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

181–190 of 693 posts

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

#181

Post by kragen »

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…

You ask, "Where do you eat when you downgrade from McDonalds..Wendy’s? It’s a sad state of affairs." On the off chance that this isn't a joke, you need to know that eating out is very expensive in the US, even at McDonald's. According to the obviously highly credible https://mcdonalds-menu-prices.us/ a Quarter Pounder With Cheese costs US$7.99 now. I think home-cooked rice and lentils costs about US$0.20. Other similarly low-cost foods include polenta, homemade bread, homemade mayonnaise, zucchini, spaghetti, sunflower-seed cheese, homemade peanut butter, onions, potatoes, etc. Those numbers aren't even the same order of magnitude.

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

#182

Post by [deleted] »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #146
agentultra wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#183

Post by johnnyanmac »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #20

From my experience, it's grim at the moment for software developer jobs. I got laid off in August and it's been rough. I'm in my early 30s so I can't compare it to 2008, but I've been laid off before and I've never seen it this bad.

Same story here. I work in games so it's always been boom or bust. It's real bad now.

- out of college it took 3 months to find work. It sucked, took over 100 apps, but I found a nice project.

- after that project ended, 3 more months (but less stressful because I had more than one role I was interviewing with).

- Then layoffs, another 3 months in 2022 where it was very competitive (I was in at least 4-5 interview pipelines before my first choice accepted my offer).

- Then that studio quickly shuttered and I haven't found anything full time in 2.5 years. Freelancing kept me up until that wasn't enough, and then I found some non-tech part time work.

working harder than ever with 2 jobs + more portfolio work to prepare for interviews despite having 9 years of experience now. This feels worse than the horror stories I'd hear when finding my first job.

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

#184

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

kortilla wrote: post #164
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Software developer salaries went up significantly after 2016 and it was a super hot market for developers in 2020. So whatever you saw wasn’t a good indicator.

It was very much bimodal. If you were working in BigTech or adjacent, that was definitely true. If you were working in enterprise dev like most of the 2.5 million+ developers working in a tier 2 city outside of the west coast in the US, comp was definitely stagnating.

In 2016, I knew I had to do something when my (step)son graduated in 2020 and my wife was willing to move anywhere the money took us.

It just so happened that a job fell into my lap at AWS working (full time) in the consulting department. I am no longer there. I now work at a third party consulting firm as a staff consultant specializing in app dev.

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

#185

Post by [deleted] »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #153
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…

>Junior engineers can fight back against this by Many juniors can't even meet with a human interviewer. There's no point maximizing for interviews that never come. That's the issue. >This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas: This seems to agree with the issue. a team of 100 becomes a team of 5 locals and 95 outsourced work. Maybe those 5 managers are better off, but we're still reducing the local workfor…

[deleted]

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

#186

Post by intended »

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…

> Nothing against our colleagues in Asia. They're brilliant. But American companies built with American labor shouldn't shut us out in the cold while they reach record profits and continue to hollow out entirely new industries simply by outstretching their arms.

What makes you think people in Asia wouldn’t benefit from more competition in the market as well?

That said - I feel that advertisement based markets will always consolidate. There is too much of a benefit to having a single network which has the largest reach in terms of audience to show ads. This will always create incentives to consolidate over time.

Then again, why make the perfect the enemy of the good. Getting to more competition is a good step.

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

#187

Post by mbfg »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #122
sheepscreek wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

the advantage of fast-food over groceries, is that you don't have to worry about spoilage and waste. So the delta is probably less than you think. Now granted McD is an s-show, they are no longer the restaurant of the poor, You likely can get a better burger meal deal at a Chilis than a McD, as sad as that is.

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

#188

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

>But that cost-cutting focus is going to lead to stagnation and self-cannibalization. Somebody’s going to buck the trend, have a splashy success, and the herd will trample back in the other direction.

Yes. But sadly, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

And I feel there's going to be a huge storm to survive first. I imagine many may not even make it to the next shift.

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

#189

Post by VinLucero »

mullingitover wrote: post #69
arnonejoe wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t know until unemployment and GDP numbers are released. Generally when the fed starts making successive rate cuts, the economy is doing poorly. Since 1953 10 out of 11 recessions happened when republicans held power. So maybe that is also why I think we have a little way to go before things get better. I’m not sure why that is and I don’t want to start a political debate. Things will get better. They always d…

> Since 1953 10 out of 11 recessions happened when republicans held power I used to think this was because the party that represents the ruling class didn't know what they were doing. Now I think these economic collapses and ensuing fire sales are not accidents, they know exactly what they're doing.

Have you ever read Yonatan’s article on Shock Wealth and how the ruling class is incentivized to cause shocks?

https://medium.com/newco/your-financial-shock-wealth-4845e6d...

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

#190

Post by johnnyanmac »

lesuorac wrote: post #150
jdlshore wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reas…

It's not "his" thing, but he and a few early layoffs certainly made it trendy to do so. It's a small club, so seeing any "members" take any action is a sign they should follow suit.
Post reply on HN