No, despite all the rhetoric about shortages, I'm seeing most companies sit on job reqs for a year waiting on a unicorn rather than taking a chance on a non-perfect fit. Largely due to the meme that started a decade+ ago that one bad hire can destroy a company, and everyone is secretly a non-learning moron.

Heaven forbid they might have to allow you to train for two weeks for a two year job. Nope, must "hit the ground running."

I wonder where it's going to go. Will the field fully stratify by tech stack? Kinda hard to imagine with how new stacks still pop up every 5 years or so.

I'm already kinda leery of taking jobs outside of my specialty. I'm not at the point yet where I won't switch stacks, but I can see it getting there.

Indeed, it might be even worse. You generally aren't allowed to take a job outside your specialty these days unless you've got a friend on the inside, or very early in your career.

Or you can answer with 100% certainty a selection of twenty random questions on the new stack. Because there will always be one other candidate who dedicated their life to it. What you know right this second takes precedence over anything you might learn, even if you could look it up in thirty seconds.

There is a book about "mindsets" I read recently. The growth mindset (teachable) and the fixed (born smart/dumb) mindset. Tech interviews are firmly in the later category, to our detriment.

Your last sentence shows that you are not interested in a discussion; you are only interested in bragging how much better you are than the people who had the rug pulled out from underneath them.