Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

news.ycombinator.com

101–110 of 625 posts

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#101
post #88

Low pay offers. In Montreal there are plenty of offers paying ~90k CAD/year ( 62k USD/year ) for 15+ years of experience. There are lot of job listings in Montreal, and those positions are real. Problem is that the pay makes those positions undesirable. The second problem is that no one hires junior developers. My friend's kid finishing CS studies in May 2025 and prospect for jobs are not good.

In the last couple of weeks we posted a job for a junior .NET dev and got over 800 resumes within days. The automation is killing both the employer having to sift through it all and the employee possibly getting lost in the mix.

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#102
post #97

[flagged]

On what basis? There is no right to employment in the US Constitution, and companies are simply practicing good capitalism by purchasing the most effective workforce at the lowest cost from a global labor pool.

If you want to live in a society where your life has value beyond that which a market rapidly converging on slave labor and AI can extract from you, I guess maybe move to a country where "socialism" isn't a dirty word.

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#104
post #97

[flagged]

Why, exactly? These companies have foreign customers, it seems reasonable to expect that they would also want to have foreign employees that can speak the language, work in the same time zone, etc. And the demand for those employees is unlikely to be perfectly commensurate with demand for US based employees at all times. Seems like a ban would be pretty destructive, even if some of this hiring is an attempt at offshoring work US based employees would be doing.

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#105
post #9
post #3

I’m self-employed so I don’t have personal experience, but all around me (in Berlin) people are struggling to find work. I have more unemployed friends than ever and they stay unemployed for longer than ever. Others are afraid to risk their job in any way. Employers got bolder in their demands and English-speaking workers are fighting for scraps. The UX industry is absolutely cutthroat right now. I work in immigratio…

Sounds like its a problem everywhere, not just the states.

Germany is facing more intense economic challenges than most.

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#106
> Elon Musk and others claim there is an engineer shortage and we must increase the number of H-1B visas in order to fill this gap

There is a shortage of engineers who are willing to work cheap, and to be much more tolerant of shitty working conditions because getting fired = getting deported.

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#107

I’m 65 and I have tenure. If I didn’t, I would leave the country. If I couldn’t, I don’t know what I would do. You do not want to be on the open market in the 2020s, that’s for sure. it is nearly impossible for people with CS degrees (especially white males) to get an interview let alone a job. My friend, if you think it’s bad for white men, just wait till you hear what it’s like for black women. 2+ year job searches…

> if you think it’s bad for white men, just wait till you hear what it’s like for black women "Corporate America Promised to Hire a Lot More People of Color. It Actually Did. The year after Black Lives Matter protests, the S&P 100 added more than 300,000 jobs — 94% went to people of color." - https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-e... A BestBuy & McKinsey leadership program open only to non-white…

One thing I've seen is the company would prefer to hire women/non-white, but doesn't get many qualified/competitive non-white applicants. Because an unfortunate number of seem to be trying to hustle into CS from outside the field, come from boot camps, etc., and are applying to senior roles with junior skills.

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#108

Wherever there is difficulty, there is also opportunity. I think the major thing stopping people from just going their own way is healthcare coverage. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) I wonder if I can hack a business model that somehow provides healthcare but also gathers together sourced projects, and freelancers to bid on building them, while also getting healthcare. (And if you opt out of healthcare, you can take the d…

There is some truth to healthcare coverage, but 26 and under are covered by their parents. They’re the hard to fill junior roles anyway. IMO, people want way too much fucking money.

Want and need way too much money. Cost of living is wild everywhere and cost of a lifestyle we used to consider "standard" (family, home ownership, kids can go to college, annual vacation, usually on one salary) is out of reach for most now.

Looking at the numbers for the decline in spending power over time is sobering.

Re: Ask HN: Are you unable to find employment?

#110
post #5

And if you look at e.g. Bachelor's enrollment in CS it's somehow still rising in Fall of 2024: https://nscresearchcenter.org/stay-informed/ That's gonna be one rude awakening.

Classic "buying on the high" behavior, we saw this in 1998/99 also.
Post reply on HN