Panic at the Job Market

No one understands or is willing to research these things anymore. Everyone (or at least everyone who is screaming and being heard) is mumbling points about interest, boom/bust, AI, etc...

The reality, in my opinion, the governments have made it so hard to start and maintain a business that the market is not liquid for employment anymore. It's not catastrophic, but rather dead (as not moving).

Here are the employment numbers: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employed-persons

2019: 159M Employed out of 326.8M Population 2024: 161M Employed out of 335.8M Population

1.25% vs 2.75%

It really sucks right now, but recent grads and juniors are suffering the most right now, to my understanding. There's an over-production of CS grads, as the industry looked very lucrative, so a lot of people decided to go software engineering route.

It's hard to make a case for start ups to bet on inexperienced people. For mature companies, why pay for 2 juniors, when you can get a senior for 1.5 price, who might do the same work. In the previous years even C-level companies had internship-to-full-time pipelines, but now it looks more scarce. I kind of imagined these tech companies could convince investors about upcoming growth, where they can launch a new products/features, which would require new engineers and etc. With higher rates, investors seeking "what's hot right now", and uncertainties in the near future makes it a bit harder (I might be wrong on this note).

And all these companies have a massive advantage in terms of hiring, as there are quite a lot of talented people who got laid off in the last couple of years. Most of them are willing to take significant cuts as well. So, why choose an average, when you can shoot your shot and get the best out there?

It's not a typo. The author alludes to these inflated salaries several times.

Examples:

"while other people who just picked a better company to work at 20 years ago and never left have been growing their wealth by a couple million dollars per year every year for almost their entire career"

"What is it like to join a company where all the co-workers your same age have made $10+ million over the past 4 years while you are joining with nothing?"

You'd have to be very high in the org chart at a FAANG style company to make that kind of income.

> manage yourself and manage your peers, but you also have an engineering manager and a project manager and the CEO is your skip-level manager and the CEO’s brother is also your skip-level manager too

This is hilarious and I’m sad I’ve seen versions of this more than once.

Overall I enjoyed most of this article but disagree about the objection to behavioral interviews. I think they’re an important part of the modern hiring process but I will agree that the approach is sometimes done wrong by companies and individual interviewers.

its a test of EQ, if a simple question about past conflicts makes you this defensive then its exactly the type of thing it was meant to screen for. I’d encourage OP to put some thought into this part for their own sake. You don’t need to make everyone feel better but if you show up with the attitude that you’re never wrong, then nobody will want to work with you. I know I don’t.

I actually enjoyed reading it. There are lot of tech bro folklore in it.

- company in California with a motto of “never hire Americans because 16 year old outsourced Croatian interns know everything already

- it would take a couple million united states freedom bucks to build working prototypes ...

There is enough lines to spin off Silicon Valley successor from it, or at least have a good conversation with the author at local bar.