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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?

#271

Post by ta12653421 »

protocolture wrote: post #76
mollusc-engine wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I became a USPS mail carrier instead. Certainly less pay but I love being outside and walking. And no Jira, changing the color of that button, or steeping myself in Frank’s eldritch horror code.

>No Jira If I was trying to attract intelligent applicants looking for work outside of software engineering, that would be in the headline.

Tried that here in EU - no chance so far: Even things I could do easily like office administration/management or whatever projectmanagement - no luck.

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

#272

Post by fragmede »

ahtihn wrote: post #270
fooker wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, assuming you could invest 100k out of your 170k per year into companies you know were doing well on tech from 2015, how much would you have ? (say: AMD, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Facebook) The answer is about 10M, which is not that far from what I estimated, even without including Nvidia. Now add in house price appreciation. There are plenty of people who have managed to do this, from fairly normal tech jobs.

Sure, just save 100k out of your 170k comp, that's totally how normal people operate. And not only that, also pick the right stocks rather than just sticking everything in an index! Just magically turn 10x 100k into 10M!

Shit, dump that $100k into bitcoin at the low point of 2015, and you'd have $37 million today. Easy!

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

#273

Post by haizhung »

bequanna wrote: post #57
OgsyedIE wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The investment thesis in AI is that the decline in consumer spending in the other sectors of the economy won't matter when the consumers cease to be a significant participant in the economy in the near term: that moving investment away from the activity in agriculture, transportation, goods and services, etc., is rational because those sectors are soon to be obsolete when their customers buying power and long term ca…

I’m not sure I follow. So, are you saying that wealth will become completely concentrated at the top and the rest of us are obsolete, out of work and broke? That seems unlikely. What is the point of an economy if there is no one who is actually able to consume?

It’s more likely than you think. In fact, this was true for almost the entirety of human history. The last 100 years, where the common person is NOT in destitute poverty, is the exception to the rule.

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

#274

Post by jameslk »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #198
naveen99 wrote: post #147

No, because the only thing keeping the fed from lowering interest rates and juicing real estate and everything else is a strong labor market.

You have it backwards. Layoffs these days increase stock value because everyone is hedging that bad job numbers will force the feds to lower interest rates. Something Powell has hesitated to do in order to keep inflation in check. It's a very screwed up incentive to be rewarded for breaking the system, but that's 2025 in a nutshell.

> Layoffs these days increase stock value because everyone is hedging that bad job numbers will force the feds to lower interest rates.

Layoffs generally cause stock prices to go up because of anticipated cost reduction/efficiency: https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwab046

If you have some source to make the case that layoff-stock price change is correlated for a different reason these days, it would be interesting to read it. But I doubt anything has changed

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

#275

Post by yolo3000 »

sethops1 wrote: post #192
naveen99 wrote: post #147

No, because the only thing keeping the fed from lowering interest rates and juicing real estate and everything else is a strong labor market.

And the fact that everybody knows real inflation is still high.

How can inflation not be high in the US given increased tariffs, deportations and uncertainty

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

#276

Post by Marsymars »

echelon wrote: post #214
ac29 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> turn to the government to finally build in some proper labor laws and other obvious controls (how about re-banning stock buybacks?) What would banning stock buybacks accomplish? Companies can still return capital to shareholders in the form of dividends.

Dividends are immediately taxable. Stock buybacks are designed to let the shareholder see the same upside, but decide when to take the taxable event. Long term gains are also preferable to non-qualified dividends.

Even worse for non-American stockholders of American companies - the IRS charges a 30% foreign withholding tax on dividends. If you ban stock buybacks in favour of dividends, it’s a big tax increase on foreigners, so US stocks lose a whole pile of value for American stockholders when foreigners dump American equities until the ROI equalizes. (Roughly 20% of US equities are foreign-owned.)

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

#277

Post by intended »

cute_boi wrote: post #66
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.

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.

The market is K shaped.

The peope will wealth are doing well, the rest of the market is not.

There are only so many apps and goods that can be made for rich people/small subset of consumers.

I bet you will find that people working on investment ideas and finance tools which focus on wealth accumulation will be hiring.

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

#278

Post by Lio »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #174
echelon wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

> GenAI can definitely do CloudFormation, Terraform or the AWS CDK

GenAI does not exist yet.

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

#279

Post by intended »

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 market is diverging with people who are in the upper echelons having money to spend and everyone else having nothing.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/economy/2025/11/25/us-e...

The K shaped economy.

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

#280

Post by goodolddays9090 »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #230
goodolddays9090 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit over 40, not liking parts of my FAANG job, worried I'll lose it, and worried no where in the industry is as fun as 12 years ago, but being on the low end of Fat FIRE makes it a lot easier.

FI is more valuable than RE. After three years or so I got the itch again and decided to self fund my own thing. Also looking back on around 10 years ago more fondly..

Yeah; I've heard a few people say versions of you get bored if you retire early, and I've soon to be retirees talk about how the people they know who retired to go do nothing just wasted away.

I like tech; my challenge now is finding a gig with interesting work and a good work-life balance and p75 pay. That, and knowing when I actually have enough net worth to have more freedom. The problem is you never think it's enough, but not because of greed, but because of fear.

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