Hacker News Reader

Comment by apohn | Hacker News Reader

>I’m about to enter the job market, and I’m terrified

You're getting a highly biased view of what is really going on in the job market because some high profile Tech companies laid off people. Their leaders are not liked so everybody has an opinion about it.

I've been at companies in the past that had huge layoffs, but they were boring companies that nobody cares to talk about on HN or Social Media. If Cisco, Oracle, Siemens, Coca-Cola and a bunch of boring companies laid off 50K+ people over the course of a year the news would not care and nobody would realize a ton of people just landed in the job market.

Is the job market worse than Jan 2022? Sure. Is it bad? I don't think so.

View on HN

Only some are doing layoffs, but the vast majority are doing some kind of hiring freeze.

How did you determine that the market is fine if layoffs at smaller/boring companies wouldn't be visible anyway?

>How did you determine that the market is fine

I didn't say the market is fine. I said it's not as bad as one might think based on social media.

I lived through the .com crises and the mortgage bubble. People in my neighborhood were getting laid off across industries and jobs. People in my family and extended network were getting laid off. If you didn't get laid off, you'd know people who got laid off. Most of my career has been large boring companies and a lot of people I know work for large boring companies. My org in my company has slowed hiring, but still has openings for "critical" jobs.

That's absolutely not my experience at all right now. I know people who are jumping jobs and getting large pay bumps. Granted, some of that is slowing, but it's not like 2000 when the only response you'd get on a job site was somebody from an insurance company asking you to be an "entrepreneur" by becoming an insurance agent.

> Is the job market worse than Jan 2022? Sure. Is it bad? I don't think so.

That's subjective.

What if you want to work for a large unicorn or FAANG? Yea, the job market is pretty bad right now then.

so work somewhere else. My company is interviewing people (some have jobs and only look at us as a fallback in case their job dies, no panic), other companies are trying to hire me. I got 4 pings on linked in this week. I still get random "companies looking for senior or principal java developers" emails. I got one today.

I could imagine it's harder on early in stage career people, because that first job can be harder to get. My resume helps I'm sure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com