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Comment by romanzubenko | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone perform an analysis on where the laid off employees for last 3 years went? According to layoffs.fyi nearly 500k were laid off since 2021, would be interesting to see if people mostly reshuffled within FAANG or there was a more structural talent migration e.g. from megacorps to startups.

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And how many haven't landed anywhere yet.

And after ~12 months or so, they are removed from the "unemployment" numbers as "no longer looking for work" so that the numbers look better.

ref: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm#nilf

No, you still count as unemployed even if you haven't had a job for 12 months, as your own link attests. The question is whether you've looked for a job at any point in the past year, not whether you've held one.

More broadly, the US government publishes six different measures of unemployment, all of which can be seen here: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm . The media usually focuses on U-3 (currently 3.7%), whereas the broadest metric is U-6 (currently 7.2%).

Your comment us needlessly pedantic, as I linked the full answer and said “~12 months” which is “about twelve months” which is not incorrect, though I’m sure the average is probably closer to 18-20 months for being removed from the U3 stat.

Or didn't seriously try to. I know people who almost certainly did pretty well over the past 15 years or so, got caught up in some layoff, and retired or semi-retired--probably a few years earlier than they would have done in different circumstances.

That's kind of what I've done. I looked around some last year, didn't see much out there, had a few interviews here and there that usually ended in ghosting. After the unemployment ran out stopped looking for a while. Then started looking again recently because I'm not sure I'm ready to be retired yet.

There are volunteer or more-or-less volunteer things you can do but you need to find the right open source project (or start one), find a channel where people will actually read what you write and do it regularly enough, have connections to people who actually want your advice, etc. Once you're not connected to an organization some of those things are harder than they seem unless you have specific, still-relevant credentials.

Or who ended up underemployed. I know one guy who ended up stocking shelves at Home Depot to keep food on the table for the family until the job market turns around. Technically employed, but not where he ought to be.

As a software engineer, finding a job is harder than it's ever been for me, but it still seems _easier_ than my peers in other industries.

Depends on the other industries, I guess. It's pretty easy to find service jobs right now. The other thing I'm noticing is that the hourly rates being offered for contracts are a lot less than they were 2 years ago.

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