Is the job market actually bad?

I was at an entrepreneurship summit for my city with founders and a bunch of startups hiring, and there was barely anyone there, let alone any computer science students or software engineers. All the startup founders were asking me how they find software engineers because they’re super desperate. I honestly had no idea, because clearly CS students aren’t motivated to come to networking events. I guess you’d have to go to their house. I was also surprised they still wanted technical people because have all these AI tools, but I quickly realized all the basic processes I take for granted when vibe coding require a technical background. Things like breaking down the service into components and mapping out the API specs, planning the database scheme, etc. The founders literally just go “make me an app” and yeah it doesn’t end well lol. Or they hire consulting firms to do the engineering… also never ends well Anyways, given the sentiment on Reddit, I would expect these events to be swarming with software engineers. Some of these startups had raised tens of millions of dollars too, so wasn’t just random people with ideas. I also went to a couple hackathons this year… no comp sci students and maybe one or two software engineers. Idk, are people still doing hackathons? I would do about one a month when I started. For context, I’m on the east coast, USA. It might just be that all the tech people are on the west coast. It’s very strange to me. Oh another interesting things is these non-technical founders struggle to hire because they put up a job posting and get 400 applicants immediately, but how are they supposed to tell who’s legit? They don’t know anything about tech. And tbh, everyone’s bullshitting on their résumé’s anyways, so I probably wouldn’t be able to either