Ask HN: Is the job market dead or something? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is the job market dead or something?

36 pointsuptownfunk62 comments

Struggling

It was dead as a doornail the last six months. It had a little bit of life in August, then it fell off a cliff. Zero. Only fake job postings, ghost posts, fake interviews, interviews at weird companies and interview loops for information espionage only pretending to be real interviews with no intent to hire.

In the last couple weeks a couple decent, actually real, roles showed up versus the fake / ever posted roles or spam posted roles to "pretend to be hiring" by companies trying to pump their IPO or whatever.

It has been brutual.

I dont think its "because of AI," Its because the economy is dying.

You have to get your head out of the tech industry to see the forest for the trees. Other industries have high demand, such as healthcare and hospitality.

Unemployment is at 4% for the most consecutive months since the 1950s.

“The economy is dying” is hyperbole.

I have never seen so many people in my linkedin feed who are begging for work after being unemployed for a year EVER

Both things are probably true.

The economy seems to be doing fairly well –– at least it was in 2023. Even tech is mostly fine, apart from the deeply unprofitable startups. The tech job market on the other hand seems to be suffering from several headwinds at once...

You have pandemic reopening slowing demand for a lot of tech companies and causing them to cut back on hiring. High interest rates are reducing valuations of unprofitable tech companies which has resulted in a slowdown in startup investment. Where capital is available it's largely going to small AI startups who are spending 90% of their capital on compute rather than tech talent. Finally, you have the largest tech companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon cutting jobs which has led to the market becoming flooded with extremely talented tech workers at a time when tech graduates entering the job market are at all time highs.

When you have very few companies hiring and lots of companies cutting jobs at a time when lots of new workers are entering the market the average tech worker isn't going to have an easy time finding a job. I've seen a lot of pleads for work on Linkedin too. I'm getting texts regularly now from ex-employees seeking working after being out of work for months. I don't quite understand how some people are still in denial at this point.

Big question, do you know those people?

LinkedIn algorithmically shows you posts that get a lot of engagement. It’s not a scientific way of gauging the economy one way or another.

This is a good argument because those posts get a lot of interaction

But this is anecdata. Exactly the kind of thing that can steer you wrong.

In my life experience, anecdotal data always signals trends weeks, months, years before the experts catch on.

I have never seen it otherwise. Whenever I talk to a range of people, they all tell me X is happening to them more often, the media take another 6+ months to report on it.

Same, it’s really bad out there.

I don’t dispute the 4% figure but isn’t that based on the % that claim unemployment? Like if you stop claiming it cuz you gave up you’re no longer counted right?

I remember reading something like that which made me question what that metric really means.

"People are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work" from https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm#unemployed

So if someone is retired, a student, a full-time parent, etc then they don't count as "unemployed" despite not working a paid job. If someone lost their job and wants a new one, and at least once every 4 weeks they check a job website or whatever, they'd still be counted.

How are they counted ? I don’t assume the government has metrics on clicks per person on website’s looking for job section with a timestamp

Read the methodology, it's all there.

This claim always comes up as a supposed flaw, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s the same metric over time. If you look at the unemployment rate now compared the past it’s very good.

Also, wages have been increasing faster than inflation since last January. I don’t think that would be happening if there was a labor surplus.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-i...

Read this post by a Google Data Scientist who has been unemployed for a year (!) https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7154741...

This is not normal, or what we had seen at all the last ten years.

We are hitting a brick wall.

Again, that’s an anecdote. That’s one person. It doesn’t tell us anything. Google has a medium sized city’s worth of employees and former employees.

And talk about choosing a bad example:

This guy’s story makes it clear that it is his personal path to not prioritize immediate re-employment. It says right there he got a big Google severance, doesn’t spend a lot of money, and is taking his time and finishing university and traveling. He’s also trying to change career paths. He wasn’t a data scientist at Google, he wants to change over to doing dats science, so he’s seeing internships.

He legitimately doesn’t even count as unemployed. He’s a student and doesn’t even want to start working until August.

> Other industries have high demand, such as healthcare and hospitality.

If there was high demand in those sectors, then surely the salaries would have increased? Isn't it called the law of demand and supply?

The salaries are increasing faster than inflation since January of last year.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-i...

Those numbers are bogus, sorry. The largest expense for any worker is having a place to live, and you just can't do that with hospitality sector wages.

If you think the numbers are bogus, send me some data that you think is correct.

And to be clear, I’m not making the claim that people are better off than they were in 2018 or 2019. I’m simply pointing out a few key ways in which perception is lagging reality.

Like I wrote in the comment above, it's a never ending discussion, and there are no numbers that people will agree on. So I urge you to look at the cost of living of yourself and people around you, as well as the salaries. A 2024 dollar or euro is maybe worth 50c of a 2020 dollar or euro. The cost of a house has in many places increased by $100 000 during that time, but have the yearly salaries of hospitality workers increased with $25 000?

There is no high demand for hospitality workers. If there was a high demand, then you'd see software engineers quitting their jobs to go work in restaurants and hotels.

Your comment isn't a counterargument - it's changing the subject to a different (although related) argument.

Agreeing on reliable inflation numbers is a never-ending conversation, but if somebody still believes any official numbers, I think it's fair to simply call those numbers bogus. Saying there is high demand for hospitality sector workers is not true, because they are still the lowest paid workers and would need a huge percentage salary growth before anybody could say there is high demand for them.

If companies were saying there was a huge demand for software engineers and that they were desperate for workers, and then offering $12 per hour salaries, people would laugh. But do and say the same in the hospitality sector, and people somehow take you serious.

What I see around me is that because of macroeconomics (no cheap credits) companies trying to outsource to India (to a greater extent than a few years ago).

Well, ironically enough the job scene is the same (or rather even worse) in India. College placements, even in the mass "IT sweatshops" have crashed catastrophically and overall recruitment is at its lowest.

I haven't been able to work for make money for 2 years now this situation would be deadly for me if my mom wasn't helping me out.

Wow, I’ve heard a lot of people are only getting by thanks to their parents and family.

We had an intern (who was great) who has struggled to find work for almost a year now, going by LinkedIn. Awful. And if he can't get a job, I can't imagine how most young devs feel these days.

Where are you located?

I thought so to but, apparently, it was just bad timing: layoffs happening in the slowest period of the year. I'm noticing things are picking up again (at least for senior positions).

It's January. You've just had layoffs and its coming up to the end of Q4.

Expect around June/July.

It feels like there's a kind of tectonic shift happening due to various economic and technical factors ... maybe driven somewhat by the advent of practical AI. For me I think it's going to be better to build stuff as a solo entrepreneur than try to swim against the current.

I might be uninformed here, I have yet to hear of anyone actually being replaced or reqs being reduced because of LLM scripting. I understand the threat, and it seems like a competent programmer could maybe squeeze out 1.5-2x their work with such a program, but is anyone actually doing that? Are any hiring managers or CTOs authorizing that instead of hiring a human?

I’m not saying it won’t happen, but so far it feels like the only reality is that we’re all a bit uncomfortable that it will happen eventually.

At big tech companies we are embedding ai into all layers of our workflow. And it’s accelerating.

Can you give an example where AI has potentially displaced human software engineers? I know of an example where creatives were probably laid off in favor of AI, but not clear examples for software engineering itself.

(I'm not in favor of creatives losing their jobs either! It's just off-topic.)

I haven’t seen anyone get laid off due to ai but maybe we don’t hire as many contractors to deal with some work that is now much easier due to the intelligent automation. Perhaps leadership is factoring this into their headcount decisions now.

I think interest rates are a much bigger factor than AI at this point!

I think there’s one more factor which is that, by and large, hyperscaling has been proven ineffective for most companies. Sure, Uber got away with it, but nearly every company who goes public and triples their headcount in a year finds themselves less productive than they were before.

And I think section 174 is a much bigger factor than interest rates (though I think AI could take the lead in the next few years, depending on how fast the tech keeps evolving)

Depends how you look at it I think. AI isn't directly replacing jobs, but it did suck most of the available investment capital from workers in 2023.

AI companies were really the only tech startups getting funded in 2023, but unlike traditional startups where most of that funding would go to building out a team of engineers to build the product, AI startups tend to have smaller teams and most of the funding goes to compute.

Agree. I also think enterprises suspect a prolonged environment of elevated interest rates.

In Canada and can see most traditional firms (banking/insurance/etc.) are almost exclusively hiting from recruiting firms that have shitty benefits. The contracting rate is only about 25% higher than the permanent role and all need to be incorporated.

Honestly, here in the energy/ utilities industry at least we can’t hire enough. The big problem is we just can’t pay what tech does for similar work, here a tech/ data lead might make 120-140 base.

Yes, I wonder how much this is the issue? During the craziness of 2020-2022 people's salary expectations went through the roof.

Yes. Any yellow flags are instant rejections even with referrals right now in my experience. Had to take time off for health and getting nearly no hits with 10yoe and a good resume.

No hit with 10y+ of experience . Then i'm doomed as a junior

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2023/11/18/heres-why-...

Ha ha, what they fail to report is that it is an election year.

hope you guys watch latest news from leading media

"Top-tier investment banks Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley forecasted that the United States economy will improve into 2024. In a Wednesday note to clients, Goldman Sachs said, “We forecast the S&P 500 index will end 2024 at 4700, representing a 12-month price gain of 5% and a total return of 6% including dividends.” The bank added, “Our baseline assumption during the next year is the U.S. economy continues to expand at a modest pace and avoids a recession, earnings rise by 5%, and the valuation of the equity market equals 18x, close to the current [price-to-earnings] level.”"

Yes. Recommend finding a job outside of tech ASAP before everyone else tries to do the same.

The real reason hiring is hard:

https://www.theonion.com/company-struggling-to-find-diverse-...

Can you elaborate? What kind of jobs are you looking for? I’d like to think that there’s still tremendous demand for software engineers, and I’m curious how the market is shifting in terms of skills and experience being sought.

Yes we are in the middle of a big change, the death of an era and the start of another one. The tech bubble burst and something much bigger will come from it just like the dotcom bubble.

What do you mean? What era is dying? What do you think is starting?

He probably means AI.

Yeah, same kind of vibe as I had around 1992. The old world of 16-bit computers had died, and the new world of the internet had yet to come. I had lots of friends despair. I myself was waiting it out while getting a MS degree.

I was a kid, internet and computers were becoming a thing. I can totally see that happening.. AI is like the new internet.

Been seeing a lot of lay offs still

Yes and much more to come I suspect

As someone not in the market this sounds awful. Is this really true?

It’s totally true. Tech market is abysmal right now. Good luck trying to raise money.

AI plus macro picture is crushing a lot of companies and VCs. It’s like the silent death.

Time to learn a trade.

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