@Motamama I will tell you what happened.Bear with me,it will be a lengthy explanation.
Context: So in Late 2020-mid 2022,liquidity was at all time high due to low fed rates.Credit was very cheaply available and more often than not this is routed to the Emerging countries like ours.In short,people were raising fund literally with a degree and a deck(Pre-seed).
Now since money was not a concern,all founders cared about valuation and how to raise funds for next round.
Don’t believe me take a look at Khatabook and Open financial technologies funding.
They literally raised 100 million dollars by creating a bookkeeping app from the likes of Google and VISA.
Long story short,founder prioritised growth over PMF.They just wanted to launch as many products in a pursuit of clicking their vanity metrics target(No of downloads,merchants onboardedetc.)
Now to achieve this they started hiring PMs and developers left right and centre.
Some of the startups went overboard and paid 20-25+ to even APMs(remember credit was very cheap) straight out of college.
And what was their selection criteria:There were three set of questions which these aspirants literally mugged up like we used to do for competitive exams:
a)Flipkart cart additions are down by 10%.How will you resolve it?
b) Design Netflix for kids
c)Improve WhatsApp/Instagram
Now there is a specific template which these aspirants mugged up and lots of communities actually have a paid courses where they help them in mugging up these concepts.
So cheap credit,mugged up frameworks (btw doesn’t apply to Indian customers)supplemented with beautified decks saw a deluge of Fresher APMs in late 2020-mid 2022 and these people are still riding on that wave.
Hope this explains