Is this still an employees market?

With all the recent news about retrenchments and staff getting laid off from tech companies, or offers getting rescinded by companies portray a concerning outlook in the coming months. For the longest time, I've been listening that we're about to enter a recession but is it really happening or has it started already?

At the start of the month, I've received a few DMs from companies/recruiters whether I was interested to move. The roles were interesting, and I was definitely interested to hear more and meet the team for a chat. And during the discussion, it sounded to me like it the outlook for the market will differ based on the industry. Tech being tech, I've come to realise that its not so much about

This can be seen in Fintech, where it took a huge hit with all the crypto nonsense going on, I've never believed in it anyway logically the concept sounds great. But if you take a closer look, there's nothing decentralized about it at all. This industry is definitely speculative and very risky to be in, you never know when you will lose your job. However, it's something to look out for though.

Negotiating salary

I had a brief conversation with a good friend of mine, and we noticed that internal salary increments always fails to meet offers from a new company. The basis is this, while your existing company wants to retain you but the value they recognise that you bring to them is only this much. The contradiction is, you get an offer from another company which is how much they think you are valued based on your years of experience, knowledge that you could possibly have. So one has a good idea of how good you area, and the other is guessing how good you can be via interviews, and other factors.

So the option to negotiate a salary based on an offer from another company then expect your current one to offer more, or accept a lower increment and stay on because you are comfortable with the present company. I asked my mentor this question, and his response was to "just leave", "no hard feelings" but if the money is "good/significant" enough why not?

Two schools of thought here, one is to leave because the company doesn't value you as much to warrant that increase. The other is to stay but accept a lower increase. What do you think?

Based on such circumstances, my point of view is that if there are learning opportunities available, and you're still constantly challenged in the company. I would prefer to stay because of two reasons, 1 it will look better on your resume because you won't seem like a job hopper. 2 you're still learning and can grow more, only when it gets bored and you feel stagnant that you should explore other opportunities.

What do you think?