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Comment by frfl | Hacker News Reader

Your experiences are too similar to what I've seen. I don't think the public preconception has yet to realize this is what reality if looking like for many people rather than the headlines about no-recession, jobs everywhere, low unemployment.

I was going to link my other comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37112093, but you already read and commented on that. Just try to hold out, it's just absolutely terrible right now, perhaps dotcom/2008 bad, but those were both before my mind so I can't necessarily give a good account for the experience during those two periods.

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> Your experiences are too similar to what I've seen. I don't think the public preconception has yet to realize this is what reality if looking like for many people rather than the headlines about no-recession, jobs everywhere, low unemployment.

Both can be true. Many people can have a reality of not being able to find buyers for remote work performed on computers. And the data indicating non remote work, possibly not performed on computers is widely available (albeit at an undesirable pay to quality of life ratio for those in the former category).

> And the data indicating non remote work, possibly not performed on computers is widely available

The initially reported jobs numbers each month always claim that, and then those numbers are consistently revised down over time so that jobs have been lost the whole time, and our perceptions were more accurate than the initially reported data.

Presumably, this chart is using revised data, and it does not show any material upward movement in even the most expansive definition of unemployed for almost a year:

https://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate

After 6 months people fall off the list, and also many people with high salaries don’t bother applying for the meager benefits.

It also isn’t specific to tech so a slight decrease in unemployment outside of tech would mask tech unemployment.

As someone that skated through 2008 employed, this seems worse to me. I've seen people that are good take a year to get a job. Some even left willingly last year only to faceplant into the current situation.

" Some even left willingly last year only to faceplant into the current situation."

lol, love the turn of phrase. My situation exactly, actually I left at the beginning of covid to take care of family (homeschool etc), and 'work on a side project' that of course hasn't progressed far (enough). So you can imagine my response rate - basically unemployable currently.

i'd gotten out of the military and was finishing college in 2008-9 and it took that long to find a real job. lot of part-time bartending then.

likewise, plenty of folks skating through this employed -- a function of perspective.

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