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Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?

economist.com

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Re: Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?

#121

Post by tayo42 »

master_crab wrote: post #17
chasd00 wrote: post #4

Ftfa (the part I could read) “ growth is buoyed by an exuberant stockmarket and artificial-intelligence investment, while ordinary Americans languish” Black Friday sales set records and it not even cyber Monday. If Americans are languishing then shouldn’t holiday spending be down?

Black Friday did not set records. Bloomberg stated that it was up 4.1%, but that was not inflation adjusted. So it was just slightly higher than flat. Not necessarily a bad thing…but not great either. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-29/black-fri...

Doesn't black Friday kind of suck now and for the last few years? There's sales all of the time, and there's all those open secrets about black Friday skus now.

Re: Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?

#122

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

sheepscreek wrote: post #85
cal_dent wrote: post #62

I think there's something quite interesting (well to me anyway) where if you go by the internet, there is this bloodbath (slight exaggeration perhaps but feels like that) in jobs out in the US, UK, Aus and major European countries (the volume of anecdotes & complaints would suggest a significant downturn in employment) but out in the official data, and less so but still true in the real world, things are still bobbin…

I believe you’re in the minority here. Perhaps your experience is different because of your skill set or the market you’re in. Anyone that I know personally who got laid off (in tech) took at least 6 months to find a job. I don’t know about anyone else but that to me is pretty brutal. More so as the people getting laid off are mid career, some with kids. Edit: Add to the above that companies like Walmart are seeing a…

> Where do you eat when you downgrade from McDonalds?

You buy groceries. And if you must downgrade from there you eat the rich.

Re: Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?

#123

Post by epistasis »

reactordev wrote: post #112
epistasis wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in the US we haven't had official data for quite some time. The BLS lost its chief because of "bad numbers" The numbers we do have show significantly worse jobs numbers compared to prior years. We might get data again, maybe not, but the US government has had an internal revolution, and it's doubtful we will have data as good as in the past, and it's quite likely that any bad news will be deeply buried.

BTC would agree with you. It’s nose diving.

Since its a Sunday night during a holiday weekend without any big breaking news, I would suspect that's probably just a bunch of people that had automated sales at $90k, or something similar.

Re: Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?

#124

Post by aorloff »

krackers wrote: post #54
aorloff wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gotta tell you man, if you can find someone in charge at the backend of the Home Depot and let them hire you as a systems uptime troubleshooter you would easily make any salary you could name for them tenfold. I at at a Home Depot like 10 times a week and let me tell you, they have a major systems problem that is making their operations look like a joke

>you would easily make any salary you could name for them tenfold. >I at at a Home Depot like 10 times a week And yet you still go to Home Depot, so from their perspective it's not an existential issue. Probably the biggest thing companies have learned recently is that they don't need 99.99% uptime, people will accept degraded performance because "that's just how technology works".

I am at 10 different supply stores too, Lowes, Ashby, Truitt and I get a shit ton of stuff delivered.

Everyone competes on price, so when I see everyone at Home Depot with their thumbs up their asses because the computers are down, I know that Ashby is eating their lunch on the margin. I'm sure Home Depot has enormous economies of scale that make up for it, but this is a current issue.

Re: Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?

#125

Post by agentultra »

sheepscreek wrote: post #95
markus_zhang wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reality is not particularly rosy for new graduates AFAIK. If I lose my job, I wouldn't be super surprised that I might never get a similar job for the rest of my life -- it is not that I do not have the skills, but 1) the amount of time for a laid off SDE to get a new job could reach to years, not months, so I need to do something else to earn $$$, and 2) why are companies going to hire me, who have gap years and are…

> but not some fresh graduates who can work 80 hours per week and only demand half of the salary Cause garbage in, gets garbage out. With AI models being all the more rage in the coming years, unexperienced hires will prove many times more costly. (10x garbage with agents). So companies are going to concentrate their worker base even more with experienced folks. They need fewer of them. Yes. But quality matters more…

We haven’t passed the stage where we convince policy makers to stop dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

We’re not going to convince anyone to keep hiring software developers.

I think we ought to be keeping people trained and employed but it seems we’re not on the winning side here.

Re: Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?

#126

Post by reactordev »

epistasis wrote: post #123
reactordev wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTC would agree with you. It’s nose diving.

Since its a Sunday night during a holiday weekend without any big breaking news, I would suspect that's probably just a bunch of people that had automated sales at $90k, or something similar.

Love that HODL optimism. Looking at the longer charts there seems to be support around $80k so maybe. This could just be holiday shopping. The timing of economics with this though has me worried the support will falter causing a sell off and Monday’s bell will be a bloodbath.

Re: Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?

#127

Post by mgh95 »

AstroNutt wrote: post #86
SoftTalker wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Construction, trades, and basically physical-world stuff that AI cannot do are still hiring.

Believe it or not, I've been in construction/remodeling for 35 years. We currently have 3 home remodels going on at the moment with more down the road. I've never experienced a slow down. Even during COVID. I'm not your typical HN member I don't think. I've been a computer nerd since I was 14 years old. I come here to stimulate my inner nerd.

How did you get into construction/remodeling, and how would someone best reach out to this community? I have been thinking about some construction related ideas (mostly around prefab automation and sales) and haven't the slightest idea how to reach these types of people.

I am always curious about people who are strongly oriented towards one thing (computing) but somehow wind up in another area, such as construction.

Re: Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?

#128

Post by yadaeno »

jdlshore wrote: post #91
bequanna wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offshoring (India + LATAM) with a side of h1b. Offshoring is by far the biggest culprit. Plenty of Jr/Mid roles hiring…but not US based.

Offshoring has been a thing for decades. Seriously, Yourdon wrote a doom-and-gloom book about it in the 90s. It was called “Decline and Fall of the American Programmer,” published 1992. Then in 1996, he wrote “Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer.” The software industry is extremely fad-driven. During the pandemic, the fad was to hire programmers. That created a lot of busywork and coordination jobs that…

It’s been a thing, but Covid and remote work took away any possible argument to no offshore everything ASAP.

Re: Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?

#129

Post by vandal8ind »

anon373839 wrote: post #16
chasd00 wrote: post #4

Ftfa (the part I could read) “ growth is buoyed by an exuberant stockmarket and artificial-intelligence investment, while ordinary Americans languish” Black Friday sales set records and it not even cyber Monday. If Americans are languishing then shouldn’t holiday spending be down?

The rise in Black Friday sales is misleading because the sales reflect inflation rather than increased consumer demand.

[dead]

Re: Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?

#130

Post by tibbar »

echelon wrote: post #115
markus_zhang wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but I forgot to mention that in the original reply I meant to say that "After the economy turns around, there is no point to hire me, an older guy with maybe a couple of gap years, who worked as a Uber driver for the last two years and can't leetcode". But yeah, new graduates is going to suffer anyway. And I'm scared of the collapse of the existing world order. Maybe we won't see a turn around for m…

New folks will never be hired. RIP to the CS degree. Old staff will be exited. Especially senior and mid level management. If you lose your job, you won't get the same comp again. The days of $500K TC are long behind us. It's the era of downsizing and outsourcing while blaming AI. None of this has anything to do with AI. That's just a scapegoat. Google and Amazon are culling entire US teams and rebuilding them in Asi…

This is not the picture I'm seeing on the ground. AI is eliminating certain classes of junior software positions. (Roughly: jobs where explaining a task to junior engineer is more work than asking Cursor/Claude Code/Codex to do it.) Junior engineers can fight back against this by

a) getting really good at clarifying requirements

b) learning quickly, so their work quality is eventually higher than Cursor can work out in one shot.

This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas: when the bottleneck is communication + taste, not raw implementation cycles, you'd rather have a small local team. And it's a pressure for high TC, because individuals now have much more leverage, although they need to master more skills to take advantage.

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