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High-Skilled Labor Is Doomed

5 points by angryconsultant ↗ HN
I'm a management consultant who's also worked in the valley for a Series B startup in a strategy function.

I got laid off in November and finding a new job has been as hard as it's ever been.

Why?

1) Companies aren't actually looking to hire 2) The economy is so f*cked that you're competing with director level candidates for senior level roles 3) ATS systems suck and can't accurate ascertain the breadth or level of experience 4) Recruiters aren't business folk and have no idea how to accurately determine whether a candidate is good 5) Diversity is still an issue when it comes to hiring (not as big of a factor but still happens) 6) Startups have multiple (6+) rounds of interviews that are poorly designed and do not accurate reflect a candidates ability to perform 7) Back when I first joined my last startup I competed against 500 other people, now in most scenarios I'm competing against 1500-2000

I often say that a precursor to economic ruin is looking at what startups are doing, besides AI, every other startup looks like they are getting destroyed with 409a's at all time lows. Founders are no longer getting the cash infusions they typically got. If innovation and growth in this sector is limited it can't be good for the rest. Time will tell as the stock market is at an all time high with bubble like conditions...

On the other hand this is good motivation to start your own thing and make those companies regret the day they never hired you!

12 comments

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zzzbra
I would retitle your post "Management consultants are doomed"
angryconsultant
My friends in investment banking and software engineering are going through the same thing so…
rhelz
> The economy is so f*cked...

But...the economy is fine. The stock market at historic highs, unemployment at historic lows, growth is very high, and inflation is under control and moving even lower....

...the economy is just bad for you :-( And for me, your job search sounds just like mine.

But it's important not to get caught up in the trap that if it's bad for me, it's bad for the world. It's not.

It's a lot easier saying that automation is long-term good for the economy--when you are the one who is automating away somebody else's job.

But it is still true, and what we are facing has been faced by one group of workers or another since the dawn of the industrial age, and if they could figure it out, we'll eventually figure it out too.

angryconsultant
On traditional measures it’s fine but everything is pointing to an overinflating bubble waiting to pop. Public companies and startups alike are laying off up the wazoo.

I’m confident we’ll figure it out. Just more so expressing my frustration haha. I’m from Canada so I’m more so basing my experience off the current state of the Canadian economy.

neom
Just on your last point. The other thing I'm seeing and hearing is that incumbents are not willing to let this next "wave of digital transformation" be won by startups. I get a real sense that F500 corps are considerably more "tech savvy" than the last generation of modernization we went through. I suspect we're going to see fairly decent software offerings from large corps in all verticals. In the past, we often saw startups out maneuvering large enterprises and winning handily. In this next wave, I see we are going to have more enterprise on enterprise battling. I only say this because I'm starting to strongly believe that founders need to be keen to this in a way we haven't maybe seen in the past software adoption curves, I don't have a good answer or anything, just that "enterprise are shit" maybe isn't a square you should have on your bingo card anymore? I could be wrong here, but just wanted to add what I'm seeing right now as food for thought. :)
angryconsultant
I agree I worked for an enterprise SaaS and we were losing to legacy providers day in and day out. Churn was at an all time high. That more so reflects how we had no PMF though.

They are more tech savvy though but with any company that is large they aren’t as nimble and are always susceptible to losing market share. Just depends on the vertical I guess

neom
Yup. I do 100% agree big corps will never be as nimble. I'll just add, I think what is quite different in this next wave is the muscle exists that was not at all built before. Big companies have always known how to pull together a special ops team and respond to a market change when they have the resources in house (car, truck, minivan). In the last wave (2010ish), Many who knew javascript and saw how the web was emerging went to a startup or got paid to work on open source by VCs and the like, and Big Corp XYZ had both no plans and no stories to tell those people. I think that was expensive and not very much fun for them. Fast-forward... what.. 15 years now? Condé Nast, Ford Motor Company, British Airways have people in house that can wrangle a microservice or configure a k8s cluster, this was just not true 15 years ago, that muscle did not exist I don't think. Going to be quite interesting to see how this all plays out, with the web and "app", it was reasonably easy to guess how it would emerge, this time, less so, for me anyway. (Ps, I'd recommend adding "Tell HN:" to this type of post)
angryconsultant
Very insightful, you hit the nail on the head!

What’s the purpose of “Tell HN”, I’m new to all of this haha

neom
Your post is kinda telling hackernews something you know/think, we usually use Tell HN: for that so it indicates to people it's some type of personal insight you're sharing with the community before they click in, we also use Ask HN: and Show HN:

Also, welcome to HN, it's a great place, just make sure you channel that anger you've got positively here, it's easy not to, and dang (our boss) doesn't much like that. ;)

angryconsultant
Thank you! Will do for the future, hopefully the name changes from Angry to Happy Consultant