Growing tribe of jobless techies is stuck in Silicon Valley's new reality
latimes.com
latimes.com
Anecdotal, but I just went to PyCon and about 1/3 of the dozens of folks I talked to are looking for work. The "job fair" was everyone playing charades, there are still a hundred people for every position. One said they were hiring 2-6% of applicants. At least the lunch was nice.
That sounds high, not to be dreary, but given how easy it is to spam and roles having thousands of applicants.
There's about 10M in US tech jobs and the forecast for net job adds is +2% in 2026 so the number on a macro level checks out.
We don't have that anymore. It won't happen. There's no one coming to save us.
I'm working with 3 other startups, but work is contract based, no healthcare and flaky..
Most people do not want to work for subpar pay in the one of the most expensive areas in the US. Especially when you're getting diluted off of the cap table as happens now. You're always ending up behind.
That's before considering people with actual life responsibilities.
Being in the first handful of non-founder startup employees at some seed stage company is probably not the most lucrative thing, but once companies are post Series A, as far as I can tell they tend to be comp competitive with bigger companies.
Obviously not many companies can compete with Meta or Jane Street for salaries, but that's true whether you're talking about a startup or the majority of the S&P 500 companies.