Unemployed office workers are having a harder time finding new jobs
wsj.com
wsj.com
I suspect that WSJ held back such topics until after the election…
The people I know that lose their job spend at least 1 year looking for a job. Usually at a significantly lower salary. With the current rate of inflation it’s a 1-2 punch that requires a big step down in lifestyle.
I don’t really see these conditions changing until there is a AI bubble pop or something. Facebook is no longer trying to poach FANG general SWE’s so there is no more pricing pressure in the market. Their recruiting departments have gone dark and their staff was eliminated.
1. There was massive over-hiring at many tech companies during the pandemic boom. That hangover is still taking time to wring out.
2. The era of easy money is over. Lots and lots of speculative investments that make sense when interest rates are essentially 0 don't make sense at all when rates are 5+ percent.
3. Outsourcing has exploded since the pandemic, and this is a long term change that is definitely not going away. The remote work trend is a double edged sword. I've worked with lots of great developers in Latin America and Europe (both Eastern and Western Europe) whose salaries are much less than American software developers, and there is plenty of time zone overlap to get lots of collaboration time in.
4. Companies are realizing they can get by with a lot fewer people. Elon may have gone off the deep end with laying off 75% of Twitter, but a lot of places are realizing they can lay off ~20% with no loss of effectiveness, including future bets. In fact, I've seen some business leaders argue (and I agree with them) that the post pandemic downturn has actually provided an opportunity for better focus and less bureaucratic meetings. I.e. cutting some people has allowed them to move faster.
5. AI is having a big impact on at least some roles. Washington Post did an article shortly after ChatGPT came out about how a bunch of copywriters were being replaced by AI. I think AI is generally over hyped, but for roles like marketing, copywriting, recruiting, etc. it's definitely having an impact on jobs.
I think #s 3, 4 and 5 are long term trends that are here to stay.
I have been warning about this over and over and over since the beginning.
If your job can be done remotely, you are effectively unessential in the grand scheme of your company.
Those who went back to the office understood the political landscape well.
I know at least one person who was a software dev who was worked very little over the last 5 years.
For myself, over that period I noticed almost all work except for government and financial dried up - lucky for me that was my most recent experience.
Why?
The WSJ and other major publications have a vested interest in brokering access by tailoring their coverage to be friendly to those in power. They are largely responsible for setting the agenda and tone of issues during an election.
(https://archive.pagecentertraining.psu.edu/public-relations-...)
Given these two factual statements... The stated stance of the current administration was to downplay the impact and scale of economic hardship, and the role of major media outlets during an election is to set out the agenda and issues to be debated during an election period...
I think it clearly follows that the WSJ had a vested interest in providing one perspective on the economy before and during the election, and now that this period is over, they can provide a different perspective more aligned with the perspective of the working class, and less aligned with the perspective of the incumbent administration.
Are you thinking of the Washington Post? You realize that the WSJ has been described as "right-centrist"[1]? It's unclear why they'd want to support a Democratic administration. Even the "friendly to those in power" excuse doesn't work too well. For most of the election Trump was leading in election models, and near the end it was a coin toss. Being anti-Biden and pro-Trump would be the rational choice, even if they were apolitical and just wanted to be "friendly to those in power"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wall_Street_Journal#Editor...
You see how your wording is not very convincing (and Wikipedia is heavily left biased, in case you thought your citation has any weight).
While I can see how "the WSJ has been described as "right-centrist"", the Overton window has shifted so much so rapidly that the WSJ is now comfortably slightly left leaning based on the "old" political spectrum (and by "old" I mean pre-2020 or so).
(But that's just, like, my opinion man.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...
If skilled people are without work and their savings and lifestyle supports it, they should consider building startups.
Also good look any small business trying to buy Nvidia hardware to compete in the AI space. Best they can do is get gouged renting compute time.
Compute will get cheaper and open models will proliferate.
Also some of the big tech companies have been quite ruthless with firing people even when they could afford not to, which doesn't match that theory.
Finally got brought on a week ago at a PC repair shop of all things. It's not glamorous but it's the only "IT related" thing I could find. In Seattle of all places!
The FAANG's doing their massive layoffs caused an absolute knock-on effect downstream across the entire corporate world ("well if Amazon thinks they should, we should too!") and everything I apply for now LinkedIn gleefully tells me there were "over 500 applicants" already
Even the public sector seems to be impossible to get into. Despite the requirement of US citizenship and the incoming administration (along with Elon's threats) even getting an interview in that sector is a challenge now
But now, there are anecdotes of other sectors being hit as well.
Note that all of this is "working as intended." The way the fed manages inflation generates unemployment to knock out high salary workers and keep wages down. The target unemployment rate is not zero.
"Tesla workers said that many employees let go were more senior engineers with higher compensation and they have been replaced with junior engineers from foreign countries at a lower pay."
https://electrek.co/2024/12/30/tesla-replaced-laid-off-us-wo...
One of the biggest issues with H1Bs is the fact that it reduces the employee's ability to change jobs and thus reduces their bargaining power for wages and thus depresses the wages across the board over time. That seems to be the main driving force for Musk behind the bluster around labor shortages.
I've worked with a few folks on H1Bs and they've all been paid significantly less than I have in the exact same role. Less base and less RSUs.
It dovetails nicely into their desire to slash education for Americans
Once we deport all the "illegal" immigrants, the MAGA folk can pick fruit in Florida while the H1B's work at Amazon for pennies on the dollar I suppose
Some jobs are unworthy for Dutch people. Your Dutch nationality protects you from slavery. For this there are immigrants.
The second reason is that we have a lot of people doing bullshit jobs in climate controlled offices but nobody wants to do physical labour.
Employers are hyper hyper selective
There are a lot a lot of fake job postings
The bar has gone way way up
It is in general very difficult and gruelling to get a job
If engineering roles are hard to find, product is 10-100x worse
If you have a job, be thankful, don't rock the ship
OBVIOUSLY there will be statements to the contrary, but this is really more in the spirit of - if you're having a hard time out there, you are not alone, and at least one person out there (who has been working for the last 10 years or so) finds it much much harder. I would say reminscent closer to 2014-2015 than anything like 2020-2021.
I don’t see any evidence for an employee favored job market. This is not 2020/21 anymore. The large corporations are firmly in power in tech.
The cost and impact of a bad hire can be really bad.
Read the story about the guy who used to sell a bag of dicks and made $100k in like 10 days for years ago. That wasn't just a lightning in a bottle idea, that's because normal people had $20 to send anonymous bags of dicks to each other for funsies. I see those people at the food bank, now.
Prior to 2022 I was advance quitting if a job wasn't good enough, didn't treat me (workers in general) right, etc. Now, I expect a year long search if I am forced out.
I have been feeling out the market the last couple months, applying mainly for jobs that match my exact experience, and have had exactly 1 phone screen. In the past I have been told I interview very well and haven't received many rejections after getting to talk to a person. But things are definitely different now.
If current job has to do big layoffs, which feels like it could happen in the next year or two, it's going to be rough.
Does this strategy work?
Exactly. It will be way worse than a hacky PoC because you might able to reason about the structure or logic based on the human author and their intent which is impossible in the case of an LLM author. Further, assuming the human author isn't hit by a bus or whatever, you can query them directly if anything is unclear. Good fuckin luck asking an LLM for a reason why it did something in the PoC.
Absolutely make believe FUD
It could be an extreme reaction to the large number of new hires in the 2022 era.
To me that sounds like a perfectly rational response to fake job apps. When there exists the possibility of 0% chance of a response for a given application, the only rational move is to minimize the investment of all submissions and maximize the number of submissions.
Recruiters and hiring managers spun it as a problem being inflicted on them because of AI tools and the attitude of people applying, with one commentator writing
> Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max… The problem is so bad that one company withdrew from partnering in our internal job board, citing rampant LLM-generated applications and obvious LLM cheating in interviews.
On the other side of your argument you have people who see no problem posting ghost jobs, and think it’s a harmless way to boost company morale and increase investor confidence. They see hundreds of “low effort” applications being submitted to them, believe it is a cost being imposed on them, and think it’s 100% a problem caused by the applicants. They see no connection between their behavior and the response they get back from the environment and would see your proposal as absolutely ridiculous.
1) Company applies on behalf of employee.
2) Company advertises for employees job.
3) Company interviews local suitors
3a) If local suitor aces it do they get the would be immigrants job? No and also no GC for immigrant.
3b) No local suitor found then immigrant gets GC.
H1B should die. Exceptional immigrants can come here and be an American after some determinant amount of time (not in a hundred plus year backlog or some nonsense). My problem is that I can't work with an underclass, their is no joining the cultures because we are pitted against each other.
At the same time falsifying skills or misrepresenting them should be just as bad.
A level of competency, recency or familiarity that is not accurate to what’s needed or communicated.
As much as many job posts can be wish lists (no hire is perfect, every hire can be a compromise of how much of each skill a candidate has), understanding what you bring, what is needed, and where you can grow relative to the position and the work ahead can mean a lot.
In some cases, a perfect candidate might mean limited time there or maybe three candidate gets bored.
I was thinking about it the other day, but it may be it's own form of japanese salaryman, except its for positions not many would work in that arrangement.
Maybe it helps companies that couldn't be sustainable, be that way (artificially).
2. Lack of information transparency: everyone involved has huge incentives to lie, so it's extremely difficult for a company to say "we are a good company wanting to hire a good dev" and someone to respond "I am a good dev looking for a good job". Same problem as dating.
3. Moving jobs to cheaper countries: the flipside of work-from-home is having companies realize that they don't need to have butts in chairs is San Francisco, they can have butts in chairs in India, 75% of performance for half the price.
This is probably going to be the new normal until:
1. The IT education scales down and juniors give up, so that there's less competition.
2. Someone comes up with a interviewing process that is significantly more difficult to game.
3. The society at large switches back from "just essentials only" to "one bag of glitter poop please" so that lots of silly businesses can stay afloat, at least for some time.
They had to be brain-dead to only consider that as an option now. What was keeping them from figuring it out sometime post-Reagan?
Positions that we typically could close in 1-3 months now take 3-6 if we do not lower our hiring bar.
We literally are using the same interview playbook as we did in the past. For some reason, the candidates in the pipeline have huge variance.
It seems that a lot of people pivoted their career in Covid leading to this mess.
Take physical resumes at your physical office?
Sponsor your local meetups and user groups?
The pool is going to be much smaller and faster to wade through for both sides. And, once you wade through it, you actually have a match that is much more likely for both sides.
Look, this is the exact same problem as online dating and has all the same failure modes. You break the failure modes in exactly the same ways.
People have forgotten that in person was the way we used to do it. We had job fairs, companies would come to colleges in person, etc. It did work. It was just expensive from the point of view of the company.
Companies gave in person up because online was cheaper. Well, it isn't cheaper anymore now that both employers and employees have pissed in the online well. Whoops.
1. Work on two meaningful projects using the tech you want a job in. Update your resume with the work that was done, without embellishment.
2. Open your profile on LinkedIn. Close it when you get five interviews. Learn from each failing interview.
Highly skilled engineers aren't being fought over anymore. It's become a buyer's market.
If you lose your job, you might be looking for a new one for a long time.
I can’t put my finger on it, but I’ve observed a trend where new hires have massively fraudulent experience on their resumes. Likewise an engineer who passed leetcode rounds suddenly doesn’t know what a variable is.
At the very least, we have a problem with people using AI to game the job interview process.
These days your personal network matters most. If you don’t have one start working on one. Your resume might never see human eyes otherwise. Nobody cares about your GitHub sadly.