprise world" but beyond that, difficult to say one is "worse" or "better." And I've worked alongside FAANG people in startup world so, either that isn't a "worse" job and therefore your theory doesn't work because that means it's not really possible to accurately evaluate every single company as objectively worse/better, or, your theory doesn't work because people do apply to "worse" jobs.
This still seems like an oversimplification. It's easy to label FAANG, "frontier AI companies," whatever else, but the vast majority of jobs and the vast majority of engineers are in a soup that's maybe able to be split between "startup world" and "enterprise world" but beyond that, difficult to say one is "worse" or "better." And I've worked alongside FAANG people in startup world so, either that isn't a "worse" job and therefore your theory doesn't work because that means it's not really possible to accurately evaluate every single company as objectively worse/better, or, your theory doesn't work because people do apply to "worse" jobs.