There is something extremely strange and suspicious going on in this job market. I know and have seen A LOT of people out for 9-12 months and it isn't getting better for them, at all.
I have seen people BEGGING on LinkedIn as in: "My unemployment is maxed out, I am losing my house, I haven't interviewed in 9 months etc. Someone please, I don't even want a job, just send me a few hundred dollars so I can eat."
I have never seen actual despair like that in tech before. It is usually white men 40+. Have seen it several times. Even former Google employees (!).
In particular, its 35+ year old tech workers. There is literally no one coming to offer them remotely equivalent roles to what they had. And the current set of startups are optimized for "VERY highly qualified / very cheap market rate."
We are talking about "We want AI engineers with PHDs and plan to pay $170K for that."
This means there is a very shocking disconnect between the people looking (a lot of external facing, traditional software engineer types).
I hate to say it but I am not sure I believe the employment statistics are real, and am expecting those numbers to turn out to be false.
There are also hundreds of thousands of out of work former tech workers applying for same roles. A lot of them fake.
Something f*cked up is going on, everyone who is actually looking for work knows what I am talking about. Suspect employment stats are not just "enhanced" but drastically revised higher than reality, along with GDP.
>It seems that cryptocurrency was clearly a target for attack by the government.
C'mon man, crypto hurt itself out of it's own stupidy. When literally every single market leading exchange repeatedly turns out to be just taking the cash and peacing out, what do you expect? When everything interaction you can have with the tech is some hellish combo of "Unregulated stock market full of bucket shops and front running" crossed with "Straight up, in the open, not even using magic words, pump and dumps recruiting from MLM victims in discord", what do you expect? Crypto is all about making EVERYTHING into a market for speculation, and the only people who have ever wanted MORE speculation markets in day to day life are Finance Bros who take a cut on every single trade so of course more trading is better for them and genuinely degenerate gamblers who want more access to their fix.
Totally agree on all your points and have witnessed the same. The market is fucked, I know a couple new CS grads who have been looking for over a year for anything even remotely tech related and unable to even secure a rejection email let alone OA. These are smart guys too, near 4.0GPA, strong math and CS skills, plus went to a top university with pedigree.
in that boat and know several others like me and I've been programming from childhood and have never stopped. I'm up to date with the latest and worked in pretty tight industries but when you're not even getting a call back after unemployment is dry and you're broke and rent keeps hitting and you've got a child and it's all just coming down hard, man. ah well, maybe we can organize groups jumping off bridges on social media until either we get work or there aren't enough of us left to go around
Not sure why you’re being downvoted. I know engineering directors with lots of experience that haven’t received a single interview for a year. It feels like a terrible job market but maybe it’s restricted to the tech space.
I got downvoted because I said the words "White Men,"
It's not just older white men, got off a call with an Indian colleague who is 50+. He has been unemployed for 12 months, nothing coming to him
Lots of founders and VC on here. They would 100% downvote my comment. So would any government officials wanting to shape the conversation.
These are my own observations. Stuff I have seen in my feed repeatedly. The stats do not seem believable.
It's probably worth considering that you are in a bubble. There's a whole world of jobs outside of tech. The part I find strange (not really but I'm very cynical) is that tech companies are still posting record revenues while shedding all these employees.
Tech is smaller than you think. I found article where 400k workers were laid off in 2023. But that is worldwide, say 200k in US, or 16k per month. The US has been adding workers at rate of 200k per month. We also don't know how many have been hired again.
Tech job market is a mess right now, but you can't use it to say anything about the wider market.
I was nodding along and I've been out of "tech" for years at this point. All my professional connections are at like banks, shipping companies, big retailers. They're going through very similar things as far as I can tell. "Every company is a tech company" probably closest to true in this case. If you need to hire a programmer there are a couple hundred thousand looking for work.
They need to move out of SV. In my state that people mostly don't know about, there was no disruption to the software dev market here because we didn't have stupid purposeful overgrowth during the pandemic to unwind now.
In fact, California is probably being hit so hard simply because it's so much cheaper for a company that needs to be in California to hire someone out of state for remote employment.
>We are talking about "We want AI engineers with PHDs and plan to pay $170K for that."
Meanwhile all my friends are B students and have completely boring resumes and have been finding $150k positions for what are essentially average software development jobs.
If that person who is so desperate to eat can't live on $170k a year, why is that? I make $75k a year in a place with $2000 a month rent and a new car and a bad takeout habit and still am increasing my savings.
I'm not trying to be heartless here, I think tech workers like "AI engineers" should command significantly more than $200k a year, explicitly because software developers can "produce" infinitely more than any other job category than maybe "creatives". FAANG pays you a pittance for what you give back to them, but right now FAANG is trying to play dumb employment market games to ratchet down their costs. They've done this multiple times over the past decades including literal collusion to keep down dev wages. Maybe Elon at Twitter showed them you can easily find 5000 software developers who are terrible at knowing their own worth, hyper sycophantic, or H1B slaves, and they will take way less money.
Maybe instead of crying for two decades that they make so much money because we don't have a social safety net and because they don't have unions so they can "negotiate better on their own"
I have multiple friends in the SoCal and OC area that have gotten "boring" software engineering jobs in the last 12 months at decent salaries but not astronomical (one as low as $95K, most in the 100-130 range, a few around 150).
These include jobs such as: creating middleware for trucking parts suppliers to efficiently distribute between repair shops in Arizona; writing billing inhouse software for a large law firm; writing very tiny AI recommendation services for a lumber company to generate new sales leads.
This is all anecdotal of course, but it's 8 people, and all 8 have non-sexy jobs. Nothing at a party that you would go "oh coooool". But they are gainfully employed.
It's a big challenge and they don't try to hide it. You can definitely see how gig work can affect things. I think that we're going to need to figure out how to better measure unemployment now that gig work platforms exist and it's so easy to use them.
No they are hiding it because our government is unbelievably corrupt and not serving our interests. I would like to say it some other way, but revising down 10/11 reports can only be described as deliberate manipulation. There is no other explanation.
See this tweet: the jobs numbers are totally fabricated and everyone looking knows it
You have a good point but your reasoning is nonsensical. It could be as simple as the tech sector seeing a slump while hiring is really taking off in other sectors.
LOL, Zero Hedge... The never ending doomerism will always have readers. Do yourself a favor and read old content on the wayback machine or something. They never get anything right, not even the housing crash of 07. But it sure is entertaining!
Was laid off in March 2020 (great timing) and was looking for more than a year. IT but not in the SV. Finally found position for which I was way overqualified but they took pity on me. Much lower salary too. So I'm sifting through Excel spreadsheets and writing Azure Data Flows (with 2 Masters, 20+ years in IT and multiple architect and management positions on the resume). I'm honestly afraid to look for anything else, not that I see much available anyways. My wife's company was going through a reorg so she had to find a new job (not IT but white collar), lower salary and 2 levels down in title. I've lived through both 2001-2004 and 2008-2010, it feels very similar. The "historically low unemployment rate" my behind.
It does seem all the interviews I've been doing are a waste of time. Even when I make it past the final round the company waits a week or two and says well you did good but we have too many qualified people or something.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 62.9 ms ] threadI have seen people BEGGING on LinkedIn as in: "My unemployment is maxed out, I am losing my house, I haven't interviewed in 9 months etc. Someone please, I don't even want a job, just send me a few hundred dollars so I can eat."
I have never seen actual despair like that in tech before. It is usually white men 40+. Have seen it several times. Even former Google employees (!).
In particular, its 35+ year old tech workers. There is literally no one coming to offer them remotely equivalent roles to what they had. And the current set of startups are optimized for "VERY highly qualified / very cheap market rate."
We are talking about "We want AI engineers with PHDs and plan to pay $170K for that."
This means there is a very shocking disconnect between the people looking (a lot of external facing, traditional software engineer types).
I hate to say it but I am not sure I believe the employment statistics are real, and am expecting those numbers to turn out to be false.
There are also hundreds of thousands of out of work former tech workers applying for same roles. A lot of them fake.
Something f*cked up is going on, everyone who is actually looking for work knows what I am talking about. Suspect employment stats are not just "enhanced" but drastically revised higher than reality, along with GDP.
There's also the (related) massive market correction from Big Tech's manic hiring spree in COVID and subsequent layoffs.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/tech-reces...
What is interesting is now it seems to have spread to tech, more broadly with this hidden provision that is set to lance a bunch of startups via R&D credits https://x.com/Pragmatic_Eng/status/1742964620929757593?s=20
C'mon man, crypto hurt itself out of it's own stupidy. When literally every single market leading exchange repeatedly turns out to be just taking the cash and peacing out, what do you expect? When everything interaction you can have with the tech is some hellish combo of "Unregulated stock market full of bucket shops and front running" crossed with "Straight up, in the open, not even using magic words, pump and dumps recruiting from MLM victims in discord", what do you expect? Crypto is all about making EVERYTHING into a market for speculation, and the only people who have ever wanted MORE speculation markets in day to day life are Finance Bros who take a cut on every single trade so of course more trading is better for them and genuinely degenerate gamblers who want more access to their fix.
Been through multiple interviews, a lot of them totally fake.
My opinion is employers are not actually hiring right now.
They are going through motions, top grading, collecting resumes, gathering info.
They are not sure what to do.
COuld change in the new year, entirely possible.
But rate cuts are coming which is usually quite a recessionary thing to do which means another dump is coming.
It appears as though most of these job postings are fake, to give the illusioj that things are better than they are.
Lots of founders and VC on here. They would 100% downvote my comment. So would any government officials wanting to shape the conversation.
These are my own observations. Stuff I have seen in my feed repeatedly. The stats do not seem believable.
Something is weird.
Tech job market is a mess right now, but you can't use it to say anything about the wider market.
In fact, California is probably being hit so hard simply because it's so much cheaper for a company that needs to be in California to hire someone out of state for remote employment.
>We are talking about "We want AI engineers with PHDs and plan to pay $170K for that."
Meanwhile all my friends are B students and have completely boring resumes and have been finding $150k positions for what are essentially average software development jobs.
If that person who is so desperate to eat can't live on $170k a year, why is that? I make $75k a year in a place with $2000 a month rent and a new car and a bad takeout habit and still am increasing my savings.
I'm not trying to be heartless here, I think tech workers like "AI engineers" should command significantly more than $200k a year, explicitly because software developers can "produce" infinitely more than any other job category than maybe "creatives". FAANG pays you a pittance for what you give back to them, but right now FAANG is trying to play dumb employment market games to ratchet down their costs. They've done this multiple times over the past decades including literal collusion to keep down dev wages. Maybe Elon at Twitter showed them you can easily find 5000 software developers who are terrible at knowing their own worth, hyper sycophantic, or H1B slaves, and they will take way less money.
Maybe instead of crying for two decades that they make so much money because we don't have a social safety net and because they don't have unions so they can "negotiate better on their own"
How's that negotiation doing?
I have multiple friends in the SoCal and OC area that have gotten "boring" software engineering jobs in the last 12 months at decent salaries but not astronomical (one as low as $95K, most in the 100-130 range, a few around 150).
These include jobs such as: creating middleware for trucking parts suppliers to efficiently distribute between repair shops in Arizona; writing billing inhouse software for a large law firm; writing very tiny AI recommendation services for a lumber company to generate new sales leads.
This is all anecdotal of course, but it's 8 people, and all 8 have non-sexy jobs. Nothing at a party that you would go "oh coooool". But they are gainfully employed.
You should read up on how the data is assembled before thinking that it is false.
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm
It's a big challenge and they don't try to hide it. You can definitely see how gig work can affect things. I think that we're going to need to figure out how to better measure unemployment now that gig work platforms exist and it's so easy to use them.
You can also see state by state information
https://www.bls.gov/charts/state-employment-and-unemployment...
Which shows California as having higher-than-average unemployment and one of the highest rates of growth.
See this tweet: the jobs numbers are totally fabricated and everyone looking knows it
https://twitter.com/KobeissiLetter/status/174326860815787661...