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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?

#171

Post by cindyllm »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #161
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…

I saw this coming way before AI became a thing around 2016 when I was 42. Software development was becoming a commodity where there were plenty of “good enough” developers where no matter what, it was going to be saturated. If someone is trying to sell themselves as an undifferentiated developer in 2025 or later, it’s going to be an uphill battle unless you can lean on your network. At 51, if my only differentiator i…

[dead]

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

#172

Post by echelon »

QuiEgo wrote: post #151
echelon wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’ve been told for 20 years that in 5 years my job is going to be offshored. If they could have they would have long ago. My theory: We had a crazy bubble of hiring during zero rate interest. We are living through a nasty correction. AI is moving the needle too, but it’s mostly being used as a scapegoat to save face and explain away cleaning up failed ZRIP yolo plans that didn’t pan out. We’ve also haven’t had a seri…

> I’ve been told for 20 years that in 5 years my job is going to be offshored. If they could have they would have long ago.

"This time it's different."

20 years ago China and India had a nascent tech industry. Now they're booming.

Talented folks all over the world - Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere - are working on hard problems.

> We had a crazy bubble of hiring during zero rate interest.

We did. This has had a tremendous impact, no doubt. But by the same coin, ZIRP has had half a decade to unwind at this point. There's other stuff going on. Tariffs, continued inflation, etc.

We're not the only industry offshoring. Hollywood has moved a lionshare of production overseas in the last 4 years. Graphics design and marketing... It's being shipped out at volume.

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

#173

Post by [deleted] »

echelon wrote: post #134
tibbar wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Show of hands for anyone seeing AI replacing juniors (and I assume also backfilling employees). I'm genuinely curious. I've heard this argued the other way too. Seen it firsthand. Fwiw, we've had good engineers switch to vibe coding and it's ruined their output. From really solid systems to unmaintainable flocks of seagulls - nested if statements ten levels deep with no thought or care. From good engineers that are j…

[deleted]

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

#174

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

echelon wrote: post #134
tibbar wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Show of hands for anyone seeing AI replacing juniors (and I assume also backfilling employees). I'm genuinely curious. I've heard this argued the other way too. Seen it firsthand. Fwiw, we've had good engineers switch to vibe coding and it's ruined their output. From really solid systems to unmaintainable flocks of seagulls - nested if statements ten levels deep with no thought or care. From good engineers that are j…

I lead cloud consulting projects as a staff consultant specializing in application development.

I use to need myself to lead the project, customer management, design work and some development. I would add usually another developer to do some of the grunt work coding and usually a cloud architect to take care of infrastructure as code, security, etc.

Not that I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to do it all myself, I just didn’t have time. GenAI can definitely do CloudFormation, Terraform or the AWS CDK (ie using a high level language like Typescript instead of Yaml) and can do the code where I really don’t need two other resources or deal with the detailed requirements and coordination.

Before the pearl clutching starts about my not knowing how to code without AI. I’ve been coding consistently since 1986 when I was a hobbyist assembly language coder.

> We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products.

It seems to be working…

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2E...

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

#175

Post by vachina »

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…

Jobless are probably a vocal minority.

Nothing paints a picture of recession in reality right now.

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

#176

Post by addaon »

tadfisher wrote: post #113
bryanlarsen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may also affect it a lot. Retirees I know have a retirement plan that involves their retirement accounts being at a specific level at the end of each year. If their accounts are over that level because the stock market had a good year, they consider it funny money that they're allowed to spend.

That's not a plan, it's a suicide note with extra steps.

> That's not a plan, it's a suicide note with extra steps.

Being an aging human is a suicide note. The extra steps are the entire point of retirement.

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

#177

Post by [deleted] »

reactordev wrote: post #126
epistasis wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#178

Post by johnnyanmac »

shagie wrote: post #119
t-writescode wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean spending all their time looking for a new job, applying for various benefits, doing side work as much as they can, at pay far lower than they're used to so it takes more hours of gig work to reach equilibrium?

> ... at pay far lower than they're used to ... Is this saying something more about the relative expectation of compensation bands? New grads are unlikely to have a comparable benchmark. People who've worked in Big Tech and finding themselves applying to regular companies where the revenue per employee is in the $200k range are likely going to have difficulty adjusting to such. I work in the public sector and make ve…

> Is this saying something more about the relative expectation of compensation bands?

I just want to survive and I can do barely that. If you want a reference: I'm a single male who went from 160k salary to nothing in the last half of 2023. My necessary expenses were 3k a month (70% of that being rent).

Since then I lived in 2024 off of 50/hr freelance @ 15 hours a week. or... 3000/month. You see the issue here. Savings got obliterated, credit built up. But I figured I'd pay it off quickly if I just got any job to supplement the freelance work. not a 160k job per se. I could have found some local 60k IT role and been just fine (if a bit overworked with two different jobs).

In 2025, after a year of circuses in the job market I settled on a 20/hr 20 hour role to supplement the freelance work. So things are "stable" now... as long as I don't get sick, or the car doesn't break down, or a variety of other life factors (spoilers: I did in fact get sick. Which lead to me finding the 2nd part time work).

Like I said, I just want to survive. As is, I'm working for a third or so of my old salary with zero benefits and much more stress.

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

#179

Post by SilverElfin »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #140
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…

Your competition isn’t new grads. It’s experienced engineers in other countries who will work for half your wage in your own city on an H1B or similar.

H1Bs don’t work for “half your wage”. This is a myth. H1Bs have a higher average salary.

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

#180

Post by cal_dent »

vannevar wrote: post #103
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…

>...but out in the official data, and less so but still true in the real world, things are still bobbing along. I don't know that the official data shows things "still bobbing along." The graph of monthly employment numbers looks like it has a decidedly downward trend overall. September jobs were unexpectedly high, but we've had a lot of subsequent downward revisions and it may happen again for September. https://www…

looks like a return to post GFC pre-covid trend. That's sort of what I mean, we've obviously come from a boom-ish market and correcting. How much of it now is the shock that now isnt the same as the 2021-2023 market v this is the start of a real downturn. I don't know
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