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Unemployed office workers are having a harder time finding new jobs

wsj.com

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Re: Unemployed office workers are having a harder time finding new jobs

#41

Post by HighGoldstein »

j45 wrote: post #33
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #7

Ghost jobs doesn't help things any. Posting fake jobs should be considered wage theft. Multiply the number of applications for a fake job by the average time to apply and then by the hourly rate (or salaried rate calculated down to the hour). Charge those responsible for theft of that figure, which easily will push it into felony territory. Bet the ghost job phenomenon disappears overnight.

That has some merit. At the same time falsifying skills or misrepresenting them should be just as bad.

How do you quantify skill falsification?

Re: Unemployed office workers are having a harder time finding new jobs

#42

Post by tjpnz »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #7

Ghost jobs doesn't help things any. Posting fake jobs should be considered wage theft. Multiply the number of applications for a fake job by the average time to apply and then by the hourly rate (or salaried rate calculated down to the hour). Charge those responsible for theft of that figure, which easily will push it into felony territory. Bet the ghost job phenomenon disappears overnight.

Without the ghost job they're unable to prove due diligence locally. That's not just thievery but fraud.

Re: Unemployed office workers are having a harder time finding new jobs

#43

Post by exe34 »

hipadev23 wrote: post #40
likeabatterycar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

There are a massive amount of overstays on H2A & H4 visas. They didn’t arrive here illegally, but their current status is very often illegal as they can’t switch jobs or extend beyond a season without a cumbersome renewal process, often which requires leaving the country for at least 3 months.

sounds like an early career Elon Musk.

Re: Unemployed office workers are having a harder time finding new jobs

#44

Post by nicbou »

IntelMiner wrote: post #6
autobodie wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can what you're saying be true if Elon Musk says we need more H1Bs because there is a labor shortage?

There's a lack of dirt cheap highly educated labor. It dovetails nicely into their desire to slash education for Americans Once we deport all the "illegal" immigrants, the MAGA folk can pick fruit in Florida while the H1B's work at Amazon for pennies on the dollar I suppose

The same labour shortage was all over the news in Germany. Meanwhile people were mocking the salaries and conditions offered by those industries. Immigration is only means to acquire labour at below market rate.

Re: Unemployed office workers are having a harder time finding new jobs

#45

Post by anal_reactor »

1. The field got oversaturated. Everyone signed up for coding classes, not everyone has graduated from coding classes.

2. Lack of information transparency: everyone involved has huge incentives to lie, so it's extremely difficult for a company to say "we are a good company wanting to hire a good dev" and someone to respond "I am a good dev looking for a good job". Same problem as dating.

3. Moving jobs to cheaper countries: the flipside of work-from-home is having companies realize that they don't need to have butts in chairs is San Francisco, they can have butts in chairs in India, 75% of performance for half the price.

This is probably going to be the new normal until:

1. The IT education scales down and juniors give up, so that there's less competition.

2. Someone comes up with a interviewing process that is significantly more difficult to game.

3. The society at large switches back from "just essentials only" to "one bag of glitter poop please" so that lots of silly businesses can stay afloat, at least for some time.

Re: Unemployed office workers are having a harder time finding new jobs

#46

Post by stuaxo »

klipklop wrote: post #4

It’s been this way for at least 2 years. I suspect that WSJ held back such topics until after the election… The people I know that lose their job spend at least 1 year looking for a job. Usually at a significantly lower salary. With the current rate of inflation it’s a 1-2 punch that requires a big step down in lifestyle. I don’t really see these conditions changing until there is a AI bubble pop or something. Facebo…

Longer than this: certainly in the UK things were not in a good state before the pandemic started in early 2019.

I know at least one person who was a software dev who was worked very little over the last 5 years.

For myself, over that period I noticed almost all work except for government and financial dried up - lucky for me that was my most recent experience.

Re: Unemployed office workers are having a harder time finding new jobs

#47

Post by jhot »

jiveturkey wrote: post #39

The high end of tech work certainly feels more extreme than what this news report is discussing, which says it's now 6 months from 5 months during the most recent boom. To add only 1 month from the boom time doesn't jive with my own experience. Prior to 2022 I was advance quitting if a job wasn't good enough, didn't treat me (workers in general) right, etc. Now, I expect a year long search if I am forced out.

The startup I was at previously laid most people off in early 2021. I spent 2 days applying to a bunch of jobs that seemed interesting and spent the following 3 weeks with a pretty full schedule of interviews. Received several offers and was able to pick my favorite.

I have been feeling out the market the last couple months, applying mainly for jobs that match my exact experience, and have had exactly 1 phone screen. In the past I have been told I interview very well and haven't received many rejections after getting to talk to a person. But things are definitely different now.

If current job has to do big layoffs, which feels like it could happen in the next year or two, it's going to be rough.

Re: Unemployed office workers are having a harder time finding new jobs

#48

Post by normie3000 »

thw09j9m wrote: post #12

Tech market is rough. I think BigTech currently thinks that there's a better ROI spending $300k on compute (training an LLM) than $300k on an employee. All the startups I've interviewed with are HEAVILY leveraging LLMs (via Cursor) to keep engineer count and burn rate low.

> HEAVILY leveraging LLMs (via Cursor) to keep engineer count and burn rate low

Does this strategy work?

Re: Unemployed office workers are having a harder time finding new jobs

#49

Post by csomar »

normie3000 wrote: post #48
thw09j9m wrote: post #12

Tech market is rough. I think BigTech currently thinks that there's a better ROI spending $300k on compute (training an LLM) than $300k on an employee. All the startups I've interviewed with are HEAVILY leveraging LLMs (via Cursor) to keep engineer count and burn rate low.

> HEAVILY leveraging LLMs (via Cursor) to keep engineer count and burn rate low Does this strategy work?

I think it's going to blow up given the number of broken libraries and products out there. Management does not care until things really break. In 3-4 years, there will be a serious shortage of software developers and maintenance of the stack will be as expensive as ever.

Re: Unemployed office workers are having a harder time finding new jobs

#50

Post by kmac_ »

csomar wrote: post #49
normie3000 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HEAVILY leveraging LLMs (via Cursor) to keep engineer count and burn rate low Does this strategy work?

I think it's going to blow up given the number of broken libraries and products out there. Management does not care until things really break. In 3-4 years, there will be a serious shortage of software developers and maintenance of the stack will be as expensive as ever.

This, plus in several years we will observe many MVPs generated (partially) by LLMs that will require fixing and further development. LLMs barely produce 1k lines of coherent code, riddled with bugs. Benchmarks are improving, but there is no breakthrough in handling real, large codebases. I have no idea about the future job market, but the quality of the "material" we work with will be quite poor.
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