Nobody is switching jobs because if you move you likely have to switch two jobs rather than just one.
Improving mobility means that you have to make a single earner household a viable pathway again. That means bring house prices down and subsidizing childcare.
Which would cost a bunch of billionaires a couple of pennies. So it will never happen.
I've been casually job hunting for a couple months since rounds of layoffs started at my company.
I've applied to umpteen places and haven't had a single callback. In my twenty+ years working as a dev, this is the worst I've seen it since about 2005.
Laid off from tech and out of work for two years. Thousands of applications. Ran out of contacts, luck, savings, patience, everything. I start my retail career next week earning $12/hr. I can't even provide for my own rent and utilities anymore, even after moving.
I almost can't believe it's come to this, sometimes. But another part of me says that's just ego talking, and anyways plenty of others are also desperate for any and all scraps to feed themselves. Problems like mine aren't difficult to come by.
Just a single data point against this. I got interviews with 4 companies out of 30 or so I applied to. Cleared all the onsites. Think FAANG, famous hedge fund, popular data analytics platform, and defense. 4 different industries. Job market's not the best, but it's also not that bad if you have 5 YOE+. Offers were good, ~$50-100K over my current pay.
So many people are using AI during the interviews to cheat, as long as you don't use AI and are good at leetcode, probably not that hard to snag an offer. I also interview people at a FAANG, and #1 reason to reject people these days is AI use. If you don't use AI and can leetcode and system design, you're pretty solid and will stand out from other half-baked candidates.
There is a very simple solution to AI cheating and I'm not sure why it hasn't made a comeback - fly candidates in for in-person interviews (which btw, if people remember, was the norm before COVID).
Who says home prices must always go up? That's an incredibly dumb thing to say. Houses depreciate. Maybe land prices always go up (maybe over very very long time scales because of currency devaluation) but that's a tiny fraction of the value of a home.
There's no good reason to expect homes to magically appreciate.
It's basically illegal to build dense homes in most cities. And despite what people say, the vacancy rate is at historic lows so its not just "people are keeping them empty"
Its a disgrace that people deny the supply crunch we are in
Devil's advocate, I don't think we should keep building more housing insofar as it encourages population growth (which it does). Like highways, there will always be barely enough, no matter how many lanes/houses we build.
But population growth is the overwhelming factor in all of our sustainability issues.
The reason there will never be enough lanes is not population growth. It's that we generally don't provide people with alternatives to driving, and adding more lanes just makes even more people have to drive, since things get even farther apart.
Unprecedented mobility allowed unprecedented competition. The core of the problem is that when there's a job posting or a house for sale, you're competing not only with people in your local area, but also with people from all over the world. For example, in my city HALF of home sales are to foreigners. The effect is that top x% keeps amassing wealth, while the rest suffers from brain drain and depopulation. Literally same problem as Tinder - it promised men to date all over the world, in effect it made them compete with other men from all over the world, and nobody's getting dates.
The problem will fix itself when moving to a big city completely stops being a viable option, and average Joe will be forced to live in bumfuck nowhere. Once enough Joes stay in bumfuck nowhere, they'll eventually build a working small-scale local economy.
In a way this is the ultimate goal of conservatism in its literal sense to conserve. The rich want have their place in society safely entrenched at the top, with no risk of people rising from below to displace them. Those at the bottom should stay locked in there and work and toil because that is the natural order of things.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 50.7 ms ] threadAs far jobs are concerned the job market is completely fucked up. Their is oversupply and there are no wage increase.
It does not take a genius to understand why there is no mobility.
Improving mobility means that you have to make a single earner household a viable pathway again. That means bring house prices down and subsidizing childcare.
Which would cost a bunch of billionaires a couple of pennies. So it will never happen.
I've applied to umpteen places and haven't had a single callback. In my twenty+ years working as a dev, this is the worst I've seen it since about 2005.
I almost can't believe it's come to this, sometimes. But another part of me says that's just ego talking, and anyways plenty of others are also desperate for any and all scraps to feed themselves. Problems like mine aren't difficult to come by.
It seems better now than it was two years ago.
So many people are using AI during the interviews to cheat, as long as you don't use AI and are good at leetcode, probably not that hard to snag an offer. I also interview people at a FAANG, and #1 reason to reject people these days is AI use. If you don't use AI and can leetcode and system design, you're pretty solid and will stand out from other half-baked candidates.
When the balance is not broadly possible, our system seems to favor "home prices must always go up", at least in the short term.
There's no good reason to expect homes to magically appreciate.
Its a disgrace that people deny the supply crunch we are in
But population growth is the overwhelming factor in all of our sustainability issues.
https://x.com/lindsaywise/status/1956170542601421040
The problem will fix itself when moving to a big city completely stops being a viable option, and average Joe will be forced to live in bumfuck nowhere. Once enough Joes stay in bumfuck nowhere, they'll eventually build a working small-scale local economy.