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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?

#671

Post by QuiEgo »

windward wrote: post #657
QuiEgo wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s hypothetically say we’re all doomed. Say our jobs are going the way of manufacturing in the 70s-80s. What’s the play then? If I was a new college grad I’d stay away from programming, but that’s been true for a while regardless of offshoring, the job market is just too soft until managers figure out they are killing their senior engineer pipeline and go back to investing in people. What about the people already…

Good question. I've gone with: >Live under your means and save as much as possible? which, while obvious, isn't being done by all of us. A part of me gets angry that collective action was so unpopular thanks to the view that it dragged down those who could excel individually. Every time I see software people act powerless in front of these steamrolling, enormous tech giants that control every facet of our lives, I th…

I love the idea of FIRE as a life goal and driving financial strategy. The core principal is you save enough money up that the dividends from your investment returns (the FI part of FIRE) is enough to live off forever.

If you hit FIRE, awesome, you’re free from ever caring about offshoring or RTO or AI or whatever again.

If you don’t hit it, you’re sitting on a pile of money when a rainy day comes.

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

#672

Post by _yb2s »

deadbabe wrote: post #539
_yb2s wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way hiring works is a reflection of company culture. If they can’t execute a hiring process that hires the most skilled and competent instead of the youngest and best looking, guess what kind of coworkers you will have to deal with? Anyways, I am in my 40s- I am an amateur strength athlete and eat healthy and already look almost inappropriately healthy and youthful for a sedentary job- enough so that I feel somet…

An ageist company culture does not mean the company is a fraud though or that the jobs are fake. It’s all very real, you are just rejected, that’s what makes it so frustrating, you could be living the good life if only those people weren’t so ageist. Now imagine being a POC and your whole life is like that, just racism everywhere keeping you out.

In both cases- ageism and racism, the employer culture is hiring less qualified workers based on criteria other than skill and competence. That necessarily means they have a lower caliber of expertise on average, as they are artificially decreasing the pool size of potential candidates. Moreover, if they have a discriminatory hiring practice in the first place, it is very unlikely that they are really selecting for competence even within the preferred demographic. For an extreme example, look at the current US administration, hiring only people with "Mar-a-lago face" combined with them needing to have a particular ideology and extreme lack of ethics, necessarily makes virtually all of the hires incompetent. They aren't, presumably specifically seeking incompetent hires, it's just the only people left given the fact that they select for things other than competence first.

I hire software engineers, and given all of the discrimination in the field, my willingness to hire women, minorities, and older people gives me a substantial advantage over those I am competing against that have discriminatory hiring practices. Although I'm not selecting for discriminated against groups, in practice I hire almost exclusively from them, because there are a surplus of extremely qualified people in those demographics that are getting rejected from everywhere else. I'm sure there are a ton of competent young white men in software engineering, but they're never among my top applicants, presumably because they've already been hired elsewhere.

This widespread discrimination pre-loads the applicant pool, such that the effect is enormous: you are getting substantially inferior employees if you have discriminatory hiring practices, because so many others do to, so your "preferred demographic" is already depleted of competent applicants.

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

#673

Post by cwbriscoe »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #643
cwbriscoe wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Numbers don't matter. If you can save 80% of your paycheck for 15-20 years and you invest it wisely, you are FI on the 4% rule.

So exactly how do you save 80% off of $175K and live off of $30K a year? Especially considering everything above your 401K max is post tax? That’s only twice the minimum wage and even in Atlanta they are offering cashiers at McDonalds more than that.

Before Covid, I lived on about 25K a year since I had a paid off condo then. Now, I am renting and live on around 36K a year. I realize my situation doesn't work for everyone. Some people cannot fathom not buying a new phone and computer every year and a new car every 3 years.

Also, now, I am fully working from home so that helps with saving on gas and not eating out as much. I make my coffee every morning instead of Starbucks on the way to work and I make my own lunch and dinner 95% of the time.

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

#674

Post by jiveturkey »

j-bos wrote: post #658
jiveturkey wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they aren't. those are market tests, not open reqs.

How do you reckon? My understanding is that they're valid perm positions that legally must be offered to US citizens before they can be filled by anyone else.

yes technically legal, the best kind of legal.

it's really, really easy to say that applicants don't meet the requirements, since hiring is sooo subjective. "none of the applicants had 8 years and 2 months experience in this company working on this team, so they won't be able to perform the duties".

or, if they do have a flood of qualified applicants (the point of the website), they can simply not go forward with PERM at this time for their selected candidate. PERM roles aren't new jobs in the sense that the employer is "down" one employee if they don't fill it. PERM roles are simply a status change for an existing employee.

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

#675

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

cwbriscoe wrote: post #673
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So exactly how do you save 80% off of $175K and live off of $30K a year? Especially considering everything above your 401K max is post tax? That’s only twice the minimum wage and even in Atlanta they are offering cashiers at McDonalds more than that.

Before Covid, I lived on about 25K a year since I had a paid off condo then. Now, I am renting and live on around 36K a year. I realize my situation doesn't work for everyone. Some people cannot fathom not buying a new phone and computer every year and a new car every 3 years. Also, now, I am fully working from home so that helps with saving on gas and not eating out as much. I make my coffee every morning instead of…

We aren’t talking about buying a new phone. We are talking about buying a place to live and food to eat.

What is the average rent where you live for a one bedroom? What is the tech hiring seen like?

Do you have kids?

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

#676

Post by creer »

ecshafer wrote: post #503
AIorNot wrote: post #260

Well as a single datum: After I got laid off in late 2023 I had a devil of a time finding work (despite having AI experience) to the point my unemployment ran out - And I was 20 years as a dev and tech lead and full stack, (never had trouble finding work) including stints as a leading EM and CTO, I’ve been an industry award winning innovation lead,a digital studio director, switching tech stacks and cloud certs all m…

Are you in a major tech market (SF? Seattle?) I was a laid off in the beginning of the year from my remote job, landed several interviews, and I found a new job in I was able to land interviews with some remote companies. I used to work at Shopify, a got some interviews at Ruby shops from that. Some possibilities: 1. Ageism, this is a distinct possibility. 2. You held very senior positions. I think a lot of people do…

4. Overqualified can also be seen as you are seeking this job purely temporarily. While continuing to seek better. You may be gone within weeks. A more alert project might seek to use your experience at low cost for that little while. But a harried manager already had a problem and might see it as now having two problems.

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

#677

Post by OkayPhysicist »

zcw100 wrote: post #491
lumost wrote: post #470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We really need a regulation on job openings being real. Each interview costs the candidate roughly one PTO day. Mandating something like a minimum of 40:1 interviews to extended offers should correct for at least the worst offenses.

That will never happen. We've got employers making employees sign ridiculous Non-compete, non-disclosure, non-disparagement, agreements. Do you really think this will ever happen? We've collectively decided that corporations are people and people have freedom of speech. We've spent years doing the H1B dance. (I'm not anti-immigration. I'd love to simply give them citizenship. I've met some amazing people on H1Bs. The…

California killed the noncompete. Hell, the previous FTC almost killed them.

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

#678

Post by creer »

AIorNot wrote: post #260

Well as a single datum: After I got laid off in late 2023 I had a devil of a time finding work (despite having AI experience) to the point my unemployment ran out - And I was 20 years as a dev and tech lead and full stack, (never had trouble finding work) including stints as a leading EM and CTO, I’ve been an industry award winning innovation lead,a digital studio director, switching tech stacks and cloud certs all m…

"Now it's different". Is it really? One aspect of these stories is that we all do age and we do climb into higher positions. So we run into "too old" and "too qualified" and "will leave asap for something better". And the reason is not that the economy or job market are different. The reason is that we are older. Nothing wrong with both happening at the same time but this "I never ran into this problem before" does have a common difference which is "I was never that old before".

I use "old" for shock value here while being totally in the camp that companies would do well to find ways to use older, more experienced talent at a lower cost than "normal". (Even after I have run into "older" as inflexible and a pain to work with.)

But there is also another problem in many of these reports: Older and still applying by sending resumes in response for job postings! If you are older you should have a network you can use. If they find nothing for you - or don't care to talk to you, then THAT is the better signal. And still not necessarily a signal about the job market.

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

#679

Post by stuckinhell »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #605
stuckinhell wrote: post #591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you are 100% right. I know people don't want to hear this . . . but at my mega large corp, we recently laid off hundreds people who basically didn't do this.

>we recently laid off hundreds people who basically didn't do this. Did you give them a choice or simply say "we've moving most operations to China?"

no choice we simply looked at hours worked via remote tracking.

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

#680

Post by amy_petrik »

jiveturkey wrote: post #674
j-bos wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you reckon? My understanding is that they're valid perm positions that legally must be offered to US citizens before they can be filled by anyone else.

yes technically legal, the best kind of legal. it's really, really easy to say that applicants don't meet the requirements, since hiring is sooo subjective. "none of the applicants had 8 years and 2 months experience in this company working on this team, so they won't be able to perform the duties". or, if they do have a flood of qualified applicants (the point of the website), they can simply not go forward with PER…

Nominally - although perhaps more often barking and not serious - is if you're a super duper qualified US citizen, you either can find a job there, or, you sue the company for discrimination, either way you get paid. The latter being the part that's highly hypothetical and potentially not realistic.
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