That confirms my anecdotal experience. At times I felt I was losing my mind with all the "record low unemployment" and "soft landing" stories in the press. 2021 and 2022 felt like great years in terms of the job market. 2023 felt horrible.
Also, just like in the dot com bust, companies really start laser focusing on roles that are directly tied to revenue, but anything that is even slightly tangential/"a luxury" gets cut. In a non-scientific perusal of my LinkedIn connections, most of the software devs and sales people I know who were laid off found work relatively quickly, but I've seen people in roles like recruiting, content marketing, UX research, and product managers that have in some cases been unemployed for over a year. Middle management also definitely had a major thinning out.
You can't look at years of largesse and then when we get back to reality lament about how it's so horrible.
The American worker has never had largesse, even the tech workers like ourselves, the largesse is and was and will still be going to the capitalist class. You're basically saying that we must accept that we're meant to live shitty lives where we grind and grind for very little gain while the capitalists and founders thrive on our labor. Reality is reality, but the whole "we can't complain about this" message you're sending is part of what's keeping us here. We should be fighting for the fruits of our labor.
I am absolutely not convinced that if I lose my job I can easily get another one that pays as well, which is saying something because my wage is pathetic compared to most people on HN.
Well, we had people bragging about working 2, 3 or more remote jobs in 2021/2022, so I'm not sure that should be the expectations anchor. 2023 reversed some of that.
We're in a lull, no doubt. But there's still a lot happening.
Coincidental to the overemployment stories, there was a trend of entry-level workers taking jobs and abandoning them at the end of the training period. They'd work a series of short-term "jobs" concurrently in which they collected pay for the time period in which nobody had any real expectations from them, and left when that changed.
Overemployment candidates don't hide it well, or the media was making news up based on viral bullshit someone exaggerated on Reddit based on the above trend. I figured someone would try this shit so I kept an eye out; we only ever caught two OE cases arising from unresponsive remote employees with low output. (One confessed.)
There's not exactly any mystery to catching this, and there's a ton of ways to get caught (as repeatedly reported by Redditors). I have a hard time believing this narrative was ever real for more than a handful of people. The story mainly seemed to serve as astroturf citable in support of eventual RTO mandates.
Do we know how prevalent that really was though?
I just assumed those were extreme outliers, famous because they were so outrageous.
Companies bend and cut the throat of loyal hard working employees the moment they are not relevant yet people raged some ethics there which was very misplaced.
For example, if you drop 2 IT jobs, but each one is 150k, but you create 4x 60k jobs, it looks like you added 2 jobs, but in reality, you removed 60k worth of payroll income.
But the company saves 60k, so the net (to the economy) is the same.
No, it's entirely true. The economy is a closed system. Employees can't "put that income back into the economy", because it has never left.
How it gets redistributed will vary, and you can make normative arguments about spending the money at the local coffee shop. But the net effect on the economy is the same.
This is sort of not true. The biggest example of why is the concept of the velocity of money. If you’re unfamiliar with this concept, it’s the idea of of how many times a single dollar is used in a given time period. It’s a very important measure, and it’s historic low at the start of the lock downs was why the fed dumping so much money into the economy was not a mistake (at the time). It’s an effective multiplier, and has very real impact as to the total utils that everyone in the spending chain collect.
What this means, is that when money is spent outside a country, there is a very real risk that that the local velocity of money goes down, even though the gdp of the global economy is going up.
No, its not; value (and, separately, money) can both be created and destroyed. And, when examining any scale smaller than the global economy, value and money can each enter or exit the universe of analysis from or to the outside, as well.
4.1% sounds nice, but inflation has been at, what, 7% over the last couple of years?
It really did. I choose that year to become an independent contractor, and thanks God the only client I found loves me and pays on time because otherwise literally nobody has ever contacted me on LinkedIn or anything with a single decent proposal.
I have a huge fear of losing that client and going back to European corporate job and salary again.
If you're a contractor you should be the one contacting. Sales is part of the job.