Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?
economist.com
economist.com
After I got laid off in late 2023 I had a devil of a time finding work (despite having AI experience) to the point my unemployment ran out -
And I was 20 years as a dev and tech lead and full stack, (never had trouble finding work) including stints as a leading EM and CTO, I’ve been an industry award winning innovation lead,a digital studio director, switching tech stacks and cloud certs all my career..mentoring juniors and doing podcasts and writing white papers etc, but peanuts - nothing
Getting ghosted by 25 year olds in interviews and doing rounds and rounds and leetcode and all that but no success- for example I had a 7 round interview with NBCUniversal in 2023 and then got ghosted (I probably doged a bullet since they had subsequent layoffs)
a 12 month stint with nothing - we lost our savings as my wife got laid off too
Since then I pivoted to AI and Gen AI startups- joining incubators and finally got some work or at least cofounded some AI startups- now money is tight and I dont have health insurance but at least I have a job… it sucks as a over 45 year old as I have so much experience but no one cares.. still dont have much grey hair so I can pass for 40 to get noticed
No one stable is hiring or your resume just goes to a dead letter queue or is lost in ether or lost amid all the ai generated resumes out there - young ML and PHds and people under 40 seem to be getting work in Gen AI but thats about it
networking is the only game left and most good recruiters I know got laid off too
At least I’ve built up production experience in agents and context engineering RL, pytorch, langchain/LangGraph, RAG, KGa, etc python, BAML, LLM and LLMops to add to my years of full stack work
Ideally I want a job outside my wheelhouse to learn and move forward, but it seems like no one these days is interested in any sort of training.
There have been two gigs I was really excited about that seemed more-or-less exactly what I have spent the past decade doing and they've BOTH actually replied that they didn't think my skills were a good fit. I genuinely have zero idea what you're looking for if the literal perfect fit isn't it.
Before COVID I would regularly apply for jobs, almost always get them, and decline largely to keep my interview skills fresh.
This last year of looking has been the total opposite. I've applied for umpteen places, and gotten a little bit of email back and forth, and a single interview (it's in a couple days, wish me luck).
The simple answer is that they probably had no intention of hiring you, or anybody, in the first place.
The amount of fake job listings is absurd.
So a LOT of businesses are now in the position that they have to raise prices significantly into the worst market in decades. So they'll get significantly less revenue and they'll have to go into overdrive on saving money. That means no hiring, layoffs, price hikes, shrinkflation, ... the whole thing. They have to do a lot less with a lot less.
How does management respond to this? Well, management generally isn't competent. Their only job is to negotiate, and now that will really be put to the test. The smarter ones know that negotiation doesn't even matter under these circumstances (since it's a fixed pie being divided: someone has to lose). So they're maximizing their runway and getting out. And first, of course, they lie. They tell people even inside companies that they're hiring, even to the point of having interviews. They post job postings, because that's part of doing covert layoffs: they replace full time employees by temporary ones, even interns. They wait with price hikes until they're through inventory. They notice they've signed long-term contracts with Walmart that they cannot fulfill. And so on. So they lie to maintain their reputation for after the crisis (so on their next interview they can believably claim "I could have saved the company, but I found a better opportunity ...").
So I bet we'll be seeing a LOT of managers, especially higher up, suddenly decide they need to find a new job, and when it turns out that doesn't work, take a 2-3 year excuse to take a break.
As for replacing these people with AI: they're not spending ... and AI is expensive. Sure there's startups using AI, but larger companies are just firing people and not replacing them. Certainly they don't see the current period as a good time to change ... anything.
Governments should be "countering the crisis" and hire, according to economics textbooks, and increase social spending with the savings from the decade past ... except ... there are no savings from the decade past. So governments are firing, laying off, saving on healthcare, and so on and so forth. The US obviously has everyone's attention but the UK is doing the same (frankly, worse) and so is the EU.
Trump will be the most desperate manager of all, doing anything and everything he can to delay this from happening until the midterm elections in November, like lowering interest rates. But the thing everyone needs to remember about interest rates: they only lower for a good reason. The problem for Trump is ... either he delays this to beyond November or he becomes a "lame-duck" president, unable to do anything.
Namely, where the President does things unconstitutionally and illegally, like creating new taxes on Americans, refusing to execute laws saying money must be spent achieving a goal, ordering the persecution of opponents, etc.
Meanwhile, the new conservative majority of the Supreme Court refuses to act claiming impeachment is literally the only remedy, and a small minority of Republican legislators prevent impeachment from occurring.
All of silicon valley is playing a stupid bubble game.
Mandating something like a minimum of 40:1 interviews to extended offers should correct for at least the worst offenses.
And it's not just the ATS doing this -- oooodles of goobers who are nowhere near qualified are using AI and slamming the hiring pipelines. I'm already leaning on the personal networks because of that, anyway, but Parent Poster's idea just means I push for that explicitly instead of informally.
See also: layoffs.fyi -- the market is just SATURATED with quality talent
Patrick Boyle : AI and the Death of the Career Ladder (Nov 29, 2025) - https://youtu.be/FsfgbTBIP6M?si=KYd8fkX8lrigGVmT&t=610
> In the graduate job market, the "goods" are job applications. When employers are flooded with thousands of AI-generated, indistinguishable cover letters, they lose the ability to identify the high-quality candidates who invested time and effort. The signal is drowned out by noise. Just as buyers in Akerlof's market stopped buying used cars, employers are stopping the open hiring process. They retreat to offline networks and nepotism to find people they feel they can trust. The issue is that if everyone sounds perfect on paper, the only signal left is a personal introduction.
he cited a bunch of studies but didn't give links tho
No one has the resources left to pay for it, that's the thing. Clients are cutting budgets because no one is buying their stuff, so everyone is looking for seniors and above only, and replacing juniors/intermediates with AI.
Trickle-down ideology is now beginning to eat itself, the ouroboros is complete - turns out, eventually the entire economy will crash down on itself when people can't afford things. Even Henry Ford already knew this...
Record profits reported by tech companies says the opposite. Money are there, but no will to spend them on people.
We had multiple layoffs recently so parent company could report a billion USD in quarterly profits.
And you buy things/services from these major tech companies, but in return they buy nothing from you.
The circular stream that was "supposed to be" capitalism is broken.
Pray that Darth Trump alters it no further
Maybe someone on a visa that can't leave and will take peanuts.
Amazon had a whole paper about how bringing migrants and diversity makes unionization less likely and successful. It's part of the point.
Also it's not just the US. Here in Europe it's the same. Hell the government spent it's money trough the employers org training Moroccans to become programmers to then bring em in. I knew a fair few programmers who believe this is all just for low skill low paying jobs as if paying better wages for those is impossible and as if those deserve to be undercut. The weird thing is how this kind of plainly rightwing economic rhetoric is often masquerading as left wing.
it's really, really easy to say that applicants don't meet the requirements, since hiring is sooo subjective. "none of the applicants had 8 years and 2 months experience in this company working on this team, so they won't be able to perform the duties".
or, if they do have a flood of qualified applicants (the point of the website), they can simply not go forward with PERM at this time for their selected candidate. PERM roles aren't new jobs in the sense that the employer is "down" one employee if they don't fill it. PERM roles are simply a status change for an existing employee.
Well, wait, isn't this just karma in action, then? Sounds like you deliberately wasted a lot of other peoples' valuable time.
Ie its a race to the bottom - there is no gold standard for a productive software engineer who is transferable to another company that really people trust
Name and shame, this should be the norm. People are too shy on this subject. Thank you.
You need to maximise your earnings during your 30s and 40s to be able to just do contracting, etc. then.
This is the natural consequence of marketing and fundraising completely destroying engineering. It's not about real things anymore. It's about image. It's an industry of carnival barkers turning everything it touches to shit.
Once you hit 40s just get the botox anyway. Looks better. Only lasts 3 months or so. Good for a few rounds of interviews.
Anyways, I am in my 40s- I am an amateur strength athlete and eat healthy and already look almost inappropriately healthy and youthful for a sedentary job- enough so that I feel sometimes I’m not taken as seriously because I don’t look like a stereotypical elder nerd.
I hire software engineers, and given all of the discrimination in the field, my willingness to hire women, minorities, and older people gives me a substantial advantage over those I am competing against that have discriminatory hiring practices. Although I'm not selecting for discriminated against groups, in practice I hire almost exclusively from them, because there are a surplus of extremely qualified people in those demographics that are getting rejected from everywhere else. I'm sure there are a ton of competent young white men in software engineering, but they're never among my top applicants, presumably because they've already been hired elsewhere.
This widespread discrimination pre-loads the applicant pool, such that the effect is enormous: you are getting substantially inferior employees if you have discriminatory hiring practices, because so many others do to, so your "preferred demographic" is already depleted of competent applicants.
He has an engineering degree from one of the top 5 engineering colleges in India, a Master's from one of the top 5 engineering schools in the US. He built some of the systems that form the foundation of the entire call center industry.
And now he pivoted to GenAI and has dozens of very impressive public projects including some heavily starred open source repos
And yet...nothing.
Ageism in the tech industry has never been worse
So yes, ageism is real. I suppose the company gets away with it by saying they look for candidates with 3-10 years of experience?
At that stage, I think I would pass Leetcode with 2-3 months of practice, and I don't mind putting the work if this is what it takes. I'm just not sure I'd be given the chance.
Linus Torovalds is 55 - so he’s too old right? Hes about dad age for most software engineer teams in FAANG and startups…
Software engineering team culture is young and male skewed for years-
Doesn't help that I've tried to specialize for quite a while but simply can't stay around long enough without layoffs happening. Hard to be a domain expert when companies let you go ever 3 years. T shaped generalist it is, then.
I was a laid off in the beginning of the year from my remote job, landed several interviews, and I found a new job in <2 months. My resume is less impressive than yours, ~10 years of experience.
I was able to land interviews with some remote companies. I used to work at Shopify, a got some interviews at Ruby shops from that.
Some possibilities:
1. Ageism, this is a distinct possibility.
2. You held very senior positions. I think a lot of people don't like hiring people that were more senior than them. So that CTO is being held as a negative. They are not saying "Hey I get the experience of an EM and a CTO in a Senior Engineer for a bargain salary", they are worried you will overshadow them. This is sub optimal behavior for companies.
3. Talking to people I think non-tech markets look like they are doing fine. People I know in Rochester, Syracuse, and Cleveland aren't having issues getting jobs. I think the huge layoffs in big tech have left a big supply in tech cities to less demand.
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Not only is there the overshadow worry, but there's the overqualified for the position.
You were CTO once, and now you're a IC again... are you looking for a CTO position still?
I had an experience (post dot com crash) where the team hired a senior engineer... who left the team within a year to be an engineering manager somewhere else in the company and our team was back to interviewing for the position again.
From our team's perspective we wasted the time interviewing and onboarding a person when they job-hopped (even within the company) in under a year. Despite being qualified as a senior engineer it wasn't what they wanted to do.
To that end, overly qualified candidates are similarly risky to hire as under qualified ones.
I've also been in situations where someone in a senior or management position is hired with previous Big Tech or startup experience and tries to make the regional retail company's internals into a Big Tech engineering department which ended poorly for everyone involved.
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To your third point, the desire to stay on the coasts and around Big Tech companies is also a thing. Being willing to move to and within the midwestern states (some companies have return to office... others don't want to create a tax nexus in another state - if you don't hire anyone in California or Colorado you don't have to follow those laws... so hire everyone in one state and only deal with one state's payroll tax and insurance options).
Same reason I struggled to get a job at McD's or Home Depot years ago when laid off. They knew I'd be gone ASAP and that I probably wouldn't eat shit the way the local rube demographic would. These are crappy service jobs but they still want you to stick it out for at least 6-12 months.
My career started in the south and then we moved to Seattle - it feels like everyone is laid off in Seattle - I could probably find something in the south again
i've noticed that folks who want to work remote having a tougher time if they're looking for tech jobs. makes sense if you look for jobs at a local non-tech company, you might have better luck.
generally seems like remote jobs have the most competition so if you can find jobs localized to your market, you will have more luck there.
Still very very hard to get noticed
Or good investment planning. I only recently built up savings after spending my entire career maxing out 401ks. If I was laid off, I'd only have like 6 months or so of savings before I run out despite having a coastFIRE/leanFIRE NW.
Yes, there are hardship withdraws from 401ks, but the older you get, the more retirement account means retirement account. Meaning, it becomes more clear that the money in that account needs to be left alone until things get dire. You're not going to be more employable in 20 years.
Having a great, timeless linkedin profile picture helps too.
I use "old" for shock value here while being totally in the camp that companies would do well to find ways to use older, more experienced talent at a lower cost than "normal". (Even after I have run into "older" as inflexible and a pain to work with.)
But there is also another problem in many of these reports: Older and still applying by sending resumes in response for job postings! If you are older you should have a network you can use. If they find nothing for you - or don't care to talk to you, then THAT is the better signal. And still not necessarily a signal about the job market.
You only cultivate a regional network if you live in the same spot for years - i moved from the south to Seattle - Im not moving back to the South- so my network is mostly useless
I have for example a network with OpenAI, Google and Anthropic - all it got me was getting to the team match stage with Google followed by denial after almost 6 months in the interview process
As for OpenAI and Anthropic you need to have success in the AI startup world+network+ be young (old is only allowed id you have massive career success eg VP at Google or Amazon)
Outside of the unique circumstances of covid, we've never had, to my knowledge, a notable downturn when social media, and all the chatter it generates, has been so prominent or mass engaged. How much of it is just internet noise vs canary in the coal mine stuff. Who knows? But curious to find out in coming months/year
The numbers we do have show significantly worse jobs numbers compared to prior years.
We might get data again, maybe not, but the US government has had an internal revolution, and it's doubtful we will have data as good as in the past, and it's quite likely that any bad news will be deeply buried.
I see that Tokyo stock markets are way down today, that's probably what's driving lower BTC?
Is this saying something more about the relative expectation of compensation bands?
New grads are unlikely to have a comparable benchmark.
People who've worked in Big Tech and finding themselves applying to regular companies where the revenue per employee is in the $200k range are likely going to have difficulty adjusting to such.
I work in the public sector and make very low six digits. Others I know have compensation that is 3x or 4x what I make while working in technology industries.
If both I and the people I chat with were to find themselves suddenly out of a job, I suspect I'd find an acceptable job elsewhere more easily than they would because anything I did would be a pay raise while anything they took would be a pay cut. This in turn translates to that I would be the less risky candidate (that I wouldn't be looking for a new position that would pay more within the year)... and thus I believe not only would I be more likely to accept the job I would also be more likely to be extended the position.
Browsing reddit there are a lot of people on cscareerquestions (and similar) who have the mindset of FAANG or bust as a new grad. That they wouldn't even consider working at a company like Little Cesar's or Home Depot despite those companies having open positions.
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Furthermore, this gets into a lemon market situation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons ). Where it becomes harder to distinguish a good candidate for a poor one and that can only be found out after someone is hired, the companies that have people are more afraid of hiring a lemon than so don't hire anyone. This further depresses the market for the highly skilled candidates. Additionally, people who are skilled are less likely to look for a new job because the market is depressed and they're not as likely to get a good position afterwards.
I just want to survive and I can do barely that. If you want a reference: I'm a single male who went from 160k salary to nothing in the last half of 2023. My necessary expenses were 3k a month (70% of that being rent).
Since then I lived in 2024 off of 50/hr freelance @ 15 hours a week. or... 3000/month. You see the issue here. Savings got obliterated, credit built up. But I figured I'd pay it off quickly if I just got any job to supplement the freelance work. not a 160k job per se. I could have found some local 60k IT role and been just fine (if a bit overworked with two different jobs).
In 2025, after a year of circuses in the job market I settled on a 20/hr 20 hour role to supplement the freelance work. So things are "stable" now... as long as I don't get sick, or the car doesn't break down, or a variety of other life factors (spoilers: I did in fact get sick. Which lead to me finding the 2nd part time work).
Like I said, I just want to survive. As is, I'm working for a third or so of my old salary with zero benefits and much more stress.
Salary-wise, I'm making less than I did when I lived in California in '09 (and that's salary - stocks were a nice bit more and public sector doesn't exactly have an ESPP).
It may be necessary to move to get a job that pays $80k a year with 100% in the office expectations. Yes, it sucks. It's hard. Finding a job in '09 was not fun and I expect that similar conditions are to be found today. However, there are jobs out there when one considers what would be D tier companies and presents themself as someone isn't going to leave in a year for a higher salary somewhere else (before the implicit ROI of onboarding has been paid off). With the prevalence of job hopping and the "this resume does not match the applicant" issues, companies have become very risk adverse.
csomar: Also people who can’t find a job tend to be more vocal than the rest.
fragmede: Are they perhaps more vocal because they have *a lot of time on their hands?* (emphasis mine)
me: You mean spending all their time looking for a new job, applying for various benefits, doing side work as much as they can, at pay far lower than they're used to so it takes more hours of gig work to reach equilibrium?
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So, what I was responding to was the implication that unemployed or under-employed means that you've got a whole lot of free time, which can absolutely, positively be the opposite of true.
If one had a job that previously made end's meet and now all they've got is gig work, they're probably filling ALL of their time just to survive, and are probably still coming up short. That's what I meant.
I work in games and have the occasional slump. But this time is much different. all staffind agencies for temp work in my city pretty much said there's nothing out there. my local area is pretty much a bunch of fractional janitorial roles and that's it.
And yes I believe this time it's going to be different. I believe that if the economy dumps again, we are really going to see more hot wars. It is different from 2001, and different from 2008. We have kicked the can for almost 20 years and I kudos the policy makers who managed to achieve this.
Cause garbage in, gets garbage out. With AI models being all the more rage in the coming years, unexperienced hires will prove many times more costly. (10x garbage with agents).
So companies are going to concentrate their worker base even more with experienced folks. They need fewer of them. Yes. But quality matters more than ever.
I really feel bad for the new graduates. For no fault of their own, the bar went up so high. Unless they’re a child prodigy doing some coding projects on the side since the age of 10 - no one will hire them. So how will they ever gain the experience they need?
Maybe, just maybe, we’ll see a reinvention of coding schools - that will now focus on fundamental and industry knowledge - imparted by other veterans, instead of teaching applied skills.
But yeah, new graduates is going to suffer anyway.
And I'm scared of the collapse of the existing world order. Maybe we won't see a turn around for many years if it does collapse -- and we are already seeing many cracks on it.
Old staff will be exited. Especially senior and mid level management.
If you lose your job, you won't get the same comp again. The days of $500K TC are long behind us.
It's the era of downsizing and outsourcing while blaming AI.
None of this has anything to do with AI. That's just a scapegoat.
Google and Amazon are culling entire US teams and rebuilding them in Asia where the cost of labor is significantly lower.
The best thing ICs can do is fight for big tech monopolies to be broken up. (Call your reps leading up to the midterms.) If several members of the Mag 7 are broken up into smaller companies, that'll inject tons of energy back into the ecosystem and enable the wheels of competition and employment.
Bonus - if big conglomerates are fighting to pick up the pieces of a Ma Bell style dismantlement, they won't have time to manage teams 12 hours away.
Nothing against our colleagues in Asia. They're brilliant. But American companies built with American labor shouldn't shut us out in the cold while they reach record profits and continue to hollow out entirely new industries simply by outstretching their arms.
a) getting really good at clarifying requirements
b) learning quickly, so their work quality is eventually higher than Cursor can work out in one shot.
This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas: when the bottleneck is communication + taste, not raw implementation cycles, you'd rather have a small local team. And it's a pressure for high TC, because individuals now have much more leverage, although they need to master more skills to take advantage.
I'm genuinely curious.
I've heard this argued the other way too. Seen it firsthand.
Fwiw, we've had good engineers switch to vibe coding and it's ruined their output.
From really solid systems to unmaintainable flocks of seagulls - nested if statements ten levels deep with no thought or care. From good engineers that are just dialing it in now.
We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products.
I use to need myself to lead the project, customer management, design work and some development. I would add usually another developer to do some of the grunt work coding and usually a cloud architect to take care of infrastructure as code, security, etc.
Not that I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to do it all myself, I just didn’t have time. GenAI can definitely do CloudFormation, Terraform or the AWS CDK (ie using a high level language like Typescript instead of Yaml) and can do the code where I really don’t need two other resources or deal with the detailed requirements and coordination.
Before the pearl clutching starts about my not knowing how to code without AI. I’ve been coding consistently since 1986 when I was a hobbyist assembly language coder.
> We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products.
It seems to be working…
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2E...
GenAI does not exist yet.
most people (read: MOST) working at X corp aren't going to be using AI to accelerate their work, they are going to "phone it in" like you said or buy themselves more time to do other stuff. i think with the onslaught of vibe and slop most people don't have a vested interest to go above and beyond to ensure quality as long as it works, even experienced devs. that's honestly probably what i'd be tempted to do.
where we see the most exponential gains will be people who are paid enough to care, smaller teams that have a direct vested interest in long term success (founding teams, etc.) or people paid to just clean up a mess.
hiring and the landscape will be super interesting to see in the next year or so. probably team structure will change drastically as well.
That was the bottleneck in the industry when it was in growth phase, it's a mature sector now and it's all about efficiency and profit now. Speed to market and product iteration speed isn't the most important thing anymore, there's not a lot of innovation taking place. Outside the actual novel AI specific companies out there, of course, there are a few other spots of growth and exceptional companies but largely the kings have been crowned.
Many juniors can't even meet with a human interviewer. There's no point maximizing for interviews that never come. That's the issue.
>This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas:
This seems to agree with the issue. a team of 100 becomes a team of 5 locals and 95 outsourced work. Maybe those 5 managers are better off, but we're still reducing the local workforce by 95%.
And I doubt the conditions of the remaining 5 are better than pre-outsourcing. You can't out-compensate burnout and QoL. Gen Z in particular seems to really be pushing against this mentality, so this strategy is limited in time even if it's working on Gen X/Millenials.
Junior engineers, i.e. people who have already been hired, can indeed fight back by getting really good at their jobs.
But you're right, it doesn't help you get hired if you can't even get an interview.
Having in couple hours unannounced meeting. My boss told me over private channel, that he just got fired. It’s very interesting and the home mortgage does not really help today. I was really good. Better than expected and accomplished few optional projects. Looks like it didn’t help again.
This sounds almost word for word like The Onion’s classic: Secretary Of Labor Assures Nation There Still Plenty Of Jobs For Americans Willing To Outwork Robots
[0] https://theonion.com/secretary-of-labor-assures-nation-there...
To be fair, I meant something a little different -- something like -- learn how to be a robot priest who can get it to follow the desperate prayers of humans. And, like, how to unstick the robot arm when it accidentally punches through a wall. Etc.
Not that that is particularly comforting, in an existential sense. Maybe buys you a couple years till you have to pivot again.
Instead they should start learning how to shoot guns and build pipe bombs.
Given the vibes of the community here: I guess I'll look for a Mad Max mask (I'll ofc keep performing my civic duties, though).
If you're an entrepreneur or VC, you want big tech broken up because they can put serious price pressure on your exit.
Trillion dollar companies can easily spin up a team to copy you, with no incentive to stay alive. They can threaten you with all kinds of leverage - access to customers, patents, legislators. They can give you an ultimatum to sell for cheap, go to your competitor, etc.
Their scale and reach is additional unexpected gravity on your delta V.
Capitalism is supposed to be hard. It isn't supposed to support invasive species that can graze anywhere they please and kill ecosystems of diversity and innovation. These mega conglomerates can just throw themselves into markets using unrelated business unit profit and suffocate real companies.
Breaking up Google and Amazon would be good for everyone, perhaps even shareholders and ICs at those companies themselves if value is unlocked. Let alone all of the other companies and entrepreneurs in the market.
I do hope we have more genuine competitors fighting out there for breakupps. But it's hard to say these days.
Good, because this is an extremely toxic and damaging version of capitalism
Every company should be seeking to stand on its own, not become assimilated by the borg
What would banning stock buybacks accomplish? Companies can still return capital to shareholders in the form of dividends.
Stock buybacks are designed to let the shareholder see the same upside, but decide when to take the taxable event. Long term gains are also preferable to non-qualified dividends.
If anything, all the businesses with the most long term growth have done the most buybacks because they are paying the employees in stock, which employees gladly accept because they bet the business will have long term growth.
And executive compensation is not vested until business targets are met a few years in the future.
If I am bonused on earnings per share, and I have a button to increase earnings per share mechanically (without needing to increase revenue or decrease costs), why wouldn't I push that button?
Can you share some evidence around your statement? i.e. "There is no evidence to indicate buybacks reduce long term incentives for executives compared to dividends."
Examining fantastical scenarios is a waste of time. No one has that button, there is a whole board of directors that votes on these things, and again, compensation is staggered over various performance targets staggered over a number of years. The proxy reports detailing these are easily accessible with an online search.
> Can you share some evidence around your statement? i.e. "There is no evidence to indicate buybacks reduce long term incentives for executives compared to dividends."
Reality. The businesses that have the best long term performance over the previous decades are the ones that have done the most buybacks, hence buybacks do not cause short term-ism. It’s just as easy as a business cutting expenses now to juice dividends in the near term, we’ve seen it time and time again with businesses that sacrifice quality and innovation in the short term which eventually cede ground to new businesses.
So no source(s) then?
Your statement is just as un-evidenced as mine, so I'm uncertain why you seem to be so sure of your statement.
> Examining fantastical scenarios is a waste of time. No one has that button, there is a whole board of directors that votes on these things, and again, compensation is staggered over various performance targets staggered over a number of years. The proxy reports detailing these are easily accessible with an online search.
If I can reduce the number of shares, then I can increase EPS. Buybacks reduce the number of shares. The button clearly exists, and based on watching this happen it's clear that the button gets pressed pretty often.
This is mixing up cause and effect. If I have lots of free cash flow, then I can do buybacks which increases EPS. Lots of free cash flow is associated with better performance, which is perhaps why people believe this.
This is pretend boogie man. Banning buybacks will not automatically make that money flow into hiring or salaries. Companies are not charities, they exist to make a return. If hiring people and/or paying more will generate a larger return than giving the money back to shareholders either through buybacks or dividends, then companies will do that.
AI is now giving companies something to do with excess cash that could generate better returns (shareholders believe so) and buybacks are being pushed out as money goes elsewhere[1].
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/move-over-stock-buybacks-ai-1...
Nope, but that's what trends show us from the decades between its ban and bans being lifted. All I know is that companies flowing money back into itself and having executives shift in and out every few years clearly hasn't worked.
It's just one stepping stone to make sure companies have skin in the game again.
You can argue dividends but that means the money gets taxed quicker, so that also helps the people.
>AI is now giving companies something to do with excess cash that could generate better returns
Sure, for now. I think that problem will fix itself sooner than later, so I'm not too concerned about that. Trends come and go.
That would mean there's no incentive for companies to buy back stock instead of dividends.
My theory: We had a crazy bubble of hiring during zero rate interest. We are living through a nasty correction. AI is moving the needle too, but it’s mostly being used as a scapegoat to save face and explain away cleaning up failed ZRIP yolo plans that didn’t pan out.
We’ve also haven’t had a serious recession since 2009. It feels like it’s only a matter of time :(
"This time it's different."
20 years ago China and India had a nascent tech industry. Now they're booming.
Talented folks all over the world - Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere - are working on hard problems.
> We had a crazy bubble of hiring during zero rate interest.
We did. This has had a tremendous impact, no doubt. But by the same coin, ZIRP has had half a decade to unwind at this point. There's other stuff going on. Tariffs, continued inflation, etc.
We're not the only industry offshoring. Hollywood has moved a lionshare of production overseas in the last 4 years. Graphics design and marketing... It's being shipped out at volume.
I was told that once video conferencing got good and internet and infrastructure became better in other places, "this time it will be different."
I was told once universities in other countries started pumping out a pool of great candidates, expats who worked for FAANGs in the US would go home to found their own companies using that pool, and those companies would take over the world. "this time it's different."
I was told during covid once everyone was remote, why would people not just hire the cheapest remote workers going forward? "This time it's different."
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely have seen more and more offshoring over time, but there's a huge inertia behind the US tech industry that's hard to change. The VC / startup ecosystem and all of it's resources have huge Bay Area inertia - it mostly hasn't even spread to the rest of the US, let alone the rest of the world, despite the cost of living and constrained talent pool in the Bay Area. There's something about getting a bunch of people with the same mindset in one spot and having them know each other, socialize with each other, make friends and networks with each other that still matters. Founders tend to build off the people and connections they know and are connected with personally.
I'm hoping it will take long enough to change for me to finish my career. We'll see. This time really may be different :).
EDIT: p.s. Agree totally it's way to complex to tell what's actually happening. The _impact_ of the end of ZRIP, the rise of AI, major tax changes on R&D amortization, and US tariffs pretty much landed at the same time, so who knows?
On the other hand, in the 2020s, India, Israel, most Eastern European states, Ireland, Costa Rica, and a couple others have launched industrial promotion subsidizes for software offshoring - often providing US$10k-30k per head in federal and local subsidizes along with subsidized office space and real estate and tax windows.
That along with the internal frictions of async work largely being ironed out due to the COVID remote work period along with an exodus of mid-level managers on work visas during the early pandemic layoffs which had an outsized impact on Indian, Chinese, and Eastern European techies in the US made offshoring much more cost competitive and effective than it was 25 years ago.
Putting your head in the sand saying it's no big deal is honestly very stupid if you are hoping to maintain your career for the next 5-10 years in any white collar job.
And it's only going to get even more competitive now that the Indian government is enacting labor reform laws to align Indian labor laws with China's [0], making it even more cost effective for businesses to offshore by reducing regulatory overhead [1].
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-21/india-imp...
[1] - https://www.fortuneindia.com/business-news/tech-sector-expec...
This isn't true either in India or most of eastern europe.
Maybe you are confusing PLI for manufacturing? Altough even that's not on per head basis.
It is.
Wage arbitrage doesn't move the needle for offshoring once operating costs come to play, and outsourcing companies like EPAM, WITCH, and others juiced their margins by padding heavily, which further reduced the cost competitiveness of outsourcing without subsidies.
Czechia [0], individual Volvodships along with the federal government in Poland [1], state+center in India [2][3], Ireland [4], Romania [5], and others [6] dated list from KPMG which doesn't include state and local incentives) are all providing subsidies for GCCs now which include a payroll/per-head incentive depending on the amount spent in FDI, along with added additional subsidies per industry (eg. Life sciences GCCs get additional sets of subsidies versus a generic software GCC versus a VFX GCC).
The US has some of the weakest R&D tax incentives globally [6], with no payroll or financing incentives - only Vietnam, Philippines, Peru, and PNG are stingier, which has been a major role for why GCC expansion has been rapidly growing for the past few years.
That said, these incentives are primarily targeted at large employers becuase if you cannot provide at the minimum dozens of jobs, then the cost cannot be recouped over the long term by most subsidies. So mom-and-pop 3 person consultancies are ignored because in most cases they are parasites and large firms interested in opening large dedicated headcount offices are incentivized.
[0] - https://czechinvest.gov.cz/en/For-Investors/Investment-Incen...
[1] - https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmg/pl/pdf/services/for...
[2] - https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=93f90e07-581d...
[3] - https://inductusgcc.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/INDIAS-GC...
[4] - https://www.idaireland.fr/getmedia/4f70d494-8ec1-4e3d-b5a5-1...
[5] - https://kpmg.com/kpmg-us/content/dam/kpmg/pdf/2021/global-rd...
When I came into the job market the rule of thumb was it would take 1 month/10k of salary to find a new job. Over time that moved to 1 month/20k of salary or so. Even then, someone making a FAANG type salary should be prepared to look for a ~year for a new job matching that salary. Being able to bounce from job to job while getting big raises along the way was the exception, and ZIRP only exacerbated it.
Around five times since 2007.
It goes for other places, too. Is the US's financial strength of today its mean, or is it where the UK was pre-Suez Crisis? Where Japan was in the 80s?
If I was a new college grad I’d stay away from programming, but that’s been true for a while regardless of offshoring, the job market is just too soft until managers figure out they are killing their senior engineer pipeline and go back to investing in people.
What about the people already in industry? What’s our play?
Live under your means and save as much as possible? Already doing it.
Learn a new trade? Does not feel realistic while working a demanding full time job already, but if things get bad enough, sure.
Use the political apparatus to protect my employment? The system is built to prevent me from doing that. Fighting the system very well could put my employment at risk, which defeats the whole “get what I can while I still can” plan, if I assume doom and gloom on the horizon. I’m also unlikely to actually change anything by taking that risk, so the ROI is horrible.
Is there some other outcome or plan of action here I’m not seeing?
>Live under your means and save as much as possible?
which, while obvious, isn't being done by all of us.
A part of me gets angry that collective action was so unpopular thanks to the view that it dragged down those who could excel individually. Every time I see software people act powerless in front of these steamrolling, enormous tech giants that control every facet of our lives, I think about how much power we had - and are on the verge of giving up.
I also try to confront the future, rather than turn a blind eye to it. Can I be happy and find self-actualisation without this identity and financial status? That's a question everyone should think about regardless of what happens.
If you hit FIRE, awesome, you’re free from ever caring about offshoring or RTO or AI or whatever again.
If you don’t hit it, you’re sitting on a pile of money when a rainy day comes.
What makes you think people in Asia wouldn’t benefit from more competition in the market as well?
That said - I feel that advertisement based markets will always consolidate. There is too much of a benefit to having a single network which has the largest reach in terms of audience to show ads. This will always create incentives to consolidate over time.
Then again, why make the perfect the enemy of the good. Getting to more competition is a good step.
We've just hired a couple of graduates, with the expectation that they are going to take some time to grow.
What I'm seeing right now is a huge influx of candidates from large companies that have zero skill. I'm not exaggerating, they can't code anything. And it's not just AI, they started working before ChatGPT came out.
Others in the industry are seeing the same and it's quite likely that your resume is getting lost.
One practical advice for resume writers from me. PLEASE, just don't put stuff like "Improved the API responsiveness by 23.123897%". Unless it's a crazy number like 100x.
This has been true in software for decades. From the very first time I was senior enough in my career to start conducting interviews on the "employer" side of the table, we've seen a huge number of candidates who literally (in the literal meaning of literally) could not code. Like you would ask them to write a for loop, and they froze up and couldn't do it, or just started talking, hoping we would move onto more "behavioral" questions. This has been pretty much a constant in the software industry for as long as I've been in it.
I wouldn't be so sure about that, unless you mean $500K TC in 2019 dollars.
ZIRP might just come back, but it'll come with a higher price tag than the one from 2008.
We’re not going to convince anyone to keep hiring software developers.
I think we ought to be keeping people trained and employed but it seems we’re not on the winning side here.
I doubt things will recover to 2018 levels. Too many new software devs coming out each year, too much AI, too little big company growth once everyone already has an internet computer in their hands. The Wild West is over and now the digital economy has entered the boring phase.
We should be the last occupation to be replaced by machines.
Maybe I’m stupid, but I’m stupidly optimistic.
I never understood this sentiment. We don't have a massive manual weaving industry anymore, 95%+ of people used to be farmers in 1900. Tech comes and replaces humans, and the transition can be extremely painful especially for the people replaced, but ultimately it's better than keeping people artificially employed in obsolete jobs.
(I don't think SWE will be obsolete, but even in this case I'd rather switch careers)
At a large enough scale, most people don't really move on, their lives are wrecked and they just suffer through them.
What's a software developer in their 30s, 40s, and 50s supposed to re-skill into? Take on debt for the rest of their lives and re-skill into a profession (if they can even afford to take several years out of their lives to go back to school)? Into blue collar work along with the salary cut for which they might not have the physical capabilities for?
There's no social system for providing the necessities for living.
The other side of it is skill. Human societies have lost knowledge before. We've had to rediscover various aspects of metallurgy before. We could lose the ability to understand the technology we've made if we trust everything to the LLMs. There are already vibecoders who don't even be able to review the code that it generates for them because they're starting to lose the critical faculties and skills to understand it.
I tell the younger generation the same thing. Save, invest, max 401k, before you go off and party. Your older self will thank you.
I don't really have any advice for the present. We're in a storm, so do what you need to weather it. If there's any downtime you do have, use it to prepare for when (if?) the market bounces back:
1. Network. Nothing serious but just get to know people in your area. Keep in contact and they might one day have an in for some work.
2. work on personal projects. They aren't being looked at now, but it'll help you stand out when the market corrects itself.
3. consider some adjacent skillsets. At some point, if this last longer than any of us expect, it may be best to vouch for yourself. learning some graphic design can help you sell your own apps or make websites for others. Learning some art can help you sell games. embrace the generalization and be able to take small products from start to finih by youself. If you don't want to get completely out, you may want to start shaping your career around being your own boss instead of relying on others to employ you.
4. take care of your physical health. I don't know your body, and you may already be doing this. But it's always important to remind people (especially in a field like tech) that sometimes a breath of fresh air and 10 minutes of walking can make all the difference. Don't let yourself get cooped up.
Best of luck out there.
I can't do graphic design or UI design more generally but I absolutely love to develop software and work with tech. But I am trying to diversify because I don't know what else to do. As a result my resume puts me as a generalist which doesn't exactly help my chances... But eh. I am definitely trying to work with what I have, it's frustrating and really demotivating though.
Hustle culture.
Post college, it was about “what have you done?” vs “where did you go?” and so I demonstrated several projects I had done for the passion. A game engine. A graphics website community. Some novel networking libraries. A MUD. Finally, a database. By the time they got to the mud and database they were ringing me non-stop.
All of these projects done over a weekend or two while working other jobs to afford rent. Call centers are a personal level of hell.
Listening to Dave Ramsey on YT gets me amazed on how some people can be so irresponsible and accumulate debt on credit cards and cars they can't afford.
This is the entire problem. It's called job hunting, not job fishing. I.e. you should be seeking out specific exact positions that you know are worthwhile and tailoring yourself for them, not casting a net and hoping.
Hunting is still your better bet overall. figure out who has a need and position yourself to fill it. This also takes a lot more time to pull off than just sending 1000 resumes, and there is no guarantee. there is generally a mix of course, you start by casting a net to see what is there, and then when there is a potential bite you start tailoring your resume to that potential. Not all leads will result in something. Who you know is always important.
I like tech; my challenge now is finding a gig with interesting work and a good work-life balance and p75 pay. That, and knowing when I actually have enough net worth to have more freedom. The problem is you never think it's enough, but not because of greed, but because of fear.
At least you could have the decency to debate my comment instead of a feeble insult. My condolences.
Now I never get bored. Things have changed, but yeah, boredom used to be a real thing that people experienced no matter what their personality traits were.
Of course your job/boss matters. Some are worse than others.
When the work didn't suck and the product didn't suck.
Please, if you ever want any respect from anyone younger than you ever again in your entire life, do not say those words again.
I’m not old. Just wise.
I’m not avoiding the fact that the economy is fucked. I’m fully aware. It’s up to you how much you’re willing to continue to pay or what you’re willing to sacrifice. It sucks, but the only thing you can control is yourself.
I graduated 10 years ago and it’s a day and night difference. Whatever worked for me in 2015 will not work for a fresh grad today, the game is completely different.
I graduated 20 years ago and it was different when you graduated just as it is different now. Things change. Economies change. Life changes. The advice I give is simply because that’s the only thing you can change. You and your habits.
I’m all for revolution.
I’m all for socialism w/ a sprinkle of free market capitalism.
I’m all for the better good of all fellow humans.
I empathize with fresh graduates who were told there would be ample jobs in their fields when they graduate 4-6 years from when they started. I struggle to empathize with those who see there are no jobs and do nothing. Anything is better than nothing.
Why is it such a problem for you that people talk about it openly? Why the need to pretend that everyone can have this under control? It seems to me that your advice is just about making you feel better about the situation, about pretending to ourselves that all issues are individual failures, that the world is fair.
I do not see people who argue with you calling for revolution, I am seeing them trying to talk about objective state of the world. You seem to be rejecting that description, because it involves things you or them cant control.
I’m not blaming anyone or saying it’s anyone’s failure. I’m simply saying the only thing you can control is you and so it’s up to you to master your habits and desires so that you can afford a future you want.
> ’m simply saying the only thing you can control is you and so it’s up to you to master your habits and desires so that you can afford a future you want.
Nah, there is no possibility "future you want" in your advice. It is just about hiding the reality creating vague feeling that people can control things. Even if they cant.
What you are actually saying is that there is no hope for change. Everybody knows your advice wont lead to a change. Worst, if one believes to your advice, they will vote for politicians who created current situation. Because they are the ones constantly blaming individuals for result of policies they pushed for.
Still, people have agency. If one doesn't see it like that in relation to their material stance then there must be a lot of things that are simply disconsidered from the list of possible options, for whatever reason. Nobody said the world is fine as is and that the blame is somehow all on the ones that are in unsavory positions now. The world is not fine (and never was, for a lot of folks that almost nobody talkes about). It's winter time in this industry and the new hatchlings have their future in question. Yes, there are factors out of their control (like LLMs) that led to this winter, but there's also the colective decision for a lot of kids of pursuing these cushy well-paid office jobs that made things worse by oversaturating the market. Now, of course that, being saddled with student debt and heavily invested by an already acquired degree, to consider the long-term career prospects outside the industry seems like a non-starter, yet it may be exactly what the labor market (and younglings' individual well-being) needs. Such a decision is just of the same kind as the one that brought them here. That's agency on the individual level. And lastly, it's best for everyone to understand, internalize, and accept (the more the better) the fact that nobody else should be expected to step in and fix things for you. Yes, there are many people trying to make the world a better place (as there are many who don't care), there are also people in power that are even supposed to do the same, yet if they manage or not to make it better for you is not a given. That's, whenever it happens, just a bonus. The rest is up to you, the adult.
I think what would be useful for them is to have very concrete examples of what fields to pursue. I wish I knew myself.
You have two options. Continue to point fingers and complain and be broke, or start putting $100/mo in VOO and save what little money you have for your future?
I know it sucks. I know income inequality is huge. I know the only way out of this is to put in sweat equity. I know the only way to put food on the table is to have a second job at a gas station. I’ve been there. However, as much as you DON’T want to hear it - the only way out of your mess is by you working your way out of your mess.
> You have two options. Continue to point fingers and complain and be broke, or start putting $100/mo in VOO and save what little money you have for your future?
The imaginary person you're trying to give this advice to graduated from university eighteen months ago and has been living in their parents' house ever since, applying for jobs non-stop. Their income is $0 per month. They are entirely unable to apply your advice; applying your advice is something they aspire to.
It’s not a career. It’s just a job.
> the only way out of your mess is by you working your way out of your mess.
Third option is revolution. Could be violent, could be passive like not starting families, complaining on the internet, scrolling tiktok as long as the benefits and body allow, and suicide if necessary.
It is possible for too much of the benefits of working having too high of a likelihood of being captured by rent seekers to not make the work worth it. In old times, the lack of birth control made people have to work more due to needing to support kids, but if I didn’t have kids, I could get by with a much lower standard of living.
I'm pretty well off but my friends are in that siutation
Some folks I know died in those situations.
That is why it is so important to save and invest.
Just grow up. Bootstraps! I did it, why can't you?
Well first off, you didn't do it, you got fucked up the ass and asked for more. Your parents and their parents lived in an America where one person could own a home, multiple cars, and care for a large family. They lived in an America where layoffs did not exist, where shareholders were at the bottom of the totem pole, and where companies like GE prided themselves in how much money they gave to their employees.
We now live in an America where GE has been run into the ground, dragged through hell, revived, and then damned again, only for the demon that did it to be praised as a Capitalist God - a template, an alchemist of money, who could seemingly create value out of thin air.
Of course, nobody has stepped back and asked what "value" we're measuring. Not that it matters, because whatever you measure, GE don't got it.
You could have been better off, but you weren't. You're complacent enough, but baby this train goes downtown. There's no reversing course. However hard it was for you, it will only get harder.
Of course, this is big picture stuff. Small picture, can you do things to help your situation? Of course you can. But those things become harder, they become rarer, they become more elusive.
Just get a job and you'll be good! Oh wait no, that doesn't work anymore. Just go to college and you'll be good! No wait, that doesn't work either. Well, just own a home, that's the path to financial freedom! Um, well, actually no not that either. Well just invest in the stock market!
Yes, great idea! I wonder how long that will last! I wouldn't hold your breath.
I graduated right before the collapse in 2008, and I’ve spent the last 17 years hustling, scraping, and clawing to make, save, and invest every dollar I could. It wasn’t easy, and after a divorce and a recent layoff, it’s still not. Particularly in one of the most expensive cities in the world, with kids and child support.
I worry a lot about my kids and their future economic prospects. I don’t want them to suffer, but the reality is that suffering comes for all of us, and saving and investing has been good advice for millennia. Blaming others and refusing to take responsibility for your own life and predicament has never been good advice. I hope my kids have the strength of character to resist the learned helplessness you’re offering here.
I'm older than you and now doing fine AND able to save/invest but after multiple once-in-a-lifetime events that reset all of my progress each time, the last thing I need to hear from some out-of-touch old person is bullshit avocado toast pull yourself up by your bootstraps comments.
Both options require effort and discipline. If someone working two jobs can’t make rent, then who is to blame for it not working out? Society? The government? Your landlord? Who? Who do you be angry towards if not yourself?
It’s out of touch because they are out of touch. I was out of touch. We all go through this and realize this is it. This is all there is. This is life. Welcome to being fully grown.
As I’ve said before - I’m here for the revolution if that’s what it takes. I’ll be on the front. I’m not rich. I’m not a home owner. I just know there’s only one path carved and they’re at the bottom of the slide hoarding it, taxing us more for each body down.
Capitalism is a disease but it’s been that way for multiple millennia. Humans vs humans. Survival of the fittest. Stuff they don’t teach in private school. Only the school of hard knocks. So, again, who do we blame, if not ourselves? Why do we buy the boomer products? Why do we subscribe to the boomer media? Why do we put up with it?
And no one here said anything about avocado toast or pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. Sounds like you're just making assumptions and ranting against a strawman.
Serious question: if your kids were in the situation you're talking about, struggling to pay rent, and you couldn't help them financially, what advice would you give them? What would you hope they'd do? I'm genuinely curious.
You can't save your way out of rent being 70, 80+% of your paycheck. For my area, minimum wage is $18 and your best hope for rent is sharing a $3k 2 bedroom apartment. quick napkin math suggests $2400 take home pay and ~$1800 eaten up between the rent split, utilities, gas, and the most basic rice and beans diet of "groceries". Not even including potential health insurance or car notes or student loans.
If you don't have the fortune of a family who'd house you for free/dirt cheap then you don't have much to save. You're already sacrificing for the present.
There's no escape in the US from the problem. It's either California with weird complicated property tax laws that make no one sell, Texas with unlimited and disgusting urban sprawl, Florida with shoddy construction, or NYC with big headaches tied to strict building incentives for tax breaks.
The answer could be ugly - less regulation, but now you're going red and not blue, which is very much the opposite attitude that many pro urbanization folks tend to be.
I'm not sure, other than I think the issue is that it's not Not Enough Building. It's that we allow investors to buy everything up. In NYC this year, 40 percent of condo transactions were without financing contingency. Explain that one.
Yesterday my BIL threw a perfectly working tower PC in the recycling because he couldn't find anyone (not even a charity shop) to take it. Last time I was at e-waste I saw half a dozen 42 inch TVs that I'm willing to bet we're working.
However we were wealthy in one way: we had a stable home, and optimism. I may have had old clothes, one pair of worn shoes and a 4th-hand uncool bicycle, but there was no question of ever losing the roof over my head. And there was a future that looked like it was full of possibilities. "Stuff" was getting cheaper and more available. I remember our family being able to afford our first microwave oven. Our first VCR (1991). We didn't get rich, things got cheaper.
Today, it's like we're looking at the future as if we're already post-peak, and it's all downhill from here. There's tons of stuff around but nobody wants it. People have also lost the positive attitude, optimism. It'll get you through a lot of bad times. Years and years of shit. Lose optimism, and it's all bleak no matter how big your TV is.
If I could choose a safe to be reborn in, I'd take "our" poverty of the past over this.
Everyone is worried about AI for good reason but if he's the promise is true then we see significant productivity improvements.
The pie might be shared out worse than even today but there would be more pie.
We are in a period of deglobalisation, but also a period of reorganisation. Today's supply chain is less efficient than 2021s. We are materially poorer as a result. But after the dust settles, it will be a lot more efficient than it is right now. Even with no ai.
Potentially we are in a dip. Stuff for worse, but it can get better.
The optimism decline feels like it really started around 2001, and the downward curve has steadily continued ever since, down and down. Worst of all, it seems completely warranted, even if you try to look at it as objectively as possible, disabling news-headline-induced emotions as we're all prone to. The world has gotten too complex, everything too intertwined, making for an increasingly volatile and dangerous system.
And besides that major trend, it's also just many of the smaller things getting worse by the year - enshittification of both physical and digital goods, declining government services and so on.
401k max is $24,500. How much do you expect a person to earn to be able to max it out? And what percentile income is that at the bottom and top of the age range you consider “young”?
https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-by-age-calculator/
Tldr: you are telling almost every 20 to 30 year old to not party.
What they have to avoid is cashing it out when times get hard.
If you know for sure exactly how long you will live and how good your quality of life will be then the advice to max out early is probably good. However you don't know - average advice is good for average but if you are an outlier it isn't useful and you don't know. As such you need to compromise and part of that means you enjoy a little more now when you know you can, as opposed to a lot more in the future if you live that long. Exactly what they means is personal of course, but this conflict is why I would suggest a more modest retirement.
Besides, once you have a healthy 401k, you’ll realize there’s things you can do with it in the short term. Like borrow for a down payment. Use it for hospital bills. Funerals. Hardship withdrawals. Even a Roth has this. Saving vs spending will always be the story of the grasshopper and the ants.
I’m not telling you to forgo partying. I’m telling you to pay yourself first, before you do. Don’t max out a credit card for a trip. Don’t cover the table’s check when you only have $200. Be responsible, but still have fun.
Given rent, saving for house downpayment, student loan payments, auto loan payments, and possible childcare/healthcare costs, I don’t think we live in the same reality (based on income statistics). Perhaps you are only referring to doctors/software engineers/lawyers/IB/PE employees?
>I’m not telling you to forgo partying. I’m telling you to pay yourself first, before you do. Don’t max out a credit card for a trip. Don’t cover the table’s check when you only have $200. Be responsible, but still have fun.
This is very different than:
>Save, invest, max 401k, before you go off and party.
These things all come after savings, not before. If you can't afford them using post-saving money, then you need to get a better job, or a cheaper living conditions. Easier said than done, I totally agree, especially nowadays. But that's the mentality you need to really take saving seriously.
People still have the power. Always have. They just need a reason to wield it.
The old need a way to maintain a socioeconomic order where they can continue to get labor from the young, but demographics are going to make that harder and harder.
Why can't you just admit that millions of young people are being intentionally screwed out of what we consider to be a basic standard of living?
Saving for retirement doesn’t necessarily mean 401k but you can borrow from your 401k for down payment assistance so you really should be saving for your eventual retirement from day 1.
Don't forget too that inflation works for you! If you save and get in a nice house early and the STAY THERE (I can't emphasize enough how important this is - sometimes life forces you to move, but avoid it), your payments measured against inflation will go down - just put that difference into a 401k (that is don't do a cash out refinance along the way as so many do) and in 30 years the house is paid off and your have a great retirement account.
When you are in the early years the above plan looks impossible, but time is your friend.
In all honesty, when was the last time you tried to rent a place to live? My brother makes decent money in his mid-20's and _still_ wound up living out of his car for a couple months when his attempt to find something cheaper backfired.
Plans fail. Have backup plans. Attempting to min max has disadvantages too. My advice has always come from experience and never “this is what they say you should do”. I would not be so presumptuous.
In a couple years when things recover (or at least they find a job) it starts to be good advice. Even then I question max 401k - time works for the young and so a maxed 401k makes for too much money in retirement and not enough to enjoy now. Save for retirement yes, but max is too much when you are young - and if you keep saving will always be too much. Max 401k is good for the rich, or those who didn't start young and so their accounts are way behind.
Except the 401k is so tax advantaged that you are foolish to not use it as your basis for financial security. Pre-tax money + employer contributions mean 401k is far and away the fastest method of building up a significant chunk of capital to protect yourself from hardship. Yes there are penalties for early withdraw, but they come out far less than what you would alternately be able to build up with just post-tax savings from your paycheck.
So you read nothing about how graduates during 2008 pretty much had forever stunted careers?
They aren't put on the streets, but it's clear some very long term damage is being done to people simply as a matter of bad luck.
Myself included. Graduated in '08, had to work various minimum wage jobs in retail for several years because no one was hiring. I'm just now at a point in my career, nearing 40, where I should have been at 28.
Degree doesn't matter much when your only work experience is 5 years of working at Starbucks, and you barely have personal projects because you're too busy working 2 jobs to just to survive.
Those of us who suffered through that time period barely recovered, and many didn't recover at all. It shaped an entire generation.
it was a horrible period and I have many friends who are in the same boat especially those not in software
Perhaps true if you go east far enough, seems objectively wrong for the majority of the west though. Honest question, if you think this and it isn't just rage bait.. what data supports it? Scott Galloway disagrees and offers hard data, and goes as far as calling it intergenerational theft. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEJ4hkpQW8E
Much of the (American) millennials generation believes a story that they’re worse off. I feel it is a convenient story for people to tell themselves and blame someone else for their perceived losses. But I pulled up several articles supporting my claim with a quick search, even though the opposite narrative is more widespread.
Example article about how inflation adjusted net worth is higher for millennials than it was for boomers at the same age:
https://www.newsweek.com/millennials-financially-better-off-...
Galloway isn’t necessarily wrong in the individual data points he raises. But if you look at the sum of all of the factors - higher rents, more student debt, etc but also the positive things - the net worth in the end is higher for millennials. And remember this is inflation adjusted already.
Lots of research shows about a 8-10% gap, that only at very specific ages finally achieved parity.
The consequence of this is a difference in wealth building, economic security, and family planning for millions.
Most all else would have inflated or depreciated.
Remember you won't live forever (at least not to current medical knowledge, you can bet otherwise if you want), and you can't take it with you (according to most religions). Thus once you have retirement covered and emergency savings you should be spending everything you earn. You should have enough money left at the end of the month to afford the things you buy at the end of the month, but there is no point in any more, enjoy life with what you earn. (donating to charity counts as enjoying life!)
And even homes are now sieving into institutional buyers.
https://medium.com/newco/your-financial-shock-wealth-4845e6d...
Joe has a 300k house with 100k equity and 200k mortgage. He has 100k in stocks in a 401k. Net worth negative 100k.
Pete has $300 in his cheques account, and isn't eligible for loans or mortgage. Net worth positive $300
Obviously Joe is richer than Pete though.
Net worth = assets - liabilities
Yeah, because Joe’s net worth is $200,000 and Pete’s is $300
House equity = current value - mortgage balance
You subtracted the mortgage twice, so your math is off by $200,000.00
This is why middle class people often feel poor than those who are poor: they make more money and have more in total, but they also have large bills and if something happens those bills will catch up with them fast.
if you have 100K in equity and owe 200K on your mortgage, then you’re net -100K on your house
that combines with the 100K in the retirement account to produce a net worth of $0
Where is my mistake?
(Another way of thinking about equity, specifically, is it is the real estate contribution to net worth, because it is what is left when you subtract the real estate liability (mortgage) from the real estate asset (value of house). That's why you shouldn't subtract the mortgage from the equity: equity is what's left after you've already subtracted the mortgage.)
(Edit: Adjusted sign in first equation to subtract mortgage. It's probably more technically accurate to keep it as addition and consider the mortgage to be a negative value, but I believe it's more straightforward and intuitive for most people as it is now represented.)
However, there are certainly a lot of conflicting studies and data out there. And to be honest, it doesnt feel true given how much young people complain on the internet. Its hard to see which asserion is correct. It isnt necessarily correct just because one study says its so.
[Edit] also inflation is calculated based on average consumption. So you will notice that toys, clothing and electronic devices (TVs, cooking robots), all cheaper and cheaper (due to enshitiffication and quality decrease) count more for inflation than education, cars, housing and probably a lot of other stuff a 25-35 yo care more about.
A great recent example was the Australian decision to add capital gains on a primary residence as a profit (ie. negative expense) when calculating inflation. All of a sudden inflation was very reasonable despite the fact that established homeowners and their families were choosing between groceries and mortgage payments… but in terms of their net worth, YAY! They’re getting ahead!
They’re convinced they’ll time the next grift right. Who knows
The economy has been moving upward since 2013 - 12 years ago. What were you doing from 2013 to 2020?
I ask because I also graduated around ‘08. I’ve been a software developer since 2016. I’m currently a senior dev with almost a decade of experience.
There were really crappy years to start with, but I feel I’ve made up for it substantially.
My own parents graduated in the late 70s during a terrible economic recession.
It seems weathering economic recessions have been a tradition for several generations.
I still remember articles almost identical to the ones I see now; “this generation is screwed and there is no possible salvation.”
It’s getting old.
Though I wouldn't tell the rest what they should do. The guy I know had to live in MN for decades (where I met him) away from the rest of his friends and family - that is itself a large cost in lifestyle that I question if money makes up for.
The current VP is a stupid redneck hick from Appalachia who … you can Google him.
Point is, one way of responding to regional decline (Appalachia was once the wealthiest part of America) is to move.
What or who is the standard for where you “should have been at 28?”
https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology/article/77/4/78...
>> Across a generation’s life course, early-life advantages are magnified through disparate occupational and social trajectories that lead to wide late-life disparities in financial and health resources, in a process first termed by Crystal and Shea as one of “cumulative advantage and disadvantage” (CAD; Crystal, 1982, 1986, 2020; Crystal et al., 1992, 2017; Crystal & Shea, 1990b; Dannefer, 1987, 1988). Dannefer (1987) described the trend of increasing inequality over the life course as the “Matthew effect,” applying a biblical dictum first used by Merton (1968), stating that “to he who has much, more is given, and to he who has little, even that is taken.” This ongoing process has also been described as an “obdurate tendency” for increasing inequality over the life course (Dannefer, 2020).
https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy...
>Can you please provide a reference for the assertion you just made
>Sure, here it is: <link>
> 404, please double check
> I apologize for the mistake, I have double checked, here is the corrected link: <link>
> Still 404, please always double check a link by actually visiting and reading it
x5 before I gave up.
I looked at the statistics[1], and while you could argue new graduates have seen worse (recent grad unemployment is actually lower than much of the 2010s), you can also see that in contrast to previous periods where new grad unemployment is lower than all worker unemployment, this time around new grad unemployment is actually slightly higher. However if you look at the chart this wasn't a post pandemic phenomena. The gap has been closing since the back half of the 2010s, and doesn't show much of a spike after the release of chatgpt, so "AI" isn't a good explanation either.
[1] https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market
TL;DR Gen Z is "slightly better off" in pure financial status compared to older generations , even with inflation adjusted. But the distribution on what got cheaper overtime and what got more expensive is causing the true strain among Gen Z.
It also helps to explain a bit of a generation clash when you see how older generations can chastise the younger ones over what were "luxuriies" when they were that age. The entire market is flipped.
Of course you also need to look at underemployment too. Which CS is on the lower end of that. So you have to consider things like that even though there's a higher unemployment rate than performing arts (2x) there is far lower underemployment because people expect to get jobs in their field for CS.
There's more you need to look at too. It's not so easy and you shouldn't just use such a high level approximation if you want to make sense of the data.
Hiring lab has some more interesting information to like the number of postings. CS is way down from "prepandemic" levels, but unfortunately only goes to 2020 (hence the quotes).
However, engineers in developing countries will work half your wage, remote from their home, where that's a great salary where they live. When the average annual salary in India is the equivalent of $4,200 USD/year, there are a lot of talented engineers there that if they don't win the H1B lottery, will end up working for big tech remote.
If someone is trying to sell themselves as an undifferentiated developer in 2025 or later, it’s going to be an uphill battle unless you can lean on your network.
At 51, if my only differentiator is I can code, I’ve done something horribly wrong in my life.
Anecdotally, I found software development adjacent roles quickly when I was looking both last year and the year before.
In 2016, I knew I had to do something when my (step)son graduated in 2020 and my wife was willing to move anywhere the money took us.
It just so happened that a job fell into my lap at AWS working (full time) in the consulting department. I am no longer there. I now work at a third party consulting firm as a staff consultant specializing in app dev.
There's always a race to the bottom. I don't think it's a big leap to suggest that what's considered the "minimum viable product" has decreased over the years. It's also no secret that software is getting worse.
As to salaries, I think you forgot how things worked before. The reason companies like Google introduced free food and all the incentives was because increasing salaries was not a better way to attract better talent, since salaries were already high. So either now something has changed where better talent cares more about money or we're attracting talent that cares more about money. As in either the same people changed or we're attracting a different type of person. Personally, regardless of age, regardless of field, I've seen a strong correlation with the best people not caring as much about money. Once the salary is good then they care more about how interesting the work is or how they can reduce stress in their life. Money matters, but it has decreasing utility as it grows.
'Will we get more customers?' 'Will they be more likely to stay with us?' 'Are we screwing ourselves out of sales by offering to host a server for remote control on the PC connected to the tool, even though it's cool and we can implement it in a week?'
I'm more on the 'do it because it's cool' side and have had to be wrangled a couple times with such questions since what makes interesting work for myself often doesn't align with client needs or hurts sales, as stupid as it might be.
I agree with you completely. They can just keep giving me cost of living raises and respect my experience and opinions (not saying they always have to go along with them) and I will be the last person here if they shut the lights off.
I work in a consulting company where I lead projects and I have an almost obsessive commitment to seeing the customer happy within the constraints of our contract that I wouldn’t even think I was capable of earlier in my career.
I pay close to attention to my employer’s goals and strategies and stay aligned. I lurk in our sales Slack channel and care very much about how I can add revenue even though I know it wont make but a little difference in my comp.
FWIW: the other two companies I cared about deeply were startups where my opinion was respected and they gave me more autonomy than I could have ever expected. The first I was leading a project for their largest customer and the second a decade later I was just kind of thrown the reigns of our cloud architecture strategy even though I had no experience at the time.
I had to think about this. The three companies I’ve actually cared about were those that I had already “won” the organizational rat race within my definition of winning. The first I was leading their largest project only because near the end, they had laid everyone else off. “Winning” was staying employed until the market picked back up after 2009. The company went out of business late 2011. I stayed until the bitter end and then did a contract with the customer that I had been working with.
The second I was already the de facto cloud architect and I “threatened” my CTO that I would quit if they ever made me a team lead. I only got that because I volunteered for the initiatives and I stuck to it until I figured out what I was doing and did a lot of research. The company only had 60 people at its height including project managers, managers, QA, analysts, sales and developers.
The current company, I’m already at the top IC level and have the highest bill rate as a US based consultant. I was bought in at that level. I’ve repeatedly asked my manager what my goals should be a s he said basically - keep making the customers happy and bringing in money through being billable.
The others I was a cog in the wheel and would have had to play the politics game to get ahead. I’ve always sucked at that.
Someone joining now on the other hand, might have to resort to physical work at some point in the next ten years of things go south.
Most developers in the US don’t work for tech companies and will never make ovdd $200K inflation adjusted. Developer salary is very much bimodal
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal
If you are working for boring old enterprise companies like banks, airlines, insurance companies or even most YC funded companies, “senior” developers will top out at around $160K-$170K inflation adjusted in tier 2 cities.
I spent my pure developer career [1] in Atlanta GA. Well known companies based there like Home Depot, Delta, Coke, and GE Transportation are paying their top developers around what entry level developers getting in BigTech.
But choose your non west coast city and you will see the same.
(say: AMD, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Facebook)
The answer is about 10M, which is not that far from what I estimated, even without including Nvidia. Now add in house price appreciation.
There are plenty of people who have managed to do this, from fairly normal tech jobs.
Just magically turn 10x 100k into 10M!
You could have looked up the numbers for indices yourself, but here you go -
S&P500 -> ~4 million
NDXT (top 100 tech) -> ~14 million.
> just save 100k out of your 170k comp
Yes, that was my starting salary, and that's almost exactly what I saved.
This calculation assumes your salary is somewhat constant and maxed out as the person I was responding to claimed, but in my experience you can expect your tech salary to double every ~5-6 years.
NDXT went from ~2300 in 2015 to ~12500 in 2025. That's ~5.5x return. So even if you had your whole 1M saving in 2015, you'd only have 5.5M now. No idea how you get nearly 3x that?
And it's way worse if you take the actual scenario which is 100k added every year instead of starting with the 1M.
S&P500 is worse yet, at about 3.5x total return if you had the whole million at the start.
Realistically fooker's investment strategy into NDXT of 100k over 10 years would have produced around $2.5M depending on exact timing in the year and partitioning of that 100k. Way less than $15M nonsense. Also would have required extreme conviction alike the crypto types and completely counter how typically multi-million portfolios are managed (diversified).
Also, who needs 15M, at 5M net wealth there honestly is no reason to be working at a $200k/year job. You'll make way more after-tax income even assuming lousy 5% yearly return thru capital gains. Same story for 2.5M @ 10%.
If I had $5 million of investments outside of my home, would I work? Maybe? My job is far from stressful, I work from home, I “retired” my wife over 5 years ago when she was 44 eight years into our marriage so she could pursue her passions and we could travel a lot.
All of my friends still work so what could I possibly do with my free time that I don’t do now? The only restrictions that not working would lift is that we could more easily spend an extended amount of time outside of US time zones.
Yes though the propose is not to retire. There's better things to do with your life (IMO) than work a standard 9-5 job for some corporation once you've accumulated sufficient wealth to have financial independence.
> Even 5% is not conservative enough while you are in the withdrawal phase.
Assuming you spend 5% per year. 5M@5% is 250k, 200k+ after tax for CG + eligible divs. That's a lot of money to spend every year, more than most families get to earn thru their labor yearly. Can be secured against downturns with higher 4%+ bond allocations too. 5M is financial independence for vast majority of households. 2.5M can be as well for many if their baseline spend remains at 100k.
> All of my friends still work so what could I possibly do with my free time that I don’t do now?
Financial independence provides vast opportunities for those with ideas but lacking time. There's a reason most businesses are pursued by those who have financial wealth on their side.
I obviously decided to stay in consulting and work full time for a third party consulting company.
And again, expecting your salary to double every six or seven years is not realistic for most developers.
Most developers making around $120K in 2013, aren’t making $480K now.
That’s only twice the minimum wage and even in Atlanta they are offering cashiers at McDonalds more than that.
Also, now, I am fully working from home so that helps with saving on gas and not eating out as much. I make my coffee every morning instead of Starbucks on the way to work and I make my own lunch and dinner 95% of the time.
What is the average rent where you live for a one bedroom? What is the tech hiring seen like?
Do you have kids?
Yeah, but there also isn’t enough wealth in the system for everyone to do this.
Like suppose that a) we’re now at a reasonably correct valuation for Nvidia b) assume a hypothetical where everyone in the US had plowed all of their savings into Nvidia in 2015. Result: The market cap of Nvidia is still $6 trillion, and the median American owns less than $10k in Nvidia stock.
About a 1:1000 ratio I'd guess.
Yes, "Everyone with a good tech job" has a significantly higher chance of keeping or holding tech RSUs, and have conviction that investing in tech is going to pay off.
> but literally cannot work for everyone at the same time
Yes, that is how the world works. Anything that makes you successful would not work for everyone at the same time.
To me this reads as a particularly misanthropic view of the world that only considers zero-sum (or less than zero sum) actions.
Any investments in yourself that aren’t at the expense of others (education, exercise, diet, therapy, living space improvements, etc., etc.) or investments in family and community, benefit both you and others and would work for everybody; indeed, many such investments would work better the more people undertook them, rather than the fewer.
> more
and
> everyone
?
If more people bought Nvidia stocks, the value would be higher. If everyone bought, something would give (and that is exactly what we are starting to see).
Some of the comments on this thread highlight just how disconnected many people were/are from everything outside of the FAANG bubble.
> Ok, are you assuming their spouse is also in tech and making at least similar?
Yes, suppose spouse contributes to household expenses, but assume separate savings and investments for this calculation. Do you see you'd easily get to 100k saved?
The difference between having a large fraction of your savings in your bank account versus invested for the last 10 years can be quite a few millions, which is what most commenters here are failing to see. I'm sure the story was different between 2002 and 2012, but that was not what I talking about.
I managed to save about 100k per year in Denver and Salt Lake City with mid tier tech and govt lab jobs. I'm suspicious of the claim that Atlanta is significantly different. From what I have seen, it's usually bad financial decisions.
And for context, saving about double that during and post COVID by obtaining a remote job where the employer does not discriminate by location too much other than for maybe career growth.
And while I work remotely, remote jobs are getting more scarce and more competitive. Every job gets hundreds of applications within the curse few hours.
I assure you that my hometown in South GA (a cheap city) didn’t have $170K a year developer jobs.
A friend who moved to Columbus GA after college in 1997 I doubt is making $170K now.
I know my friend who still lives in Atlanta and is a lead developer at Home Depot (one of the few F500 companies based in Atlanta) just crossed around $170K and he has been there 10 years.
https://www.paycheckcity.com/calculator/salary/georgia/resul...
So to invest $100K a year let’s say some pretax and some post tax, they would have to live off of $1700 a month. They are not going to be buying a house with that.
As far as wealth through equity in a house, that’s not liquid. What are you going to do borrow against it?
And actually I can speak for one of the best case scenarios for buying a house. I had a house built in 2016 in the most affluent county in GA for $335K - a 5 bedroom, 3.5 bath - and sold it in 2024 for $670K and moved to state taxe free Florida and bought a condo in 2022 for half the cost (we kept both for awhile)
Even then, we could only do that because my (step)kids were both grown and I pivoted to customer facing cloud consulting in 2020. A niche that hasn’t suffered from the return to office mandates - ironically enough except for AWS ProServe (former employee) and Google’s equivalent internal department (who has been trying to recruit me for years).
Most people won’t and shouldn’t be picking individual stocks. Of course it’s easy to be a genuis saying what would have happened if you picked stocks that went up.
You’re not realistically saving $50K a year.
I think software is going through what scribes went through when education went universal.
At one point, just knowing how to read and write gave you a cushy job. It didn't matter what, maybe you were in government, maybe you were a clerk organizing trade.
Somewhere in the last 20 years, this happened with coding. At the start of the millennium, knowing how to code meant you could fill some role. Now, everybody knows enough of how to do it that it's assumed for many roles, just as reading and writing is for every office job.
I knew I had to get into BigTech or adjacent after my son graduated as a software engineer.
Around 2016 I belatedly discovered cloud consulting where consultants would come in and “transform” organizations. I learned in hindsight that they were a bunch of old school net ops folks who only knew how to do bad lift and shifts that costs the company more money and treated AWS like a Colo.
I wanted to do the same but focus on what I learned the term for years later was “modernization”. Bringing in a software developers mindset on cloud consulting. By 2020, I was no longer thinking about BigTech and was focused on getting into consulting. I had never heard of AWS’s Professional Services department until a recruiter told me about it. Even then I didn’t know it was full time working for AWS directly until that was also explained to me.
[1] yes in hindsight I know that a title of “senior” to someone who pulls well defined tickets off a Jira board is laughable.
Is it? I don't know anyone who can code proficiently outside of people who work tech jobs (or used to).
Even if you are targeting a major tech, if you are trying to differentiate yourself by how well you can reverse a btree on the white board, there are plenty of people who can do the same. It’s not a differentiator that you have previous experience in BigTech any more. So do thousands of others.
Given cost of living, I have a hard time believing young people come out being cheaper. I live in an area with cheap rents and my mortgage is still less than the average price of a one-bedroom apartment in the area. My cars are new and paid off, and I have pretty much all of the stuff I'd ever need in my life. Plus, no student loans.
That might be one of the real root causes of the job market for new grads being shit. The amount of money people need to meet their basic needs has skyrocketed, and young people bear the brunt of the burden. The only people who can readily afford to work too cheap are those with parents who can continue to support them to a degree.
Edit: Add to the above that companies like Walmart are seeing an uptick in high wage earners becoming their customers, and McDonalds seeing a shrinking population of low-wage customers.
It’s easy to infer the rest from there. People who used to do well are cutting expenses and those who were already struggling are..I seriously don’t know what they’re doing. Where do you eat when you downgrade from McDonalds..Wendy’s? It’s a sad state of affairs.
Source: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-11-16/mcdonalds-...
You buy groceries. And if you must downgrade from there you eat the rich.
There are some fresh fruits and vegetables that are exceptions because they dont take well to refrigeration or freezing but really not much.
Flour comes in sacks, meat comes in cuts - we've a quarter lamb in the freezer, part of that in the fridge, and yeast and flour enough for bread for the next six months.
We shop cheap, like the family has done for the past 100+ years, much of our food comes from the garden - our excess gets swapped with others excess (we have a lot of fruit, we never buy eggs, they come from people that can be bothered to run chickens).
It's a bit of work, we save money by not going to a gym and our life expectancy and cancer survival rates are much better than, say, middle north America.
If people can't live like you do, it's probably because they've been placed on some kind of economic hamster wheel, and rather than figure out how to get a quarter of a lamb their better bet is to emigrate or to disrupt the system that's making McDonalds feel like a relevant factor in a survival equation by building the kind of community that you're describing. That's a big ask if you've never been part of such a thing (I know I haven't).
I had eighteen months as an isolated single parent with near zero support (long story) and had to stretch a marginal budget during that period. I've also travelled through the more remote parts of more than half of the 190+ countries across the planet, sorting logistics for food, fuel, et al along the way.
What I can pass on as hard earned lessons are that fast foods are rarely the cheapest or heathiest in the long term - if you can track down a large volume slow cooker in any garage sale or op shop on special you can keep a never ending stew on the roll by throwing in damn near anything, potatoes, celery, beans, carrots, bits of meat, swedes, etc.
It's hard to disrupt a system, difficult to break patterns and build communities and establish areas to grow food - but home cooking and stretching out food is something that can be found across the planet in the most unlikely places. Worth the effort to look for examples and make a few moves.
We're lucky to buy and prep all our food in bulk - it's more expensive on the infrequent shopping days, it's substantially cheaper over the course of year.
It's not something we need to do in current circumstances, it's a habit kept up in case it's ever needed and being frugal where possible means more to spend elsewhere.
Buying groceries, making food and eating at home is much cheaper than even the cheapest restaurants.
EDIT: realized I was late to the discussion. Disregard my post.
You obviously need access to cooking and storage facilities to eat like this, but the target audience of McDonald's is the time-poor, the resource-constrained, or the depressed and disabled, rather than just the money-poor.
IMO, I think it breaks even, but eating out saves a lot of time! Healthier cooking at home? Yes. I studied this for myself (N=1), and my cooking is about US$10/meal give or take (asparagus, chicken, rice, water to drink). If you cook for two or more people, then I think cooking at home comes out ahead financially.
so: - 5 min walk to supermarket - 10 min in there - 5 min walk back home - washing & cutting wedgetables 7 - 10 min - maybe cutting some meat: 5 min on top - eating 5 - 10 min - cleaning up the kitchen 5 min
I don't count the walk to the supermarket since even if you eat out almost every meal, you still tend to need to go to the grocery for items either way. And if you eat out, you still have to go there and back.
Cutting should be in parallel with cooking. Similar to cutting, cleaning should also be in parallel with cooking. For example, my knife and cutting board are washed, dried and put away before my sauce finishes simmering down.
- 250g raw chicken wings: $375 ≈ 30¢ (I bought these on Saturday, so this is the current price)
- 200g asparagus: $1500 ≈ US$1 (this is a rough guess because I never buy it and the greengrocer doesn't have a web site)
- 100g dry long-grain rice: $100 ≈ 7¢ (just checked the price online, and I think this is rather high)
- water to drink and cook the rice is unmetered here
Total: US$1.37. But you could easily get it down to less than half that with a different vegetable. Salts, spices, and oils might add a few pennies.
Possibly if you are at McMurdo Base or something your ingredient prices might be unusual.
You must be eating an absolute TON to eat $10 worth of chicken, asparagus, and rice. I just checked the prices at Target and rice is $1.89 for 2 pounds, chicken thighs are $1.69 a pound. Asparagus is spendier at $5 for 1 pound.
How many pounds of chicken and asparagus are you eating? Even if you ate two pounds of chicken and the entire pound of asparagus you aren't hitting $10.
I don't know that the official data shows things "still bobbing along." The graph of monthly employment numbers looks like it has a decidedly downward trend overall. September jobs were unexpectedly high, but we've had a lot of subsequent downward revisions and it may happen again for September.
https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2025/11/2...
The Titanic had 3 days of warning and took 3 hours to sink. A large ship takes a long time to do anything, be it turn or drown.
If you've been following the breadcrumbs in pretty much any industry (especially tech), you know the market isn't in a good shape. If you're looking outside expencting to see the world burning, you gotta wait another 3 hours (or hope someone steps in first).
Nothing paints a picture of recession in reality right now.
So, this is what an objectively bad job market looks like in Europe.
Imo it shows that you consider your people valuable and have a strong social safety net, so people are not forced to accept the first job that comes their way and compromise on pay or what you want to do.
I'm sure those grads could get underpaid crappy jobs the next day if they had to, but the point is they're not forced to.
If you can't sort this out in a couple years, then you have a real problem.
The problem is, we've been in an era of the polycrisis for decades - first 2007 the financial crisis thanks to the US subprime loan market, then the Euro crisis, then came the refugee crisis 2015, then the second refugee crisis 2018, then Covid, then the Russian invasion, then the Israel-Palestine war, and now Trump.
And the last three and a half crises are still going on simultaneously.
There has been no recovery period in which things could settle and those who got left behind could catch up, it was straight from one crisis to the next.
How would we even know? It's not like there's a practical way to measure this from an individual's perspective.
- A lot of people participate in the gig economy instead of getting registered as unemployed.
- AI has eroded a lot of employment opportunities for graduates, i.e. people relatively active on social networks.
- Official data can be horribly inaccurate (phone surveys in 2025, seriously?) with grossly outdated models (remember the recent huge revisions?). Political pressure does not help here either.
- The unemployment stats do not account for significant downgrades in salary and working conditions. They will show the same picture for a person with a cushy office job and the same person working 2 jobs in retail from paycheck-to-paycheck.
The unemployment agency of my country tries to help, but the reality is that the amount of new jobs every week is staggeringly low since end-2024. The agent on my case was herself honest about the prospects. It's even worse for younger developers or very old folk.
I tuned into my old freelance network in Germany and the account manager told me they're seeing 60–70% less freelance work in tech.
I could get a job in the odd thing here and there, so I'm not immensely worried yet, plus it allows me to stay home and raise our baby. But I think everyone around me is worried, even outside tech.
Unlike some of the US commenters, our high tax rates and lack of stock-options driven reward schemes means that most of us don't have enough money in the bank to casually found a startup.
That's because it effectively is gambling. Maybe if you are one of the first 50 employees in a startup that is one of 100 to reach "unicorn" stage, you have the chance to strike it big... but then you are 0.01% of all employees of startups.
The 99.99%? They'll have had their company fold or let them go due to the company "pivoting" or "having to look better in quarterly reports", they'll have left voluntarily for one reason or the other, or they'll have been let go right before the vesting period to save the company money and end up with nothing vested, or the company will have gone to three, four, five or more rounds of funding watering down existing options, or the company will have gone bust... all while having traded the "chance" of striking it big for lower pay, thus reducing payments into our tax, social security and healthcare systems.
Europe does not like gambling with the lives of its citizens and the stability of our systems.
This is a bit of a caricature of course. Banks exist. Startup accelerators exist. There are places and ways to get funding. But doing it with your own savings is virtually unheard of over here.
Plenty of other areas doing OK for now - construction, healthcare especially - there's no shortage of money around, it's just not going into tech projects outside of the AI bubble.
- It's now much harder to get a job without speaking German
- There is now competition for low-wage service jobs
- At times it felt like half of my friends were unemployed
- My dev friends have a much harder time finding work. Back in 2015-2020 I had to beat recruiters back with a stick.
Folks with amazing jobs having to spend >1y trying to find a "meh" job. Pretty much impossible to find a job without fluent German.
At first many companies stopped developing mobile apps and I think mobile app devs were the first hit. Second, the frontend developers were hit because of how the AI can generate good enough websites, however, they aren't hit as hard as the mobile developers.
This has spread into most parts of the stack with a variable impact.
It's really interesting to read both this comment and the featured article because my recollection is that one of the big reasons Harris lost in 2024 is that Democrats kept saying the underlying economic data was fine but voters felt things were bad, even if they weren't (the so-called 'vibecession'). Maybe also a bit of distrusting economic experts. So which is it? Are voters just being illogical and should trust when others say the economy is doing fine? Or is there something not being captured in economic data that validates people's concerns?
The "just fine" part is that our stock market is doing quite well, and those who are already wealthy greatly increased the velocity of their wealth. The flip side is that everything is too expensive, including labor, and we have to cut corners to make line go up. Most companies, by this point, have been more or less stripped for parts in pursuit of growth. Most are stagnating or experiencing negative growth now, because obviously, except a key few.
And those key few are pretty much holding everything together. Speculatively. Based off of the promise of growth without labor.
So, that's kind of where we're at right now.
Offshoring is by far the biggest culprit. Plenty of Jr/Mid roles hiring…but not US based.
Then in 1996, he wrote “Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer.”
The software industry is extremely fad-driven. During the pandemic, the fad was to hire programmers. That created a lot of busywork and coordination jobs that didn’t contribute to the bottom line.
Then Musk bought Twitter, laid off a bunch of folks, and things kept running. So the trend became “cut the fat.” In fairness, there actually was fat to cut.
Now boards are in cost-cutting mode and fantasizing about AI, so the pendulum has swung back towards offshoring. But that cost-cutting focus is going to lead to stagnation and self-cannibalization. Somebody’s going to buck the trend, have a splashy success, and the herd will trample back in the other direction.
I'm not sure you can give credit to Musk here. Buying a company and cutting all R&D to "juice" profits isn't his invention. Twitter is really around still in spite of his efforts as opposed to because of them; other CEOs might be doing layoffs but they're also not going out doing sieg heils. As well as he really fired them for fealty reasons and not economic ones.
It should be very telling that Grok came out of X.ai and not X. Ultimately, Musk did have to reverse some of the layoffs although with a bit of slight of hand so that Twitter could release any sort of new products.
Yes. But sadly, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
And I feel there's going to be a huge storm to survive first. I imagine many may not even make it to the next shift.
I'm not your typical HN member I don't think. I've been a computer nerd since I was 14 years old. I come here to stimulate my inner nerd.
You didn’t experience a slowdown at the height of the recession circa 2008?
I am always curious about people who are strongly oriented towards one thing (computing) but somehow wind up in another area, such as construction.
The management company my mother and I worked for sent me to various classes over the next several years (electrical, plumbing, HVAC and pool maintenance) and my supervisor was an old HVAC tech. I learned a ton from him. By the time I was 22 or so, I was promoted to maintenance director.
I got bored with apartments and wanted more. I started doing side work and met a lady that owned lots of rental property. That opened doors and she introduced me to other investors. Eventually, I was able to leave the apartment industry and do my own thing. It just kind of blew up from there.
As far as your construction related ideas, just put yourself out there. Meet people in the industry. Go to local industry related events. See if the city you live in has real estate investor clubs. DFW has a few and it's a great opportunity to meet people. This is also a great way to pick up work. Rent houses are always needing things repaired or replaced.
I know Mueller metal buildings is always looking for sales people. They were even looking for an IT person not too long ago too. In the rural area of Texas I'm in, we finish out lots of them and seem to becoming more and more popular in recent years.
Like anything, it's important to spend time networking and building a reputation for doing high quality work. This gets noticed as it does in any job and will get you better opportunities and better customers.
Trades have a higher percentage of people at the bottom tiers who have trouble showing up for work on time and sober. Avoid being associated with that and you can rise fairly quickly.
I've done a stint in construction (I think y'all call it "civil engineering", aka digging trenches and moving soil) myself, it was rare to find Germans - most of my colleagues came from Eastern Europe.
And frankly the work is miserable. I've crawled through suspended ductwork to run conduit and wiring in antifreeze recycling plants that were filled with god-knows-what reagents covering everything in dust thick enough to paint a clown. PPE be damned, my skin burned for days. It was hot, loud, cramped, wet with chemicals, uncomfortable, dangerous, and unpleasant. These jobsites are the bread and butter of blue collar anything; awful and dangerous conditions outside of your control, but required by your contract because not doing it means not getting paid.
Sure, an agent isn't going to be replacing the poor bastard who has to do that, but is our only response the the deliberate and systematic murder of the white collar job market "you can suffer for less money so you'll be fine"? That's a pathetic whimpering way to just accept the very loud and public murder of class mobility.
Residential construction is the absolute bottom of the barrel. It is trades equivalent of webdev monkeys flinging javascript poo at the web. You get benefits by not sucking and getting out of residential and into something else.
I at at a Home Depot like 10 times a week and let me tell you, they have a major systems problem that is making their operations look like a joke
>I at at a Home Depot like 10 times a week
And yet you still go to Home Depot, so from their perspective it's not an existential issue. Probably the biggest thing companies have learned recently is that they don't need 99.99% uptime, people will accept degraded performance because "that's just how technology works".
Everyone competes on price, so when I see everyone at Home Depot with their thumbs up their asses because the computers are down, I know that Ashby is eating their lunch on the margin. I'm sure Home Depot has enormous economies of scale that make up for it, but this is a current issue.
Well, since we've accepted it. Everything kind of sucks and barely works, but it doesn't matter, because we ultimately put up with it.
And for that, around here they are my second or third call after FBM or MacArthur
From looking over the shoulders of the staff, some aspects of the system that I've seen as a supplier are directly visible to them too.
Certainly less pay but I love being outside and walking.
And no Jira, changing the color of that button, or steeping myself in Frank’s eldritch horror code.
If I was trying to attract intelligent applicants looking for work outside of software engineering, that would be in the headline.
Fingerprints, background checks, references, and drug testing.
It’s the CIA. But good benefits.
Not officially, but once you remove the skills required for the tasks, it's not all that different.
I take martial arts classes, yoga classes, have nice apartment, eat what I want, have a decent car, etc.
I really don’t want anything, except ridiculous things no one can afford, like sure I’d be up for buying a Cathedral and converting it to a $20m house.
——
Liquid 3 years (savings plus liquid investments). 2 years in IRA. Set to inherit somewhere between 20-40 years worth.
I just have to work to make ends meet, let my investments mature, and eventually inherit.
It feels weird because I love my parents, but it’s something to plan around nonetheless.
I walk around all the time anyway, to any destination within the city. I have a car and still do this.
To each their own.
Yea, I'm there with your dad...
The h1b people spend (most) of their salary in the USA and pay US income taxes. Whereas overseas labor spend their salary over seas and pay no US taxes.
The peope will wealth are doing well, the rest of the market is not.
There are only so many apps and goods that can be made for rich people/small subset of consumers.
I bet you will find that people working on investment ideas and finance tools which focus on wealth accumulation will be hiring.
When is YC going to add "This account is based in..." like X has?
- out of college it took 3 months to find work. It sucked, took over 100 apps, but I found a nice project.
- after that project ended, 3 more months (but less stressful because I had more than one role I was interviewing with).
- Then layoffs, another 3 months in 2022 where it was very competitive (I was in at least 4-5 interview pipelines before my first choice accepted my offer).
- Then that studio quickly shuttered and I haven't found anything full time in 2.5 years. Freelancing kept me up until that wasn't enough, and then I found some non-tech part time work.
working harder than ever with 2 jobs + more portfolio work to prepare for interviews despite having 9 years of experience now. This feels worse than the horror stories I'd hear when finding my first job.
We do not seem to be technically experiencing stagflation,ir really either half of it, on a national scale, as we appear to still be in a weak aggregate economic expansion and inflation, while higher than the 2% target, is fairly mild at around a 3% annualized rate [0], and, in any case, stocks going up is not inflation (unqualified inflation, which is the inflation part of stagflation, in consumer price inflation, not asset value inflation.)
OTOH, we are in a very weak economy especially outside of the leading AI firms, and there are quite likely both wide regions and wide sectors of the economy which, considered alone, would be in recession, and while inflation is fairly mild, it is high for the last couple decades and being in near-recession conditions. So, for a lot of people, the experience is a something like stagflation (and there are lots of signs that the economic slowdown will continue alongside rising inflation.)
[0] though as economic statistics are only available after the fact, either of these could have changed, but the real defining period for “stagflation” in the US is the 1973-1975 recession, years which saw a minimum of 6.2% inflation (the term was actually coined in the UK for conditions which saw a massive drop in GDP growth rate, fron 5.7% annually to 2.1% in successive years, but not an actual recession, alongside 4.8% inflation.)
Isn't that part of the cause? It sucks up so much investment, there's nothing left for anything else. Or at least nothing without such perceived upside.
Either they pull it off and you're replaced by AGI, or they fail to pull it off and you lose your job to the resulting economic implosion.
Probably not significantly, IMO.
> It sucks up so much investment, there's nothing left for anything else.
Tariff-inflated input costs combined with weak consumer demand are the reason the rest of the economy is slow, and the reason there aren’t places woth strong and near-term upsides for investment dollars to go. AI being the only thing attracting investment is the effect, not the cause.
There is still a lot of tech investment, deal making, and hiring going on. It has just left the USA.
Economic thought today is that rising asset prices relative to wages are not a sign of inflation. They can be attributed to lower cost of capital, increased dollar production of assets, lower risk profiles, and other aspects. However when observing housing prices and education prices which have seen declining utility over the years - it may be that we simply lack an appropriate word for the divergence of capital prices from wages, productivity, and risk.
There is an undeniable societal impact of this divergence, individuals become less economically and socially mobile. They maintain a net debt rather than net asset count for longer, they may be either practically or perceived as locked out of societal progress.
Part of the observations from the HN reader on the current situation in Finland (believe everything he says, "canary" of Europe?):
>things really suck especially for fresh grads. There's fierce competition for jobs like cashier at supermarket, hundreds of applications for one position is normal. Lots of fresh grads with bachelor's or master's degree compete for those jobs too, since they can't find anything better.
In the USA this was one of the exact "unexpected" developments in the Nixon Recession that was like no-one had seen since the Great Depression. Except that depression there were not yet enough college grads in existence to contribute as a major statistic.
By the mid-70's I'll never forget the crowds vying for a single job opening at a gas station. Pumping gas and cleaning windshields when most stations had only converted half their pumps to self-service. Some with advanced degrees, it was not pretty. These were always minimum-wage jobs too, like supermarkets and fast-food.
When I started working there was a chemical plant within 25 miles where I could have gotten a job easily if I had graduated a few years earlier. Founded in the 1950's by one of my professors, it was actually pretty advanced. The placement office said they hadn't seen an opening in over a year. I was lucky to get a job at an appliance dealer because he liked my ability to program, but he never got a computer the whole time. Otherwise I wouldn't have got noticed, but the job was to prep merchandise for delivery so I was in the warehouse installing a lot of icemakers and doing minor repairs, plus rode along with a service operator one or two days a week to help when it was commercial refrigeration. Which I was learning, but also learned that I was kind of replacing an experienced repairman because they had let too many people go when things first got bad.
About a year later things got worse and he had to kick out the new people and we were gone.
I then began to get unemployment and the need had gotten so great that it must have been the first computerized institutional job boards for that reason. Slim pickings doesn't describe it. But you had to check in every week and apply to whatever you may be qualified for. I had gotten a cheap car (was riding bike to the appliance co) and was selling fruits and vegetables when a job came up at the plant. Not in a lab but out on the large reactor areas working with chemicals and taking readings. The posting had been badly mangled by the typist and it was not obvious it was a chemical job. You could still tell it was technical though. There were over a hundred applicants anyway, and not a realistic chance at all.
Months later I got a lead from my uncle that a lumber company near him needed somebody full time. This was about 35 miles away. All they would do is take my application without getting to talk to anybody, so it took longer to drive there. Still there were about a dozen people applying while I was there so it must have been hundreds of applications overall too.
Now I was already wearing a tie so I went back to the chemical plant and what really made the difference was that there were no new job openings so that time I was the only one showing up in a while. There was only one office building outside the gate, the manager was in and came up to see me but said right away they had no openings. He invited me for a quick tour of the labs and plant anyway, it was good getting inside the gate but like everybody else it was just optimism in the face of declining prosperity.
Surprisingly, he called me back a few days later and offered a part-time job, 4 days a week. He had talked to my professor, and I was a good student. I started out doing a lot of different things for different people, mainly for the analytical lab. In less than a year, they had me come in 5 days a few times when it got heavy and months later I was full-time.
I still wasn't getting twice the minimum wage, but I was so lucky.
After that I only sold produce on the weekends, and only seasonal things I picked myself like avocados and blueberries.
No worries, the ones that are playing economists on TV are not qualified either.
Black Friday sales set records and it not even cyber Monday. If Americans are languishing then shouldn’t holiday spending be down?
While there isn't a definitive inflation-adjusted per-capita number for 2025, recent data indicates that overall sales growth was outpaced by inflation, meaning consumers likely bought fewer items. Total Black Friday spending was up, but the average number of items purchased declined. For instance, Salesforce reported total spending was up 3% but order volume was down 2%, with average selling prices climbing 7%.
...
Per-capita sales: The increase in spending is largely driven by higher prices, meaning the actual volume of goods purchased per person likely decreased compared to the previous year, even with higher total spending, says The New York Times.
Also poor people can get into debt they are still poor. Maybe they can afford a nintendo switch but not afford to raise a family.
Edit there is talk below of inflation adjusted numbers being high but meh
Inequality is very visible in terms of what sort of consumption occurs. Gotta look at the qualitatives.
The retired middle class boomers I know are completely outside the business cycle.
While I don't think they have enough to really be considered wealthy, they have no mortgage payment, a social security check, a pension and most have a 401k.
The business cycle will not change their spending one bit.
Being an aging human is a suicide note. The extra steps are the entire point of retirement.
(1) People wait for when they perceive they'll get the best deals to do their shopping. (2) K-shaped economy (data is already bearing this out btw): Spending from the wealthy is driving consumption figures vs. the bulk of the population (3) Anxiety about rising prices cause people to purchase now vs. later. See for example RAM prices.
Checking the stats online growth is up and on par with previous years creating that record breaking stat. Instore numbers arent out yet but some figures are claiming less foot traffic in stores compared with previous years. So i'd say to early to really call if spending was down(compared with expectations)
Not necessarily a bad thing…but not great either.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-29/black-fri...
Most population growth was due to immigration for a while, and immigration (for obvious reasons in 2025) is way, way down.
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-us-population-could-shri...
what's your report?
>you'd have to nuke LA
Let's not give this administration ideas, please.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/POPTHM its source being https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2025-09/pi0825.pdf
The holiday season on the whole is a much better indicator, not just one single day. And even then, spending needs to be checked against debt incurred.
Can't see how this positive feedback loop gets us to a bad place at all!
Rich indeed!
What was the historical trend? Otherwise you can't draw much from just "49.2%" alone, aside from a vague sense that stuff should be fairer.
No, it is not normal for 10% of the coountry to power half the spending. Just think about that statistic for a second. Spending includes groceries, services, and other continual needs. A few private jets can't outspend millions of people buying food.
But here's your chart: https://preview.redd.it/2pcvmm0u3jpf1.png?width=798&auto=web...
Yet, if you look at your chart, it was 40% in 1989s and have been slowly edging up. While 40% is a smaller number than 50%, you can make the same argument about 40% not being "normal", yet society has been chugging along just fine.
1. I saw the same headline - the article stated that there were record SEASON sales, not Black Friday sales. The headline did not match the content of the article. 2. Record revenue, not necessarily record units sold. To be expected with inflation. 3. Savvy online shoppers may be bundling purchases to reduce shipping costs. Waiting for a seasonal sale to buy holiday gifts as well as detergent, snacks and underwear may be quite prudent.
Finally, increased sales revenue does not necessarily equate to more jobs. It can, but by no means does it have to.
I'd not be surprised if a good number of people did the same. PLUS, the prices rose by quite a bit between the start of the year and now. So we need to see if this increase is sales match up to inflation (which, unfortunately, would be more difficult to rely on knowing that that metric has become politicized.)
This year was prescription glasses.
not bf related but happened this week: 1) cv axles for my car ~500 and will install myself
i am employed and just make it into 6 figures $110k, which apparently is poverty level now if you have a few dependents. i consider myself fortunate.
You did in fact not rtfm?
>Black Friday sales set records and it not even cyber Monday.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/29/business/black-friday-us-econ...
I don't know where you're seeing "record numbers". 2024 wasn't a great year and you can argue spending was flat from that after inflation. I think the more relevant factor is "who" is spending the money in such a k-shaped economy. .
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/economy/2025/11/25/us-e...
The K shaped economy.
.
Also, shocking to see no mention of the investment thesis, let alone critique of it.
What do you mean by the "investment thesis"? Would you clarify?
Think of the promise of AGI as a promise of billions of tireless immigrants with PhDs who outcompete the other ethnicities in the labor market. It's the same reason people stopped investing in Detroit-based things years ahead of the industry pullout.
That seems unlikely. What is the point of an economy if there is no one who is actually able to consume?
I don't agree with the thesis, but that is what the thesis is.
Of course, this all implies that the rest of us will just sit and starve quietly. Somehow I don't think that's likely.
Long-term, it usually fails because the elites become too greedy and too complacent because they haven't seen what a large scale riot looks like, and try to squeeze too much. Then things blow up somewhere and there's a mad scramble to prevent it elsewhere by making concessions (witness all the improvements in labor rights in the West after the Russian revolution).
The only saving grace of this administration's cruelty is its stupidity. It wants to rule like Rome over slaves, but didn't learn how the rulers kept the populace from uprising and rebelling.
A point for the economy.
The mechanics of trade.
Or the objective outcomes vs subjective goals.
It is entirely possible for an economy to land up in an equilibrium point that works for a small set of people and not for the majority.
The point of the economy is a subjective societal thing, achieved via laws, regulation and enforcement of those rules.
For most of us its just gas or breaks, but those at the top have non economic goals. The economic indicators are looking positive because progress is being made towards those goals, but the gloom persists because most of us don't want the outcomes that were progressing towards.
We're in a car that we can't steer, and the economist article says everything is fine because look how high the number on the speedometer is.
> Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
Maybe that is restricted to my area / region but I got one am confused.
The position with FAANG like salaries have reduced drastically. Companies paying 6 figures just to have the privilege to have an entry level developer with this then seen as magical skill of being able to type code was a dream that is over. Look at salaries of engineers in other industries, breaking 6 figures needs a lot of seniority, $150k is rarely heard of for ICs.
breaking six figures in California isn't that impressive unless you are literally single and out of college. But that quickly gets eaten up when rent is 2k+/month and you have school loans to pay off. When you're not paying nearly six figures for college and have your taxes built into most of your day to day life, you don't need six figures.
We pay well. Very well in fact. We’re a small company though.
I have a harder time hiring here than at my previous position with a much larger company, even though my current employer is superior to my old one in every way except for brand recognition.
And from others in this space (who have at times tried to recruit me) this is not a problem unique to my company.
If you're not in a major hub and ATS is filtering out all the good candidates not gaming the system, the results are inevitable. If you're looking for a senior for junior or less pay... Well, it's easier to keep searching than take a job that literally can't pay rent in some high COL areas.
I used to think this was because the party that represents the ruling class didn't know what they were doing.
Now I think these economic collapses and ensuing fire sales are not accidents, they know exactly what they're doing.
Now, the bigger problem is that you're supposed to raise taxes during the boom so that you can run deficits during the recession to recover quickly. Unfortunately we run deficits during the boom so that the crash is even bigger as well ...
> Democrats not allowing a recession to occur just makes the next bubble even bigger. And all kinds of inefficient businesses are allow to zombify when the resources could be used elsewhere.
This is honestly just horseshit. Both parties want to avoid recession, its just that one of them believes in established economic theories and is successful; while the other one is steeped in crackpot economics which have failed repeatedly.
Perhaps we have a different definition of recessions but to me you cannot pop a bubble without a recession. How does the bubble deflate without a decrease in nominal GDP? The recession doesn't need have effects lingering for years/decades but one needs to occur.
> Both parties want to avoid recession
I mean in name only. Republicans pretty consistently just cut taxes while shifting government spending from poor to wealthy which really just causes a recession since the marginal propensity to spend of the wealthy is lower (hence ballooning SNP500 while weaker retail spending; wealthy's savings goes into SNP500 while non-wealthy cut back on consumption).
> its just that one of them believes in established economic theories and is successful
Which economic theory do the Democrats believe in? Any real theory has upsides and downsides and I just never either of the two major parties acknowledge or implement the downside (which is always required for the upside).
Large social nets are about redistributing wealth so everybody is (within a _very_ large range) equal but Democrats don't actually do this; they just give money to the bottom individuals without taking from the top which just means the future poor generations have less as they have to repay with interest to the original wealthy generations (and inheritors).
https://medium.com/newco/your-financial-shock-wealth-4845e6d...
I'm late to the party and am willing. It's becsuse we cut taxes a lot during GOP terms but no one has the balls to raise taxes back up. Thars pretty much the one bit of respect I have for HW Bush despite it being the nail in the coffin for re-election. But for the most part, GOP appeals to business, and the easiest talking point is to make them pay less taxes (though this line has blurred since Citizen's United).
That's really the gist of it. Politicians (on both sides of the aisle) need to know when to raise taxes in good times and not coast on the benefits. That way tax cuts can happen as relief in harder times. Instead we're headed to hard times and nearing default levels in the US debt. In other words: we're cooked.
now what happens if the rates won't go down much from here might just be everything slowing down all at once and then they'll drop the rates to 0 again, so it'll get better... two years later.
And even those are way down. Los Angles simply seems dead from my experience the last 2 years.
I'm a self-taught senior. At my current company have only ever been a developer, but everyone I work with started as help desk and got moved to development later. I know this is anecdotal, but they all have CS degrees. I think people still underestimate the glut in inexperienced CS grads we're working through rn.
It's a very screwed up incentive to be rewarded for breaking the system, but that's 2025 in a nutshell.
Layoffs generally cause stock prices to go up because of anticipated cost reduction/efficiency: https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwab046
If you have some source to make the case that layoff-stock price change is correlated for a different reason these days, it would be interesting to read it. But I doubt anything has changed
The phenomenon is pretty recent so there won't truly be any studies on it in a while. But look up "Jobless Boom". Here's a piece of what I'm talking about:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jobless-boom-ai-economy-labor-m...
>For much of 2025, the job market was described by economists as "no hire, no fire," meaning an environment where workers could count on job security even as hiring around the U.S. cooled. But conditions have changed, and the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate in both September and October, citing increasing risks to employment growth and with Fed Chair Jerome Powell noting that policymakers are closely watching layoff announcements by big employers.
personally, I think the AI efficiencies are a smokescreen, but the point of how this job contraction is forcing he fed's hands is hard to ignore after some 2 years of holding rates steady.
> "Why worries about American job losses are overstated."
Instead of the archived version.
While the beginning of the article is the same, the last line in the preview differs:
> Original: "...to support a weakening jobs market."
> New: "...to support a weakening jobs market. Look closer, however, and much of the gloom seems to be overdone."
Though I don't have a subscription to check the rest of the article.
Mostly kidding.
Tell me more…
Looking forward to chatting.
My personal prediction is that, barring some kind of insurrection/revolution, Congress will flip in 2026 and force POTUS to back down on tariff nonsense, which will finally un-paralyze businesses which will resume capital investments and hiring. 2026 itself might be really rough though, if the AI bubble pops.
Or nurses? https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=&job=registered+nurse&city...
The problem isn't H-1B. It's H-1B dependent employers gaming the system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B-dependent_employer https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/62c-h1b-depende...
I'm not saying that the teachers or nurses are not underpaid - they should be paid more, but the ability for the organization to pay them more is often constrained by other factors (teacher salaries for public schools, medicare reimbursement rates for hospitals).
Saying "no, we shouldn't hire them" doesn't mean that a qualified American teacher will show up or new nurses will go to Fargo to get a job. Rather, foreign language programs in schools will be discontinued and hospitals in rural areas will close (being unable to meet the required nurse to patient ratios).
There are problems with the system. People on HN often forget that there are a lot of other professions outside of technology that make use of the H-1B when there is a genuine need.
Unfortunately technology - and especially technology consultancies - have flooded the application process for the H-1B visas to the point where H-1B has become synonymous with Indian programmer working at a WITCH company.
> Public Law 114–113, part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2016, imposed a fee of $4,000 on H-1B petitions [edit: for H-1B dependent employers] and $4,500 on L-1A and L-1B petitions. The additional H-1B fees would apply to all petitions postmarked on or after December 18, 2015, and until September 30, 2025.
This apparently has expired. The proclamation "Restriction on Entry of Certain Nonimmigrant Workers" is of dubious footing.
You know what would have been good with the budget bill (the previous Consolidated Appropriations Act was a budget bill signed by Obama)? Quadrupling the application fee for H-1B dependent employers and hiring auditors to make sure that the applicants are properly qualified, that there is a position open (not just a position on the bench at a consultancy) for the applicant to fill, that the position to be filled was attempted to be filled by a and that the employer is making full use of their existing employees (e.g. no one on the bench).
This is something that is (was) there and can be regulated and audited and catch the problematic employers - not French teachers and nurses.
IMO, they are a clearer reflection of the fact that the industry has lots of jobs that are tied to remote future payoff and dependent on financing outside of operations, and that tighter money policies reduced the flow of investment into the broad industry (outside of the AI segment), cutting a lot of those jobs.
There is a problem with tech and how oversubscribed the H-1B visa is because of tech contracting - especially with visa dependent employers. However, the suggestion to cancel the program would impact many other professions (that already suffer because of tech in the field) where the visa isn't used in the same way.
The problems that we are seeing is not one of the H-1B visa, but rather large amounts of money sloshing around in the tech industry trying to get things done first and consultancies trying to get a piece of the pie from people who have ideas but no idea of how to do do whatever the hyped thing is today.
The only people who need immigrants are greedy businesses. It makes life worse for literally everyone else in a nation.
That said, I have no clue why anyone in the US is struggling to find nurses unless they expect RN's to be paid minimum wage or be caged down to fractional work. That just doesn't fly.
Bigger ones in the cities with more expensive procedures can afford it better. The smaller hospitals an hour or two drive away from a city are the ones that are hurting the most.
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/11/14/how-trumps-100k...
> Frederick Health Hospital in rural Frederick County, Maryland, is ground zero for the hurdles the new fee has created. The hospital is the only emergency room in a county that’s approximately 650 square miles in size. Patients would have to drive as far as 50 miles to get to another facility.
> “We see about 70,000 to 80,000 emergency department visits — one of the busiest emergency departments in the state,” said Jamie White, chief nursing officer at Frederick Health.
> Not only is her hospital one of the busiest in the state, it’s also chronically short-staffed. White said it can’t compete with salaries at hospitals in urban areas or with jobs that allow for more work-life-balance.
Wage suppression? Maybe. But it's not "raise wages" that is an option - its "close the hospital".
https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/o... Computer-Related Occupations is more than half
... And it is dominated by technology. And you can see that in the charts and tables of "Top H-1B employers by visa approval" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa#Top_H-1B_employers_b... and how it changed from 2006 to 2017. Everyone I know who is on a H-1B or H-4 visa is affiliated with a technology job.
There's also a loophole that if one's spouse is approved under a H-1B visa and they're under an H-4 visa, they can also work in a H-1B visa field.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-1B_visa
Work Authorization
H-1B holder: Allowed to work for sponsoring employer
H-4 dependents: Eligible if H-1B spouse has approved I-140 immigrant petition or H-1B status beyond 6 years under AC21
So, spitballing the idea... the H-1T visa would be for all STEM positions. This does not extend to a spouse (the spouse would need their own approval). This visa would be for all professions classified as 15-xxxx, 17-xxxx, and 19-xxxx by the BLS ( https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes_stru.htm ). That is, if your job is 15-1234 and you are a foreign worker, you must have an H-1T (or O-1) visa. The H-1T visa would have a different cap that is independent from the H-1B visa lottery and instead of a lottery it is done by auction. There is a 10% of salary fee paid with a minimum of $10,000 that is to be paid into the SMART scholarship and S-STEM programs. Applicants under this program may not be paid less than the median wage as determined for that profession ( https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes151251.htm ) regardless of skill level for the location where the employee is based. Companies with more than 10% H-1T visa employees may not apply for new H-1T visas if their employees are not compensated for 2000 hours of work or PTO a year (prorated for hire and termination dates - no more than 50 hours a week may be counted for an employee). Positions to be filled by a H-1T visa must first be advertised and open for 30 days on usajobs.gov (expanding the scope of the site) before applications from foreign nationals or other H-1T visa holders may apply to it. Random audits may be done for any position listed and filled by a H-1T visa holder to ensure that the position matches the job listing (with punitive fines per infraction).
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My goal with those spitballs is do decouple the H-1T and H-1B visas which largely work outside of tech. It clearly establishes who can work in that field. It tries to close loopholes (though I'm sure that there are some in there that I've missed) and tries to make sure that consultancies aren't trying to make a deep bench of people they pay part time or not at all. It's attempting to make sure that people are being compensated at market rates based on real data rather than more nebulous titles.
Source: Betteridge's law of headlines
Other annoying headlines:
“This is why interest rates are so high”
“What I learned about X from one month doing Y”
The author admits that the answer to his own question is no. Which, again, affirms Betteridge’s Law.
> A more plausible explanation for the present weak patch, and for companies’ reluctance to hire, is Trumpian uncertainty. That is now beginning to ease. The chaos of Mr Trump’s tariff roll-out seems to be receding. Deportations and changes to visa rules will remain disruptive, but businesses are starting to adapt. Although 2026 is unlikely to be a year of calm and clarity for America, it may well be a bit less frenzied. That would boost the labour market. American workers’ decade-long hot streak may have longer to run.
To paraphrase his conclusion: no. Things are soft, but in general, probably fine for 2026.
This is what I am saying - I’m sick of seeing sensational, clickbait, disaster-porn headlines, especially when the author timidly backs off and plays both sides once they have your attention. It’s such a lack of journalistic integrity.
It's really disgusting and harms most people.
I know people don't want to hear this . . . but at my mega large corp, we recently laid off hundreds people who basically didn't do this.
Did you give them a choice or simply say "we've moving most operations to China?"