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Comment by mindcandy | Hacker News Reader

AFAICT, the "Rising layoffs year after year" news lately has been an intentional misreporting of "Layoff rates slowly returning to normal after the hiring spree during COVID stimulation"

https://blog.glassdoor.com/site-us/wp-content/uploads/sites/...

https://www.glassdoor.com/blog/worklife-trends-2026/

But, CEOs figured out that if they blame layoffs on AI, stock go up a lot. Reporters know that anxiety about AI drives the clicks that write the checks.

I do think that AI anxiety is making HR around the world anxious about hiring. That's my best guess for why everyone is finding they need to apply to 500 jobs to get anywhere. So, AI is making it hard for you to find a job not because it took your job, but because HR is reading ragebait and turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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I don't recall there being regular, industry-wide layoffs effecting software engineers for basically the entirety of my career up until the last couple of years. I'm sure my memory is bad and there's data to refute that, but this doesn't feel like "normal" at all.

If your career was entirely post GFC you lived through the good times. The GFC and dot com crash were not good.

So after 2007 for people like me who arent used to the GFC acronym. Which in my case, I was 17 in 2007 and “shielded” from all of that.

For others like me: GFC = Global Financial Crisis

I went through the dotcom crisis and never heard of GFC until today. I've always seen it as the finsys crash.

To non-Americans, "global financial crisis" is the standard name we use for it. Inside the US (at least from my experience, when I lived there a few years ago) it was just financial crisis (without "global"), or the housing crash. Draw from that what conclusions you will about how Americans see their place in the world ;)

The GFC wasn't good? It wasn't good for the general economy, sure, but given the specific industry we are talking about that was one of the best times ever. Money was being printed hand over fist building software that did nothing more than emit a fart sound. The opportunities for us with the 'picks and shovels' were endless with everyone trying to strike gold at the App Store gold mine.

The iPhone app store mania is not at all representative of the state of industry as a whole. Most software jobs did not look like this, at all.

It is unclear what you mean. It is true that most software jobs were not writing iPhone apps, if that is what you are trying to say, but those were good jobs. Those who didn't have good jobs for a moment were quickly scooped up by investors trying to create the next big app. It was a feeding frenzy out there for tech workers, despite much of the rest of the economy faltering (agriculture also did very well during the GFC, to be fair).

Maybe you are trying to say that there was some grey beard Atari programmer out there who refused to start writing iPhone apps and couldn't find their dream job banging bits on the old 2600? That is likely, but it is equally likely that they never found that job since either.

It took a bit for the VC world to heat up and a lot of big companies had laid people off.

Nearly 20 years then...

I worked straight through the dotcom, ‘08 financial crisis, and covid craziness. But recently haven’t worked in over two years, with nothing on the horizon. Definitely not normal over here.

Correct. This is also the reason why job postings arent as high as they were during and after COVID. During COVID we had “the great resignation” which meant that people were leaving companies to find better pay after 2020 so companies had to “overhire” to account for the poor retention.

This is what a buddy who works at a major consulting firm told me about the hiring trend, we are returning to all the pre-COVID hiring norms.

This is the same with ANY depreciating asset or currency? Can I wait a year to buy it? Will I get 10x the return by waiting a year? Will my competition have a moat if I can move 10x faster next year? can I save money now?

I think this is a cope. It is not only the tech sectors facing poor labor market, it's everything. People can't find jobs

Idk why you're downvoted. Practically everyone i know is unemployed, underemployed, or failing to find a new job to replace one they don't like/isn't paying enough/has bad prospectus.

Lucky engineer types like me in the last group, but many of my college educated friends in that middle group. Shit is rough

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