Awesome - though why am I now having so much trouble finding a new role compared to past 20 years?
For example, I haven't had a job for almost 6 months but I've put 'self-employed' on LinkedIn and have been working on my startup during this time (and already have a fully working product which is easier to use, more scalable and more effective than the competition) but I don't think I'm going to be able to find users in the current environment due to existing media/tech monopoly and insurmountable trust barriers as well as a discriminatory ESG/DEI environment which makes it impossible for me (a straight white male) to raise funding to pay for advertising.
I know other people in similar situations. Apparently in Australia, half of the working age population is on welfare and at the same time there are shortages of many essential services like daycare which prevent people who have children from working as one parent has to stay home. Apparently the government is making it hard for daycare businesses to expand which is driving the shortage.
Also, tax brackets in Australia are based on individual income, not household income and therefore, taxes are very high if only one partner is working (which is often the case due to the shortage of daycare centers as mentioned above).
Property prices are also very high and rent is very high. The government is also ramping up immigration to prop up property prices + rents and foreigners end up taking many of the jobs which increases competition, drives down wages and makes paying rent even harder.
It's like everything is broken and the brokenness compounds. Even the incentives are broken so it's not even fixable with the current political system.
The media and funding environment just doesn't allow new tech ventures to launch and find their first users unless the founders are in some special in-group.
I don't even want to get into the details of what happened to me up until that point in my career. It's been an epic tale about the struggle for survival... Not in some remote forest in the Amazon or lost on some remote island like Robinson Crusoe, but merely survival in a profoundly dysfunctional socio-economic system.
Just kidding. It took me a couple months to find a new job over the fall, and I couldn't believe how grueling the experience was compared to the past. It was a full-time job just searching and interviewing, and at every step I was reminded of how many other candidates there were. Had to pass nine separate interviews to land an offer from my current employer. By that time, I had one other offer, and I was just ready to be done. Luckily, they were my first choice from the beginning.
I think part of what is going on is that tech is highly sensitive to interest rates, but that's not the whole story. There was also a cultural shift that happened. Many places issued return to office policies that acted as stealth layoffs. Most developers that went remote over the pandemic probably wish to remain remote, and remote jobs are harder to get interviews for due to competition. A lot of places also fucked around with replacing US developers with overseas contractors. By now, I think a lot of those places have resumed hiring in the US. Given time, it will get better.
Best of luck.
It was like WTF. Obviously the entire economy has turned into some insane scheme. There's no way these sudden market changes are natural.
What sickens me about modern society is that whenever they cheat you, they always accompany it with gaslighting... Which is exactly what this 'record low unemployment' rhetoric is.
Just like ESG/DEI/wokeness it's pure media gaslighting designed to cover up the fact that they had started discriminating against straight white people. Now whenever a young white person tells their parents "I can't get a job because they're discriminating against me," they give a weird look and respond with something like "Uhhhh, no, no, no, it's everyone else who is being discriminated against, that's what the media said. Sounds like you're just lazy, too lazy to even come up with your own excuses."
Thankfully I'm good at explaining things and my parents are intelligent so I think they understand what's happening now but there was a moment of tension. Reminded me of the COVID vaccine mandate + media hysteria breaking families apart.
I try not to take anything seriously and just focus on survival. It's like everything is fucked in the most optimal way imaginable. Optimized for fuckery, not efficiency...
Companies are also cutting higher salary employees and reducing hiring.
U6 is 7%[0] for the month of December 2023.