The Job Market Is Frozen | Hacker News Reader

The Job Market Is Frozen

theatlantic.com

87 pointsaarghh61 comments

Duh. Between the chaos in Washington and the commercial real estate crisis (30% of properties are underwater) we’re going to see a big crash, probably this year.

Tesla and Nvidia are both huge components of the overall market cap and drive alot of the yields in the last year or two. You’re one Elon scandal or Nvidia earnings miss away from a really bad day.

Healthcare is the other wildcard. For the last decade, medical practices of all kinds have consolidated into big regional networks that are interconnected. Many of them have cash flow challenges and the fucking around with Medicare/medicaid will drive some to insolvency. My one friend in the space is planning on 30% rif in some scenarios.

Be smart. Heads down at work and start unwinding your long positions and increasing cash holdings.

Just curious, what kind of Elon scandal do you think could move the needle at this point? Anyone capable and willing to observe his behavior has probably already acted on it.

What lines are left to cross?

He could fall out of favor with Trump, or the market could conclude that Tesla’s being sacrificed at the altar in exchange for pork barrel spending on spacex and twitter.

The needle has moved.

https://www.thestreet.com/video/tesla-loses-1-trillion-statu...

Stock is dropping, sales are falling, Elon is losing money with his antics.

[Edit] I'm showing a 25% drop in Tesla stock vales over this month. If Tesla is a significant part of the USA economy, then that has to be pretty painful. [/Edit]

It may not be obvious to you, but the protests are emboldening people.

https://electrek.co/2025/02/24/tesla-protests-gain-momentu-w...

Not sure where you are, but here in the UK sales might not have dropped as much as other European countries but there are definitely less Tesla's around, and the conversation is towards other EV makers because people don't want to fund him.

Except all the stocks are crashing. Not just Tesla.

IBM hasn't.

Apple hasn't.

Meta is still up on the month.

What are "all stocks"?

And by today they are...

IBM is still up on the month, and the 3 month.

Apple is still up on the month and the 3 month.

Apple may have dropped a bit, and I note that IBM still haven't dropped at all, but Tesla are down 25% on the month and down 15% on the 3 month.

Tesla are still performing far worse than anyone else by a wide margin by being below their previous position.

Unless by everyone crashing you mean up?

"Still up" means 'holding', and that confirms my argument. And you pulled only 2 stocks out of that many you mentioned at the start. No worries, they will likely take a nose dive in the coming months.

> [Edit] I'm showing a 25% drop in Tesla stock vales over this month. If Tesla is a significant part of the USA economy, then that has to be pretty painful. [/Edit]

Yes, but also that only takes the price back to early November, i.e. undoes the bubble from people thinking Trump affiliation would help.

Even after that, on the basis of the P/E ratio, I wouldn't be surprised by the share price dropping 90% from today, i.e. hovering around a price of $29/share.

That needle may yet move, but it's too soon to tell. I'd expect Musk to have an explict falling out with Trump first, not merely the current state of Trump having no interest in supporting EVs.

Then I misunderstood.

I still expect further knocks if there are more protests, people believe it's making an impact (even if it's not) with the claims of closing stores.

And if the sabotage continues, then that would be an additional cost to Tesla to replace. I know I would feel skittish about holding stocks of a company that has a CEO who is actively reducing the size of their market.

And that's all separate from the potential Trump/Musk fallout. It could get very messy.

> And that's all separate from the potential Trump/Musk fallout. It could get very messy.

Indeed.

The domestic fallout for being seen as Trump's enforcer, means the next Democrat government in the US will likely find ways to terminate most or all SpaceX contracts.

Well, unless Musk has a public falling out with Trump first.

But even then, he's already too much of a chaos monkey to be trusted with security clearence for anything (including by Trump, but Trump hasn't noticed that yet).

The international fallout for being seen by international governments… best not to speculate, but there's no fundamental upper bound when it comes to actions by governments who consider him to be a threat to their interests.

I think it is a good point, but the guy can still get a heart attack.

The markets haven’t digested the real state of affairs at the company.

Tesla is worth $30/share. It’s valued based on the Elon cult of personality. That’s already weakening — two years ago my previous post would have been brigaded into oblivion by Elon fans.

He’s the henchman of the most powerful man in earth at the moment, who’s infamous for betraying his henchman. There’s no bottom - literally anything could happen at any time.

It's really hard to time selling and buying back even if you're right and a crash is imminent. On the other hand, other than the great depression, most crashes recover fairly quickly (a few years). If you're invested for the long term then likely moving to cash is the losing move. Cash also loses to inflation.

My take is make a few adjustments on the margins to make your gut happier. If you scored you're a little ahead of the index. If you messed up you're not far behind.

> the commercial real estate crisis (30% of properties are underwater)

How bad is that compared to baseline? I mean in theory all new sold houses should be sold at 100% market value to the highest bidder, and thus unsellable at 100% of the price right away.

NVIDIA has a massive backlog of datacenter orders. Don’t think they’re in any immediate danger of collapse

Not unless their supply chain fucks up.

backlog orders esp ones with long waits, can be cancelled.

if a few other orgs make the same decision that Microsoft did -- no more AI data centers -- then their growth looks shakey

If you want data on it; the St Louis Fed has some really good stats for job postings on Indeed in various sectors going back to 2020. They're rough in a lot of industries:

IT Operations and Help Desk: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPITOPHE

Software Development: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

Banking and Finance: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPBAFI

Hospitality and Tourism: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPHOTO

Scientific Research: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSCREDE

Electrical Engineering is going pretty well though: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPELECENGI

I disagree on the quality. Google trends reflects a general decline of Indeed popularity, which could lead to fewer postings.

However yeah, places aren't really hiring. Absurdly gerrymandered roles and specific tech stacks point to probably more backrubs than hiring. Which is fine, if you want crony mcauthorized knuckledragger, take him, your product, your marketing, your teams, your contracts, and your whole history, and gtm.

It looks pretty flat to me over the last 5 years which roughly corresponds with their data:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

Maybe a small decrease over the last year.

In addition to being a job board, Indeed is a job aggregator. It scoops up listings from job boards and company websites and allows searching through them, with links to the original listing.

It is not perfect—it misses many postings across the web. But as long as its miss rate hasn't gotten much worse over the past few years, the data presented above is still valid.

my experience with indeed, simply put: it rewrote my cv: added degrees i do not have and upgraded the one I have. That was the end of it for me. Perhaps, your mileage may vary.

Great info but I feel it's missing an important piece i.e. the number of layoffs. The issue is never the number of jobs posted but the ratio of job searchers to jobs.

I feel this. A side effect has been a lot of unhappy people in my workplace. People clearly don't want to be here, but they can't move, and there's an air of discontent.

Low volatility indicates discontent, or high volatility?

> Kyle M. K., a talent-strategy adviser at Indeed, told me. “Survive Until ’25” became an unofficial rallying cry for businesses across the country.

All kinds of business? AFAIK that saying is/was specific to commercial real-estate, where nobody wants to admit that the valuation of the property might have gone down, and they're trying to delay and obscure it for long enough that they can pretend it never happened.

> “Survive Until ’25”

That was the exact quote in the entire games industry last year. [1][2] The tail end of the 2023 layoffs really hit the industry hard and then it never really recovered afterward. [3]

[1] https://www.ign.com/articles/survive-til-25-how-game-studios...

[2] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/how-to-survive-until-2025-in-t...

[3] https://www.ign.com/articles/game-developers-mass-layoffs-hu...

The article doesn't emphasize the biggest elephant in the room: The zero-interest economy ended and crashed the economy that rode on bloated valuations and stock prices. And now companies are gutting themselves to float the stock prices.

Wasn't that the excuse when they were laying people off two years ago?

Well yeah, but most companies still have a much higher headcount than before the pandemic so those initials layoffs from 2 years ago haven't cut through all the bloat.

It is hard to grasp how Facebook and Google etc. could grow headcount like that. In like five years 2017 to 2022 Google doubled from 100k to 200k.

It really isn't hard to grasp. All large orgs from government to private sector accumulate useless bloat over time if allowed to, since the goal of each employee is to grow their position and influence in the org at the expenses of the org, due to how the incentives for promotion are set up, kind of like a parasite .

And the easiest way to do that is to get the budget to hire a team to work under you, then you basically get an instant promotion to "leader/manager" and you offload your work to those below you while you chill "working" at home and take credit, and boom, the org somehow doubled its headcount overnight without any added productivity or innovation.

This gravy train was allowed to continue while there was an endless supply of free money to enable that added inefficiency, but now that the jig is up, the layoffs are a correction to that.

easy money, and a push to get a lot of things done. easy to vacuum up whoever.

there isn't an unlimited market for talent, but there are still a shit-ton of kids coming out of CMU, MIT, or even online factories like WGU that would kill to be at a FAANG or FAANG-affiliated org.

couple years later find the top 20% and drop the rest.

It was, it still is and its going to be like that from now on. The shareholders were made get used to ever-growing growth. So being profitable is not enough - the profits must grow every quarter. So this is a self-reinforcing, vicious spiral. They will lay off even more people as the economy contracts. And that contraction is aided by these layoffs. Talk about a snake that eats his tail...

It's very similar to the US housing market, which is frozen with the fewest homes exchanging hands in at least 30 years.

Sellers don't want to sell because most of them are sitting on less than 3% mortgage rate. If they sell and buy a new home now, they'll have to pay 7%.

Buyers don't want to buy because of the 7% mortgage rate and the drastically higher housing prices since covid.

I think the job market is very similar to the housing market. People don't want to leave because no one is hiring. New people can't get hired because no one is leaving.

For the job market, there is a solution, pay more and they will come to you. It's just now it's more difficult to make the case because companies have completely eroded the trust to them, aka you cannot lure one with the prospect of career growth, as you will likely lay them off in 1 to 2 years.

Masks have fallen, it's pure barbarism now. Enjoy.

The solution is lower interest rates - for both markets.

nah artificially low rates is how we got here in the first place.

it's like a junkie who is dope sick being desperate for more dope. that eases the pain in the short term but doesn't fix the problem -- real adjustments need to happen.

If the goal is to thaw the housing market and job market, then lower interest rates is basically the only lever.

If your goal is to not to have a frozen market in the future, then you can do what you said.

Depends on what goal you want to achieve.

Lowering interest rates will push house prices up even further and stoke inflation.

Employers are afraid to take new hires in unprecedented and unpredictable times. It's not going to get better until the daily news becomes boring again.

I think what makes this better is the emergence of new competitive business areas. E.g. AI companies are fighting for talent because they want to grow fast and beat the competition. Established companies sitting on a revenue stream and piles of cash without a good idea of where to go don't need more people. It's companies chasing growth that hire like there's no tomorrow.

> AI companies are fighting for talent

and then there are Montreal AI companies with job listings of 75K CAD ( 52K USD )

Job market is dead in Montreal

Employers too choosy. It's like everything else in the post-2010s economy: you have to be really talented to get ahead'; otherwise you are stuck or unemployed or menial jobs.

I’m sure some of that is delaying: by having such high standards, they don’t have to go through the risk of actually hiring someone.

they can afford to be. we used to get 1600+ apps in a week -- and that was 2013!

now with AI and a global marketplace -- and remote work being a thing -- the pool is deeper and cheaper.

burn an extra 3+ months and you can find the highly ("highly") skilled worker willing to take 70k to code some new stack. they may be in Croatia or Indonesia, but hey Teams works w/ different timezones...

As a software dev should I even bother switching jobs? I really can’t stand my current one, but articles like this and ones about AI are pretty demotivating.

You do you. If you can't stand your current job then look for a new one while doing your best at the current one. There are jobs out there and it's much easier to find a job while you have a job. Are you learning? Can you pivot a bit with your current employer to do something more interesting? Are you paid well?

Ignore the articles. In the worst times of the dot com bubble burst you could still find interesting jobs. The aggregate is the aggregate and you are you. These are somewhat weird times but the companies are piling in money and will need to find ways to put it to work. AI not taking our jobs any time soon.

I find your second sentence very difficult to pull off in practice, if you have any sort of responsibility (e.g. kids). Modern interviews seem to assume you have a lot of time to dedicate to prep.

In the old days, one could prep while on severance. But those seem to be becoming. Less generous and in some cases being skimped on through shenanigans.

Don't prep by doing leetcode. Skip leetcode places and places that expect multi-hour homework assignments as part of the interview process. Doing so narrows your options, but does not eliminate all openings. (In fact, I consider both leetcode and homework assignments to be negative signals about the company, or at least the team, so this can be a net win.)

I don't want to spread fear but the market is very bad. Worst then people realize or want to admit. And it could very much be that we haven't seen the worst of it yet.

People are trying to minimize it with comparisons to the dotcom crash or 200X market crash but the circumstances now are unique and no one knows the future.

You can try to send out some resumes and see where they go but unless you have strong pedigree, high level senior, or connections expect to be disappointed.

Europe is hiring: https://europa.eu/eures/portal/jv-se/home

And companies in Europe still embrace home office often even in foreign countries: https://euremotejobs.com/

>Europe is hiring:

On paper yeah but everyone I know who's applying to jobs is getting instant rejections before getting to the interview stage. Was also my experience a few months ago. The key word everywhere are "cost reduction" and layoffs and outsourcing are the norm.

>And companies in Europe still embrace home office often even in foreign countries

That's far from the norm. Most jobs (at least where I live) are in-office or hybrid. Full remote is super rare now. And fully remote from another country is usually B-2-B freelancing contracts which is not legal for one customer in all EU countries since it's considered dodging employment taxes.

Looking around me in Germany, I would say that we're out of the gutter at best.

My relocation consultant friends said that hiring has picked up again after their slowest year in business.

At some point it felt as if half of my friends were unemployed. Some of them had their 12 months of unemployment insurance run out, or their 6-month residence permit extension after losing their job. Now a few of them found jobs, but it took them a while and interviewing was far more difficult than before.

This is just anecdata, but it feels like if something recovered from the bottom, it was in the last two months at best.

Not really. Searching "staff software" there yields 4 jobs, and the datadog one is lingering on Linkedin for 3+ months already.

i am scanning since September... in January there was some uptick, but February is going nuts, especially last 2 weeks, nearing zero.

Here some stats of my search (around staff, principal, CTO, tech.lead, ..):

   month: maybe >applied +-interview -rejects ..the rest did not respond
   2024.8:  15 >10 +-1 -3
   2024.9:  35 >15 +-2 -5
   2024.10: 45 >25 +-2 -8
   2024.11: 50 >30 +-6 -6
   2024.12: 60 >25 +-3 -4
   2025.01: 80 >40 +-5 -20
   2025.02: 45 >25 +-0 -8

   ~~where-approximately~~:
   local-local:   5%      where i live
   local-onsite:  25%     elsewhere in same country
   local-remote:  20%
   abroad-onsite: 30%
   abroad-remote: 20%

   ~~source-listing~~:
   linkedin: 40%
   news.ycombinator: 30%
   local-job-boards: 26%
   python.org: 1%

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/the-job-market-is-froz...

They are right about the tariff threats, but orange man is quick to roll those back.

Otherwise, it is hilarious to blame orange man for the current malaise. Biden provoked and escalated the Ukraine proxy war, with detrimental effects on energy prices and the world economy.

Trump seemingly tries to shut down that conflict, which would be a major boost to the world economy. Whether he'll go through with that against the powerful political interest groups is another question.

Trump is just completely ignoring the conflict. All negotiations in Riad were about normalising US-Russia relationship. Ukraine was barely mentioned.

US is now buying mines and land from Ukraine for bargain price. Whatever Russia or Ukraine controls those mines in 10 years, does not really matter to US government! They will get ownership, profits and resources either way!

Yeah definitely something odd in the air. Also seeing a renewed offshoring push

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