Unemployed Americans Are Being Forgotten in a Strong Job Market

According to this[1], the borrowed investor cash they were being paid in dried up due to anti-inflation measures.

There's also the (related) massive market correction from Big Tech's manic hiring spree in COVID and subsequent layoffs.

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/tech-reces...

Totally agree on all your points and have witnessed the same. The market is fucked, I know a couple new CS grads who have been looking for over a year for anything even remotely tech related and unable to even secure a rejection email let alone OA. These are smart guys too, near 4.0GPA, strong math and CS skills, plus went to a top university with pedigree.

in that boat and know several others like me and I've been programming from childhood and have never stopped. I'm up to date with the latest and worked in pretty tight industries but when you're not even getting a call back after unemployment is dry and you're broke and rent keeps hitting and you've got a child and it's all just coming down hard, man. ah well, maybe we can organize groups jumping off bridges on social media until either we get work or there aren't enough of us left to go around

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. I know engineering directors with lots of experience that haven’t received a single interview for a year. It feels like a terrible job market but maybe it’s restricted to the tech space.

It's probably worth considering that you are in a bubble. There's a whole world of jobs outside of tech. The part I find strange (not really but I'm very cynical) is that tech companies are still posting record revenues while shedding all these employees.

They need to move out of SV. In my state that people mostly don't know about, there was no disruption to the software dev market here because we didn't have stupid purposeful overgrowth during the pandemic to unwind now.

In fact, California is probably being hit so hard simply because it's so much cheaper for a company that needs to be in California to hire someone out of state for remote employment.

>We are talking about "We want AI engineers with PHDs and plan to pay $170K for that."

Meanwhile all my friends are B students and have completely boring resumes and have been finding $150k positions for what are essentially average software development jobs.

If that person who is so desperate to eat can't live on $170k a year, why is that? I make $75k a year in a place with $2000 a month rent and a new car and a bad takeout habit and still am increasing my savings.

I'm not trying to be heartless here, I think tech workers like "AI engineers" should command significantly more than $200k a year, explicitly because software developers can "produce" infinitely more than any other job category than maybe "creatives". FAANG pays you a pittance for what you give back to them, but right now FAANG is trying to play dumb employment market games to ratchet down their costs. They've done this multiple times over the past decades including literal collusion to keep down dev wages. Maybe Elon at Twitter showed them you can easily find 5000 software developers who are terrible at knowing their own worth, hyper sycophantic, or H1B slaves, and they will take way less money.

Maybe instead of crying for two decades that they make so much money because we don't have a social safety net and because they don't have unions so they can "negotiate better on their own"

How's that negotiation doing?

> I hate to say it but I am not sure I believe the employment statistics are real, and am expecting those numbers to turn out to be false.

You should read up on how the data is assembled before thinking that it is false.

https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

It's a big challenge and they don't try to hide it. You can definitely see how gig work can affect things. I think that we're going to need to figure out how to better measure unemployment now that gig work platforms exist and it's so easy to use them.

You can also see state by state information

https://www.bls.gov/charts/state-employment-and-unemployment...

Which shows California as having higher-than-average unemployment and one of the highest rates of growth.

Was laid off in March 2020 (great timing) and was looking for more than a year. IT but not in the SV. Finally found position for which I was way overqualified but they took pity on me. Much lower salary too. So I'm sifting through Excel spreadsheets and writing Azure Data Flows (with 2 Masters, 20+ years in IT and multiple architect and management positions on the resume). I'm honestly afraid to look for anything else, not that I see much available anyways. My wife's company was going through a reorg so she had to find a new job (not IT but white collar), lower salary and 2 levels down in title. I've lived through both 2001-2004 and 2008-2010, it feels very similar. The "historically low unemployment rate" my behind.