Are silicon labor markets bad across USA?

I’m at Microchip. WLB is great. Location Arizona. TC around 150k in a good year, could be significant less in down cycles. YOE 3 after phd. People are nice. People keep telling me the technology is behind but I see the beauty of making it work at a good margin. And there’s no layoff. I’m looking at other companies that pay more than us but it seems even Qualcomm Intel AMD keep having layoffs for “position urgency” purposes rather than performances. There’s no good way out. Hardware engineers are that cheap. And the paranoia won’t stop for most companies. Is the job market that bad?