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Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

There are over two jobs open for every layoff.

People haven’t realized how crazy the labor market is about to get with a collapsing workforce population over the next many decades.

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In theory less people working means less demand, which means less of a need for labour. Places like Japan where you have had a collapsing working population for years have never seen similar spikes in job openings like the US is currently seeing,

https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/job-vacancies

The US saw a crazy spike in job openings at the start of 2021 which has only recently started to show signs of cooling. So imo what we're seeing in the US is much better explained by the $2T stimulus injection that occurred at the start of 2021 than demographics.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/job-vacancies

When this collapse in workforce population occurs perhaps firms will learn that they can survive and even thrive with much less "fluff staff" who mostly sit idle or contribute very little to the overall success of any given project. I continuously see a decent amount of what I consider staffing excess in a large fraction of the companies I've worked with. (My personal philosophy here is that companies/projects/etc are better off with fewer and much higher quality employees. The challenge is finding them, hiring them and keeping them.)

It's been echoed here often that many of the large SV firms and MAANG-type companies were just hoovering up talent to keep them away from competitors. This seems like a decent corp strategy when cheap money is raining down for 1-2 decades. However, now that we're entering into a new macro-economic climate maybe this practice will subside a bit, too.

Companies without slack can’t respond effectively to emergencies. see: Southwest.

Do you have any further news around SW collapse? From what I read (the news) slack would not have helped at all. #air issues > hey guys my luggage software crashed

With 50 same emojis attached.

SW was a systemic failure

Ha, I should have noted that I used the term ‘slack’ to mean % of free time available to workers who are waiting for the next crisis. Not ‘slack’ the software to hashtag issues, aha.

Good point. I should have scoped my comment to only target projects which primarily require software engineering.

Established companies without slack are just zombie companies. They are dead, they just don't know it.

There are, but the people aren't necessarily where the jobs are. I've got positions in Huntsville, AL that aren't remote-capable, and we cannot get people to even apply.

That’s the thing, with this labor market businesses might start opening new locations or moving. I see that happening with hardware startups.

Can you share some of the job listings?

Do you publicly display your pay (range)?

For a while it was fashionable to tell people who were having a hard time finding work that they needed to move. I'm wondering if people are so tolerant of suggesting it the other direction, so:

Have you considered moving?

Nothing that immigration won't solve. You have hoardes of young people from South Asia, Africa that will come up and fill any money making opportunity in the states.

Not when US immigration policy is so restrictive and hostile. We are actively preventing our own prosperity in the pursuit of protectionism.

Immigration can lower wages of existing citizens that are theoretically who a democratic government and its policies should be working for

Then allow immigration from rich countries? It's incredibly hard to immigrate even from a rich european country to the US.

We haven’t been preparing for the massive retirement of the boomers. It’s tough in many cases where they spend their careers keeping younger people out of leadership.

Then they complain to national papers that workers aren’t hustling enough to get into leadership.

There will be volatility as a new generation takes over at companies. Each generation is larger and more educated than the last so demand will keep up.

Who says they are all retiring?

> massive retirement of the boomers

I guess it implies all. To clarify, the cohort of retirement-age workers with the means to retire is experiencing a sharp rise as predicted. That contributes some to a worker shortage that should absorb those affected by layoffs like these.

Get ready for assisted living and nursing salary to double. There’s already a shortage.

It'll just melt sideways, the owners will drain elderly for every penny and then ship them off to a medicare facility once they are poor.

This is already happening. Elder care facilities build themselves in the middle of expensive cities, charge $12k a month for negligible care, and once you have no more estate to suck down and take ownership of, they send you to a third rate facility and charge the government, still absurd fees, but at least less stupid.

I conspiratorially believe this is an intentional move to limit wealth transferring from boomers to younger generations as it normally would in the past, by houses being passed down and grandma dying and leaving stuff to youngins, because now all that is taken by "old age homes" instead of the younger generations.

Comparable jobs (i.e. a software job for a software layoff) or just jobs (lots of server positions out there)?

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