Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 693 posts

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

#141

Post by pjdemers »

csomar wrote: post #79
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

Home Depot is a chain, so the backend is probably being handled from some R&D center somewhere. Your maneuvering area at the local home depot is probably pretty slim.

Back in the early 2000's I did consulting work with Home Depot's backend developers. Their office is the "store support center", which is in the NW suburbs of Atlanta. I remember the team as being very good, but surprisingly small.

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

#142

Post by doctorpangloss »

chasd00 wrote: post #61
master_crab wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

“Slightly higher than flat” is still a new record.

Haha, Black Friday sets record by being the worst discounts ever.

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

#143

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

>out in the official data, and less so but still true in the real world, things are still bobbing along.

The Titanic had 3 days of warning and took 3 hours to sink. A large ship takes a long time to do anything, be it turn or drown.

If you've been following the breadcrumbs in pretty much any industry (especially tech), you know the market isn't in a good shape. If you're looking outside expencting to see the world burning, you gotta wait another 3 hours (or hope someone steps in first).

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

#144

Post by ivankra »

itake wrote: post #77
cute_boi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is all due to outsourcing. AI/H1B isn't taking that much job. Unless government put penalties on outsourcing market isn't going to improve.

yep. Trump added tariffs on physical goods, but there are no taxes on service imports.

Section 174's 15 years amortization rule on foreign R&D is kind of an indirect tax.

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

#145

Post by AstroNutt »

cyanmagenta wrote: post #111
AstroNutt wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I've never experienced a slow down You didn’t experience a slowdown at the height of the recession circa 2008?

Nope. Things still break and need repaired no matter how the housing market is.

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

#146

Post by johnnyanmac »

agentultra wrote: post #125
sheepscreek wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

We gotta gather ourselves and remind companies why they once paid handsomely to not let potential disruptiors run rampant on the market. Long term new teams will form once productivity is valued again and not this giant incestuous GDP-maxmizing scheme.

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

#148

Post by dboreham »

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.

A common pattern is: people (I supposed I mean: investors) are somewhat worried that markets are over valued. They ponder, think, research, binge-watch Prof G videos... Then they travel to have Thanksgiving dinner with a bunch of in-laws. Market gets discussed over cigars. If they get a confirmation signal from the brother in law attorney or sister in law dentist that they are worried too...then after mulling it over on the flight back to Denver...the market dumps on Monday.

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

#149

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

Yeah pretty much. Engineers are going to be at a crossroad where they either turn to the government to finally build in some proper labor laws and other obvious controls (how about re-banning stock buybacks?) or go out to the Wild West and hope they idea can sustain their livelihood.

Given the vibes of the community here: I guess I'll look for a Mad Max mask (I'll ofc keep performing my civic duties, though).

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

#150

Post by lesuorac »

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…

> Then Musk bought Twitter, laid off a bunch of folks, and things kept running.

I'm not sure you can give credit to Musk here. Buying a company and cutting all R&D to "juice" profits isn't his invention. Twitter is really around still in spite of his efforts as opposed to because of them; other CEOs might be doing layoffs but they're also not going out doing sieg heils. As well as he really fired them for fealty reasons and not economic ones.

It should be very telling that Grok came out of X.ai and not X. Ultimately, Musk did have to reverse some of the layoffs although with a bit of slight of hand so that Twitter could release any sort of new products.

Post reply on HN