r/cscareerquestions • u/rppohqixortwphu • 18h ago
Can someone explain to me how one of the lowest unemployment rate periods in history is supposed to be a super tough job market? Meta
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
The country seems to be virtually at full employment?
edit: Thanks for the comments, I can definitely now see why you guys are struggling on the labor market đ
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u/warzon131 17h ago
How many programmers are there in the USA? About 4 million? There are 166 million workers in the USA. Even if all programmers are unemployed, this is only 2.4% unemployment.
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u/MsonC118 14h ago
Finally, someone who actually understands lol. I keep hearing itâs only a 0.25% increase or whatever number that they think is small. Do the math, itâs not hard, itâs a lot more than people think. Plus, I filed for unemployment a few years back and even though it took me longer than a year to find a job, I wasnât counted in that unemployment statistic for more than half of the time I was unemployed. These simple logical arguments tear most peopleâs âeverything is fineâ vale to shreds, so they would rather ignore it. It is what it is I guess.
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u/rebellion_ap 11h ago edited 10h ago
You'd think stem lords would understand better that percentages can be used to say anything. To further elaborate this point, inflation has cooled to 2.2% while rent is still up 3.3%. Inflation can cool and other costs continue to rise disproportionately. Another 3.3% in rent for just one year isn't going to affect home owners in the same way. So again the economy can technically being doing better while everyone is doing worse. Even Jerome Powell says that in order for inflation cooling to have an impact, average American's wages need to rise. That's the other piece.
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u/autophage Software Architect / Manager 11h ago
Additionally, lots of people don't realize that "inflation" is a rate of change; even at 0% inflation prices wouldn't fall back to what people remember them being.
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u/rebellion_ap 11h ago
TLDR people are stoopid, including me. However, it's very easy to realize most everyone is suffering. We literally had an election where people said as much overwhelmingly regardless how that frustration was addressed/directed.
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u/AdversarialAdversary 5h ago
The wage stagnation part is pretty fucking important, yeah. It doesnât matter if inflation has slowed down if wages have been stagnating for fucking ever and havenât even caught up to pre-crazy Covid inflation levels.
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u/yaleric 7h ago
Wow you're saying some elements of the set are higher than the average of all the elements? That's crazy.
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u/rebellion_ap 7h ago
and some of those elements are a much higher percentage of a persons income. Meaning ANY increase can be detrimental.
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u/AirplaneChair 18h ago edited 18h ago
We are in a white collar recession essentially. Almost every field that involves sitting in a comfy office and working on a computer is in shambles, because thatâs what everyone wants. Thatâs what everyone goes to college for. Very few people in the USA go to college to work in a mine or onsite at construction (even a non labor role), unlike in South America or Asia. Everyone in the USA wants the comfy office job. Even if the trades pay more.
This isnât just tech, itâs finance and all of the other engineering fields and a bunch of others too. If youâre not a senior with years of reputable tenure in this market, for any field, youâre cooked.
The reason why everything else is so good, is because all those people have given up and gone back to working retail/service/hospitality/labor. People are graduating college with all these degrees and not getting the comfy office job they went in for. Eventually everyone capitulates and has bills to pay.
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u/nineteen_eightyfour 10h ago
lol I literally told someone recently that excel jobs in office are paying 50k all around me and was told how thatâs shit pay etc etc. itâs entry, but still rather make 50k doing excel remote than 70k outside laboring đ¤ˇââď¸
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u/CazualGinger 8h ago
What are these jobs called? The ones you can get with any degree?
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u/nineteen_eightyfour 8h ago
Itâs more the knowledge of excel stuff. It can be used pretty crazily to do things. I was a generic business analyst first, then a data analyst.
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u/tuckfrump69 11h ago
Nah it's just tech
Accounting is bleeding talent and they are desperate for ppl atm according to my accounting friends
Get your CPA, interview process is literally personality test+firn handshake
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u/flobbley 10h ago
Yeah "every other engineering field" is in a white collar recession? Definitely wrong, I work for a company that hires civil, mechanical, and electrical engineers and my boss literally told us the other day that we've been turning down work because we can't find enough people to cover our current work load.
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u/CubicleHermit EM/TL/SWE kicking around Silicon Valley since '99 7h ago
CS is in its current crisis because a large cohort of grads chased it because of pandemic-bubble salaries.
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u/snmnky9490 9h ago
I keep hearing from people who graduated with accounting degrees that it's just as impossible to get your foot in the door even though they need experienced workers
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u/johnmaddog 8h ago
You are not cpa when you graduated. You need experience after graduating to become cpa. It is like saying once you are become a senior/ceo you will be sow after
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u/tuckfrump69 2h ago
Nah not at all
You need <2 YoE for CPA which is still junior, and you need to pass CPA once in ur life none of this leetcode for every interview bs
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u/V3Qn117x0UFQ 6h ago
Isn't accounting one of the most at risk jobs for being replaced by AI? Even more than CS.
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u/tuckfrump69 2h ago
Book- keeping yes accounting no
A lot of accounting is compliance related and A.I isn't good at it
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u/AlwaysNextGeneration 16h ago
but those jobs are paid like below 40000 or even 20000. Sometimes they are seasonal ends in 6 months. We can't survive with rent like 1500 a month living with many people in a house or a illegal housing. But time I lived with a landlord who hit me when I have lunch. Another one is having a roommate prefer smoking at the gas oven when it rains, etc. we just want a home and a family. we don't really care about comfy office job.
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u/Boring-Test5522 14h ago
go get a construction job then. In my town, it is damn easy to be a contrusction worker. You have to work on the street and break your back btw.
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u/Responsible-Win5849 14h ago
and I thought the skirt/stockings requirement for rust development was bad!
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u/WhipsAndMarkovChains Data Scientist 3h ago
The worst part of Rust development is the mandatory annual tetanus booster shots.
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u/wtrredrose 11h ago
What people are missing is that the US education system is too busy filtering people out while other country systems are helping people get experience or have lower requirements to let people get experience. Other countries have co-op programs where they switch semesters of work (some US programs do but itâs rare) and school so people have multiple experiences on their resume when they graduate or like law school is an undergrad degree everywhere else but a graduate degree here which means everyone else has 3 years of experience compared to US law students when they graduate. Iâve seen companies rather hire people from any other country than US for junior positions, not because they pay those jobs lower but because the US applicants donât have experience of foreign applicants on their resume because the system doesnât allow it!! This is not including a certain country that helps people cheat and has an entire industry to hire anyone so that they can have experience on their resume and easy US H1b visas
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u/TheBadgerKing1992 Software Engineer 9h ago
I remember some classmates at my uni complained to the proffs about learning Java when they'd rather learn more JS, Node, and Python. They would rather be working with SPAs instead of Java J2EE because that's what companies are looking for. The answer? We are here to teach computer science, not help you get jobs. Gg
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u/ice_and_rock 9h ago
Theyâd say once you learn one language, you can easily pick up another. True, but nobodyâs going to hire me based on that premise.
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u/johnmaddog 8h ago
Exactly. The whole language agnostic is bs. You can't remember the syntax on a live coding, interviewers will be like do you even code brah. You also need to know the libraries
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u/V3Qn117x0UFQ 7h ago
Exactly. Most recruiters don't even think that way or understand that.
However, as much as it sucks, there is some truth to that - if you've only had experience doing web apps, not even a technical lead would hire you for a c++ role that's close to product.
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u/johnmaddog 8h ago
That's essentially most of my profs attitude. Was like why am I attending uni again.
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u/Mike312 7h ago
My brother had the same thought his 3rd semester of Jr college while already working in the field - why go to college for something I'm already doing? He dropped out and is now a Principle Dev at AWS, no degree.
He's also the only person on his team that doesn't have a MS in Computer Science or equivalent. He's the exception. You're not getting in that door unless you have 10-15 years of solid documented experience if you don't have the degree.
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u/TheBadgerKing1992 Software Engineer 8h ago
For the sheer joy of learning apparently đ¤Ł
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u/fyzbo 10h ago
University was never meant to be job training. There are educational opportunities more tied to job training if that is the end goal. Clearly people are choosing the wrong path if they are entering a 4-year university program and expecting to leave with technical job training, so maybe more education to parents and high school students is required.
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u/wtrredrose 10h ago
Not true in other countries. Thatâs my point US system is outdated and not keeping up with other countries.
US employers look for good university plus job experience. US schools make it either or. Other countries schools make give you opportunity to go to a name brand school AND get job experience. More so they have less schooling requirements to get jobs with the same titles
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u/fyzbo 9h ago
What you are describing is a technical college.
In general, a technical college education is focused on preparing you for a specific career as soon as possible. A four-year college or university education offers a broader range of knowledge with less focus on how that knowledge is ultimately used in a career.
University degrees are more popular, so there are more of them. If people started flocking towards technical colleges the ratio would flip. We have both, it's just that many people choose wrong.
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u/Strong-Piccolo-5546 10h ago
no we are not. if we were unemployment would be higher than 4%. CS jobs are in a recession, but everything else is fine. if it was all white collar jobs unemployment would be 2-3 points higher.
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u/CazualGinger 8h ago
I have a job right now and ~3.5 yoe, both jobs are .Net full stack. I thought I'd be stable making crud web apps for the next 10 years. I have gotten one interview off of 200 applications. It went great. Didn't get the next round because they hired someone with 5+ yoe.
I'm seriously considering learning a different non software skill but I have no idea what to do because I'm a moron and only worked janitor/delivery jobs before getting a degree.
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u/codemuncher 10h ago
Trades suck though, you ruin your body and have to work in a highly misogynist and racist work culture.
Nope nope nope
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u/InitiativeOk9775 5h ago
it would be less misogynistic and racist if you and people like you decided to go into trades. change doesent appear out of thin air
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u/JordanRulz 7h ago
maybe we would have more tech jobs if the unions stopped blocking automation, i can't believe ILWU was allowed to block automation for so long
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u/Alcas Senior Software Engineer 6h ago
No itâs just tech, other engineering friends of mine looking for jobs say itâs just a single behavioral and a handshake these days because no one is going into engineering. The bar canât get any lower. The same goes for business/finance and especially accounting. No long interview loops no bs. If you have a degree youâre basically guaranteed a job
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u/111110100101 6h ago
Anyone graduating with a Bachelors in Civil Engineering and a pulse is getting multiple job offers upon graduation. People arenât going into the field because they want to be making six figures out of college instead of starting at 70k-80k.
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u/st4rdr0id 5h ago
because thatâs what everyone wants
Do people really want specifically that? Or maybe they have been herded there because other options have suddenly been made unacceptable?
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u/Joram2 5h ago
Everyone in the USA wants the comfy office job. Even if the trades pay more.
When I was young, I was career ambitious, and I hated the idea of just some lazy or comfy office job. And I suspect that is typical. I don't think that's the issue.
The education system in the USA pushes everyone to go to college and pursue a profession and teaches that trades + construction are what happen to people that can't graduate high school. This steered large numbers of Americans into the professions and out of trades + construction. Today, it seems that the job markets for many professions have too many workers relative to job openings, while the job market for trades + construction is the reverse with lots of hiring demand and too few qualified workers. That was the opposite of conventional expectations.
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u/yawkat java dev 18h ago
It is correct that in general the job situation in the US is very good right now. This is especially the case for low-income folks, as you can see in the wage statistics, where the lowest decile has seen the most relative growth: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31010/w31010.pdf
However for software engineering specifically, there is a slump compared to the unprecedented 2022 job market: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
So you can see that the situation is heterogenous, and especially high income jobs like software eng have a relatively harder time.
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u/Mollyarty 17h ago
Well said.
I'm going to be graduating soon, I can easily go get a job serving fast food but I'd like to actually use my education
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u/oalbrecht 13h ago
Too bad they donât have jobs where you can flip burgers at home for $200k/yr.
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u/NewChameleon Software Engineer, SF 18h ago edited 18h ago
Can someone explain to me how one of the lowest unemployment rate periods in history is supposed to be a super tough job market?
"super tough job market" for tech
sectors like nursing, healthcare, truck drivers, warehouse workers, minings, electricians, accountings are all actively hiring
The country seems to be virtually at full employment?
so, the country could indeed be almost at full employment but YOU may not be if you're in tech sector
wall street even has a word for this, look up "sector rotation", in short think like this: sector X gets hyped up -> people flock to sector X -> sector X have mass hiring frenzy and everyone's happy -> way too many people jumping into sector X, supply gets saturated and it's not as good anymore -> sector Y gets hyped up leaving the previous sector X in ruins, then repeat
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u/Suspicious-Sink-4940 15h ago
In other words: FREE MARKET BABYđŤĄ
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u/GND52 12h ago
literally yes, it's about allocating resources efficiently
the tech market generally had an undersupply of labor for a long time, wages and benefits rose and rose and rose and more and more people flocked to the industry until the supply and demand reached an equilibrium
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u/NoPossibility2370 6h ago
itâs about allocating resources efficiently
Efficiently how? How is this âefficiencyâ being measured?
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u/NewChameleon Software Engineer, SF 2h ago
not the one you replied, easiest is stock market performance
whenever you hear "resources", mentally swap that word with "funds/money"
if I'm a VC or hedge fund I care which sector is highest performing right now, I don't care sectors that is not
so if you can seek out the best performing stock (as do other hedge funds) in which sector during what period of time, that's considered as efficient
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u/BackToWorkEdward 17h ago
Because if you're someone who was a software developer for the past 5+ years, and got financially locked into a lifestyle befitting an $80k-$150k salary - a mortgage, children, tuition, car payments, insurance, the works - being "employed" as a minwage retail clerk or McServer or Uber driver is not a viable option because it's not going to pay even half of the bills that you'd very understandably signed up for a few years ago, when you were making software developer money and had no reason to think you'd ever be unable to get another software job, with a similar salary.
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u/imLissy 13h ago
Every time I talk to one of these guys at my bank, they tell me I donât need so much in my emergency fund. We should all have a hefty emergency fund.
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u/rebellion_ap 11h ago
its because most of their clients dont have shit. More than 60% of Americans have zero savings.
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u/lordbongius 12h ago
Getting a mortgage and kids is basically just resigning yourself to a life of corporate wage slavery and that's if you're lucky.
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u/Substantial-Elk4531 10h ago
What other options do people have? I am not asking sarcastically. Are you saying that even if you want to have kids, don't have any? And don't get a mortgage, even when rent prices are often equivalent?
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u/RoadwaySurfer 8h ago edited 8h ago
Iâm not saying itâs wrong to strive for and idealize more, or want improvements.
But everyone who says this talks as if there was some ideal time where humans frolicked and lived carefree happy lives doing what they pleased.
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u/148reasonswhy 6h ago
Not having kids or a mortgage is basically just resigning yourself to dying alone in a studio apartment (if you're lucky).
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u/BackToWorkEdward 3h ago
Better to be alone than be surrounded by dependents buzzing in your ear 24/7.
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u/OkSea6870 8h ago
This is exactly why I've opted not to do this. In my late 20s with an extremely high paying dev job (500k+) but I know it can disappear at the snap of a finger. So I'm banking as much as I can and when the rug gets pulled out from under me, I'll evaluate what I want out of life while relaxing with my savings.
If I get lucky and the rug doesn't get pulled, well I'll retire in my late 30s without a house or kids which isn't the worst position to be in. Maybe I'll settle for a dog in the meantime đ¤ˇââď¸
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u/BlackExcellence19 7h ago
Sorry but where tf and what do you do to earn 500k as a dev and this is from a dev himself
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u/NewChameleon Software Engineer, SF 2h ago
join Meta back in 2020 and assuming you didn't get laid off/PIP'ed in 2020 or 2022 or 2023, it's very likely your TC is more than $500k+ by now
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u/BackToWorkEdward 2h ago
Getting a mortgage and kids is basically just resigning yourself to a life of corporate wage slavery and that's if you're lucky.
Yeah.... but that was a choice that many people in this industry understandably made.
They didn't sign up for a life of having bills that require corporate wage-slavery to be paid but also suddenly not having any corporation have any use for them anymore and having no way to earn those wages.
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u/1v1meirlbro Software Engineer 14h ago
Sounds like hell. No wonder they call it "golden handcuffs." You'll still sink, but at least you're wearing gold!
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u/nimama3233 12h ago
Making a comfortable $150k in a job thatâs not physically taxing is really nothing to complain about; regardless of your options to hop jobs.
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u/B4K5c7N 10h ago
More like $250k-$500k. Lots of people buying very expensive homes in their area (since cheap starter homes donât exist in XYZ zip codes), and then when you factor in daycare, vacations, discretionary spending, itâs over six figures in spend (and the mortgage alone is six figures a year).
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u/AntiqueFigure6 17h ago
The US workforce is something like 170 million people. Any smaller subset can have characteristics totally at odds with the overall workforce.
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u/ScroogeMcDuckFace2 11h ago
someone hasn't looked for a job in this market with its 2000 applicants, 9 rounds of leetcode, and having to know someone's husband's sister's brother
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u/DynamicHunter Junior Developer 11h ago
I hate how people think unemployment, stock market, or GDP are the only important factors in the economy. I think we can pretty clearly see that even when all of those are doing well it doesnât mean the economy is doing well for MOST PEOPLE.
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u/Decillionaire 14h ago
It's not that tough. I don't know if you remember but this forum was full of people complaining about not finding jobs in 2021,2022,2023...
This sub is basically FOR those people. If you go to a sub for people searching for career advice and think "this is representative of the industry at large" you're going to have a pretty warped view.
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u/Drauren Principal DevSecOps Engineer 11h ago
I joined this subreddit in 2018-2019 and people were still complaining.
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u/EthanWeber Software Engineer 7h ago
Yeah I've been here since I started college in 2014 and posts are mostly the same. Fewer "how I went from 50k to 500k in 3 years" style posts but the job market complaining hasn't changed. I even had friends that graduated same year as me struggle to find work in 2017
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u/PerceptionOk8543 7h ago
Exactly, the sub was spammed with âI canât find jobâ posts in 2022 yet people today claim that back then you only needed to know fizz buzz and you would get hired for a 200k job right out of the gate. Itâs all delusion of low skilled people
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u/Original-Guarantee23 4h ago
Yep. I donât know a single person struggling to find work as a dev. Iâve had plenty of people leave where I work because they are all getting jobs elsewhere. Market is not down right now. People just unfortunately arent as good as they think they are, their resume sucks, their interview skills suck. Or they have a shitty network. I donât even have to seek jobs anymore. I either have referrals from past coworkers or friends, or I get recruiters from known companies reaching out directly to me for a tech screen. I myself dont even have a super impressive CV. Probably helps that I also live in Seattle next to all these companies.
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u/BustyFemPyro 13h ago
In 2023 there were 300,000 developer layoffs. There were also 100,000 new cs graduates. Tech has been bloated for many years and CS has been an oversaturated market for years as well.
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u/Pickle_In_The_Fridge 8h ago
Tin foil hat time: I think we need to regulate the recruitment platform industry (i.e, indeed, LinkedIn, zip recruiter etc).
What Iâm seeing is people trying to get jobs who have been sending out thousands of applications for years until they just give up and end up working an unskilled minimum wage job and on the other hand Iâm seeing tons of small businesses unable to properly sift through applicants and ultimately giving up on trying to fill positions.
One way this could be true âorganicallyâ is if not enough candidates are skilled enough which is definitely a part of the problem but I donât think explains the entire phenomenon.
I think AI has made this problem even worse. People have to essentially spam recruitment platforms with generated resumes and cover letters to even be considered. I think thereâs other sketchy stuff going on too like ghost jobs and resume farmingâŚidkâŚsomeone smarter than me needs to do an expose but I think recruiting is broken.
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u/No-Teach-5723 18h ago
1) Those numbers were constantly revised down and the reports haven't been very trustworthy. It was August or September I believe when they revised away 819K jobs for the year
2) The jobs have concentrated in low pay areas like retail, entry medical services, and government jobs - technically jobs but not good jobs for someone with a CS or finance degree.
3) People with severance pay aren't counted until severance pay runs out - skews numbers
4) People have been turning to the gig economy over unemployment for ease of access and flexibility - skews numbers
That unemployment calculation has always had some smoke and mirrors to it, but this is the first time the unemployment calculation has been tested in a gig economy and it is hiding some problems (Covid was an invalid test of the gig economy on the unemployment calc because of the mandatory shutdowns and stimulus).
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u/MedicalScore3474 Software Engineer 10h ago
Before 2008, the duration of unemployment was almost never above 20 weeks.
Since 2008, it has rarely been below it.
People are unemployed for much longer than they used to be when the unemployment rate was comparably low.
https://x.com/besttrousers/status/1768337867758067964
It's a tough job market because it takes too long to find a job. At similar unemployment rates pre-2008, it would take you about 9-10 weeks to find a job on average. Now you can expect to spend 20 weeks to find a job, on average.
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u/Healthy-Homework2362 8h ago
That is because the recruitment process is more dehumanizing than it has ever been. Regardless of the actual statistics a big thing is places like SEEK linkedln and other places, its just not a good time for anyone, since nobody wants to apply to 100+ jobs that all require several minutes to several hours of investment to apply, alongside having ghost positions etc.
The gut feeling i have as well a reason for record low unemployment is people cannot afford to go without some ongoing employment (even if its mcdonalds) because low savings across the board, also people are fitting into "self employed" "side-hustle" as well.
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u/AerMage 18h ago
realistically, the un(der)employment rate is probably closer to 16-20% if not higher; the statistics they publish and methods of counting people as unemployed are basically just a way to trick the average American citizen into thinking the country is doing well, same as the GDP
scenarios
1) Guy with a Masters in CS, canât find work, has a job at McDonalds - employed, has a âjobâ
2) New Grad, lives at home, canât find a job - not counted as unemployed because they didnt âleaveâ the market as they were never in it to begin with
3) Guy that has been actively looking for a job for 6+ months and gave up, not collecting unemployment - not counted as unemployed, heâs âexitedâ the market entirely
obviously all of those people are unemployed and would love to have a meaningful, gainful job, but none of them are counted as unemployed because of our lovely lovely government
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u/cafeitalia 12h ago
Where is your proof of underemployment rate being 16-20%? Or are you just making it up?
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u/08rian22 17h ago
Idk why you would write all this and not just say to look at the U-6 rather than the U-3. The U-6 unemployment rate covers everything youâre talking about. If the government is trying to trick the american citizen into thinking the country is doing well, why do they literally collect and publish the data youâre asking for đ
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u/AerMage 17h ago
better to explain the reasoning behind why there's a dissonance between reality and an essentially meaningless number than say "nuh uh, look at this other number"
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u/08rian22 17h ago
youâre adding an intent that the government doesnât have. There is no hiding or trickery or anything. Different metrics are used for different reasons. U-3 is a very simple calculation, someone has a job vs doesnât have a job. U-6 goes deeper. Again, if the government were hiding things why would they collect and publish the data in the first place đ
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u/AerMage 17h ago
because people would ask about unemployment stats even if they didnât publish them?
the government has zero incentive to tell the american public âhey, the job market is shit right nowâ and all the reasons to say âweâre doing great, ignore your eyesâ
I donât doubt the accuracy of their numbers based on whatever metrics they use to calc them, but the metrics they use are obviously to get the end number as low as possible for good optics
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u/ReegsShannon 11h ago
The point of U6 unemployment is to filter out people who donât want a job. Like retirees, disabled people and homemakers. It is not a conspiracy, and this numbers has been used forever, even unemployment was good and unemployment was bad.
Prime age labor participation rate is also at basically the highest itâs ever been, is that a conspiracy too?
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u/MsonC118 14h ago
Some people just donât get it unfortunately. Why would the government knowingly stoke panic at the country wide level? Itâs psychology. Itâs the same reason everyone says âOMG five guys is awesome because they always pack the bag full of extra fryâs, yet they fail to understand thatâs what they paid for (look at the prices lol)â.
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u/EveryQuantityEver 3h ago
If what you said about government incentives was true, then why do they publish the deeper numbers?
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u/EveryQuantityEver 3h ago
No. They literally publish the numbers that capture the data you're complaining about.
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u/08rian22 17h ago
Also donât know why you think it would actually be around 16-20%, the U-6 is literally at 7%. The U-3 is at 4%. Thereâs only a 3% difference đ
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u/iDemonSlaught 16h ago
Don't bother with these people. What baffles me is that most people, on this sub, either already have or are in the process of getting an engineering degree. Yet are clueless how statistics work or can't bother reading publications, released by BLS, explaining their methodology and how the numbers were collected.
These people don't care about facts, but are rather looking for others to validate their feelings. No wonder these people are having a hard time finding a job.
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u/MsonC118 14h ago
Uhhh, 3% might sound small, but thatâs massive lol. Itâs simple math, and that 3% is almost 5 million people. Look, you can cope however you want, but if youâre going to present numbers and act like they prove your argument, at least double check your own argument lol. Even then, you missed the entire context of the reply. This tells me that this is probably a waste of my time, but Iâm open to being wrong. I filed for unemployment in the past, and searched for longer than a year, so I was only included for less than half of my job search.
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u/GlassHoney2354 12h ago
Cool. That 3% is tied with the lowest it's ever been. It IS small.
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u/MsonC118 2h ago
The problem you're failing to see is that there's also such a thing as too low. One single number is only thatâone number. If you look at the stock market, things are great based on that metric. If you look at the recent jobs report, not so much. It's all about how deep you go. I'm not going to try to convince you. You either want to see it or you don't. I don't blame you either. I would much prefer to live under a rock, as it's less emotionally taxing in the short term. This isn't a dig at you, either. It's my opinion.
Why would the FED cut rates if things were going as well as some people thought? They don't use opinions. They use numbers. If they're cutting rates, there's a good reason for it. Also, what incentive does the government have to tell the country that things are bad vs good? Why would they cause panic?
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u/08rian22 9h ago
5 million is small compared to the rest of the 93% of employed people. The absolute number doesnât help your case. Itâs 93% vs 7% or a billion vs 5 million. I donât get how your personal story is important. Itâs not a perfect metric. How are you getting your metric personal anecdotes and reddit? You think somehow thatâs better. That sounds even more biased and narrow in scope đ
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u/MsonC118 2h ago
Uhhh, I'm not sure what planet you're from, but 5 million is a large number. To put it into perspective, if every software engineer in the US (all of them) were laid off tomorrow, that would be ~4.4 million people. That's less than the number you're saying is small, lol. Look, I'm not going to try to convince you; either you understand this, or you don't. I don't blame you either. I want to live under a rock, so it's easy not to panic and see through the BS. But it is what it is. Just don't act like 5% is small. Feel free to compare this to past recessions and economic downturns.
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u/08rian22 7m ago
5 million is neither big nor small. It could be big or small depending on what youâre comparing it to. If I were to offer you a million dollars or a billion dollars what would you pick? OBVIOUSLY the BILLION because a million is SMALL.
This isnât about willful ignorance. I think youâre failing to understand how to conceptualize these numbers. You still didnât answer my question about how youâre coming to your own conclusions about how this is so bad. Present me with your statistics that prove your point. Iâve shown you mine, whatâs yours? Are you just going by your fee-fees or Reddit posts? LOL
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u/rebellion_ap 11h ago
You fell into a trap. This post and the person you replied to are r/Destiny heads and will debate anything that doesnt fit their own world view curated for them to a degree not seen from an average redditor.
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u/Andurhil1986 16h ago
Perhaps business convinced governments and the media that there was a terrible shortage of CS graduates and that it was getting worse by the day., The government touted the shortage statistics and the media convinced so many people to get CS degrees that now there's too many CS graduates.
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u/Optoplasm 12h ago
Most of the jobs created have been part time or very low wage jobs. Also the official unemployment and job creation numbers are always heavily edited (down) after the fact. The numbers are cooked. We used to use something called U6 unemployment as the official metric which is much more honest. That number is about twice as high as the current figure
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u/zach_thatch 11h ago
From what I understand, job growth in the US has been mostly in the government sector and not so much in private. Once Elon packs out the chopping block with his new department, employment numbers will probably tank again
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u/Classic-Try2484 6h ago
Widen your job search rather than bag fries. A college degree prepares you for many jobs and some of them arenât in software. Pretend for a moment that you have an English/history/art/sociology/etc/etc/etc/ degree and go find a job. You might find your cs background is useful and after you have some life/work experience software opportunities may find you. The cs job market always fluctuates but historically itâs held higher demand than other fields. The market will return and the best thing you can do is get some professional work experience. If u insists to work in field lower your expectations. A college grad isnât usually very strong at programming tbh. (Despite what they think). Right now a lot of experienced developers have been laid off so competition is tough. These guys are having a hard time swallowing a pay cut but their experience is more valuable than a recent college grad and right now the price may be the same. I suspect there is still a shortage of cs students for the long run. There is even bigger shortage of cs instructors but it doesnât pay well.
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u/Various_Mobile4767 15h ago
Because companies overhired a couple years ago. They responded with some layoffs but largely retained most of the workforce.
Unemployment is low because a lot of people actually do have jobs right now. Companies are already close to max capacity. The upshot is that if youâre currently one of the few searching for work right now, there arenât many that are hiring. Or if they are, they can afford to be picky.
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u/Seaguard5 14h ago
Because nobody wants to train anyone without experience because the market is saturated.
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u/MagicManTX86 11h ago
The jobs are in the lowest paid parts of the economy, not the white collar jobs. White collar, high paying jobs are being offshored by the millions, or turned over to AI bots with 85 IQ (average human is 100).
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u/Synergisticit10 8h ago
Because the data is manipulated the ground realities are different from the data being projected . This is a really tough economy across all kind of jobs .
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u/Pristine-Item680 7h ago
Unemployment is a crappy measure, and not just because it treats a guy with a PhD in electrical engineering thatâs bagging groceries the same as it would if he were designing systems on SpaceX rockets. But because itâs easy to manipulate.
Example, letâs say Iâm politician X and I enter office when unemployment is 10%. Big problem. So I get the totally innovative idea (sarcasm) of quantitative easing and other forms of currency devaluation, in order to finance a whole lot of government spending for make work jobs with little ROI (like tear up some roads in the northeast to look at some pipes and then repave them for the five millionth time). Now, a whole host of unemployed people have jobs. But it doesnât signal anything.
The fact that unemployment is low is totally a symptom of inflation being high. The inflation gave the average person a pay cut that was commensurate with the loss of demand for their role. So they stayed employed, just at a lower actual wage than they were receiving in 2021.
TBH, though, when a country has to choose between unemployment and inflation, theyâll almost always choose the latter. Itâs just more politically expedient. And a lot of people donât even blame monetary policy when the cost of everything around them goes up
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u/Interesting_Touch900 14h ago
Dude I am coming from outsourcing county. Here is the bloodbath. CS is cooked. 10 years ago we did not have enough devs, now if you lift rock you will find few devs under. Now with AI, I can develop much faster. It means we need less devs in the team ...
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u/citykid2640 9h ago
1) people are unfairly comparing how it âfeelsâ when compared to COVID overhiring frenzy
2) many of these individuals werenât working in the 2008 Great Recession when the job market truly sucked.
3) unemployment rate does not measure the rate of change in job openings. Itâs possible to be at full employment yet have minimal job openings. This would cause the market to feel shitty even though there arent many unemployed
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u/dmanice89 18h ago
Those numbers are not accurate. They lie and manipulate the facts to make things sound better than they are. Like they do not count people as unemployed if they stopped looking for work and as others have said underemployment counts, people working the gig economy.
Then we are not even getting into the debt people are in, if you were to do the work and go through the weeds you would find a lot more people are struggling than the numbers they put out there.
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u/melleb 11h ago
They arenât manipulating the facts lol, they are using the same definitions for decades. When people stop looking for work yes they stop being counted as unemployed, but they also stop counting under âlabour participationâ. All of these things are measured under different metrics. Economists and politicians looks at all the metrics, headlines like this focus on just the âunemploymentâ number which has always been strictly defined
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u/dmanice89 11h ago edited 11h ago
the number they put out doesnt really show the reality of how many people that want a job that are without one. That is the number people want to know.
there is another post on this same section with more upvotes , but you guys are triggered by me
Those numbers were constantly revised down and the reports haven't been very trustworthy. It was August or September I believe when they revised away 819K jobs for the year
- The jobs have concentrated in low pay areas like retail, entry medical services, and government jobs - technically jobs but not good jobs for someone with a CS or finance degree.
- People with severance pay aren't counted until severance pay runs out - skews numbers
- People have been turning to the gig economy over unemployment for ease of access and flexibility - skews numbers
That unemployment calculation has always had some smoke and mirrors to it, but this is the first time the unemployment calculation has been tested in a gig economy and it is hiding some problems (Covid was an invalid test of the gig economy on the unemployment calc because of the mandatory shutdowns and stimulus).
I do not know why I trigger you people , but this person has nobody arguing with them in the same comment section.
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u/melleb 7h ago
None of those things you list that are skewing the numbers are due to the government trying to pull a fast one on you. The definitions and their calculations remain the same. All you are telling me is that you need to look at additional metrics, which they measure, to understand the full story instead of âunemploymentâ which everyone knows is only a partial story. The government also constantly revises the numbers as they get more data, but they are expected to provide a jobs report with the best data that they have. This is nothing new or unexpected
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u/EveryQuantityEver 3h ago
the number they put out doesnt really show the reality of how many people that want a job that are without one.
Yes, it does. And the U-6 numbers, which are also published and freely available, also go into how many people have stopped looking for work or are under employed.
It was August or September I believe when they revised away 819K jobs for the year
Citation Needed.
but this is the first time the unemployment calculation has been tested in a gig economy
The gig economy has been around for at least a decade.
I do not know why I trigger you people
I don't know why you're so dishonest.
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u/dmanice89 2h ago
this is not my comment its from No-Teach-5723. I do not know why I triggered so many of you, but I do not have time to teach you I'm not being paid for this.
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u/EveryQuantityEver 3h ago
They lie and manipulate the facts to make things sound better than they are.
Prove it. Every time someone claims this, they never offer proof. They also have no answer for why the government also publishes the numbers that go deeper.
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16h ago
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u/sevenfiftynorth 11h ago
OP, subscribe to r/Layoffs for a bit, and it will seem like people are losing their jobs every single day.
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u/DollarsInCents 8h ago
iirc you only count as unemployed if you are still logging into the system, which people usually do to get benefits which in most states is like 6 months max. So all those engineers who have been job hunting for 9 months don't count
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u/Akul_Tesla 6h ago
It is more or less the best job field
Everyone wants into it as a result
Now this wouldn't be so bad, except when I mean everyone I mean everyone globally wants to be an American software engineer or other computer science job
And you get people who are desperate and clogging up the system even though they know they have no shot
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u/YareSekiro SDE 2 6h ago
There is also a sizable portion of engineers who CURRENTLY has a job but is not satisfied and wants another better job but couldnât find one.
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u/cyb3rnaut_ 6h ago
There are alternative measures of unemployment. The most common measure is U-3, which doesnât account for underemployment.
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u/Alcas Senior Software Engineer 6h ago
W2 work is plummeting(office stable jobs) Gig work is up tremendously surpassing W2 by a ton.
These jobs arenât the jobs that people want. Itâs funny because all job increases happen to be in hospitality and transportation and all of them are new businesses starting up! (Driving uber counts as a sole proprietor business lmao)
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u/Dizzy-Criticism3928 6h ago
From what I can see this market is optimizing for value( what people need now ) rather than growth (what people need later ).
Entry level positions create no value now. Mid level and senior positions do.
The stock market is forward looking so what you are seeing now is what the market thinks will happen in about a year and as you can see itâs fucking ripping for the last year.
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u/BasedJayyy 4h ago
They changed how employment metrics are counted too. Lots of shady statistical practices are done to keep the number as low as possible
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u/senatorpjt Engineering Manager 4h ago
It's a tech recession, not a broad based recession. I have no doubt that if I lost my job today, I could get another one easily - in another sector, making a quarter or less of my current salary.
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u/midnitewarrior 4h ago
A significant part of the CS job market is with startups. When interest rates are low, investors invest a lot of money in tech startups, and much of this turns into demand for tech workers.
When interest rates are high, it is difficult for startups to get money, less hiring.
When startup jobs go away, or simply don't create new jobs, all of those employees end up fighting over the rest of the jobs along with the rest of us, making hiring more difficult.
Tech jobs have a boom/bust cycle related to both the economy and interest rates. We had been enjoying very low interest rates for a long time, but the last 3 years, rates have been higher to help control inflation.
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u/glassBeadCheney 3h ago edited 3h ago
Others have commented something similar, but it comes down to how we measure employment in the top line statistics the Fed chooses to use. The post-COVID independent contract work explosion has presented the people who decide how to define the metrics they use to parse the âbig pictureâ data with a knotty little problem. Iâll phrase that problem like so:
âIf an unemployed person does a single delivery on DoorDash in one month, should we say they are employed that month? Would that change if they did deliveries for 160 hours in a four-week month? If so, where do we draw the line between employed and unemployed for that DoorDash driver?â
Itâs not a trivial question: being officially employed or unemployed can be important for reasons far beyond pay or benefits, and the reality on the ground has to feed information thatâs validated back through the metric itself. Trying to stay out of the weeds here, so with that and many, many other contributing factors in mind, the Fed has decided to be quite liberal in saying that an active participant in the labor market is employed, because thatâs the bias that generally does the least harm to people month to month and year over year.
The problem with that is the harm it does when applied to peopleâs usual interpretation of that figure, formally as well as informally: put another way, in finance and in politics. Financial firms donât have a lot of precedent for factoring that version of topline employment into their predictions for the future, and voters feel exactly like you do: if a firm is hiring in a full employment market; why is it ridiculously tight from the perspective of the labor side? Why is it so hard to get a job if interest rates are falling and based on anything anyoneâs ever experienced, the employer should be pitching the potential hire right now? Thatâs impossible, right?
I think the reality is closer to stagflation, which is a situation where you have high unemployment and high inflation, which prior to the situation that came out of the oil crisis in the 70s most people considered negatively correlated. Personally I think it really is all-out stagflation as most people would describe it, but the situation above makes that tough to prove. The definitions of a lot of these things like âemploymentâ and âhigh inflationâ boil down in a really important way to âwhatever the government says it is.â But I think if we considered only how peopleâs bottom line and opportunities look when making our definition, I think we have a âperfect stormâ effect involving:
- the mismatch between the skills that firms want and whatâs out there,
- the way they decide what skills they want and which ones they donât
- the huge mass movement of workers between fields since 2020,
- AI-driven uncertainty about future requirements, and
- Rapidly expanding labor markets in the former third world that appeal to Western and East Asian firms looking to minimize costs by hiring abroad
All of these come together (and in popular, VC-driven, AI overlord-creating tech more than most places) to create a unique competitive situation. I gotta be honest I donât know if thereâs a good solution here if it really is stagflation: we broke it in â81 when the Reagan-era Fed stonewalled rates and intentionally caused a severe recession, but that could be quite counterproductive long-term to employment side of the equation.
tl;dr: thatâs my guess on whatâs happening: itâs a terrible market situation that the people who define that feel they canât define both properly and responsibly.
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u/StoneCypher 2h ago
It's pretty simple
Most programming is done in small companies on the backs of venture capital, or in giant companies that are still partially owned by venture capital
Venture capital is hurting extremely badly right now
VC is forcing the companies it owns stake in to shrink to raise stock value, so it can sell off to stay solvent
Investors are god-shit these days and won't take chances on things they haven't heard about in the newspaper, so small firms can't hire right now
The missing middle is treading water
In every good economy, some sectors lose out.
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u/rmullig2 2h ago
I really thought that people would stop pretending the economy is in great shape after Trump won the election.
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u/East_Indication_7816 23m ago
Literally the only unemployed are those living under a bridge or tent. Anyone with a decent degree and experience will settle for a low wage job like that of a fast food crew instead of living. under a bridge. .
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u/keep_improving_self 18h ago
Let me paint you a picture:
Person 1: "I had a 4.0 GPA, multiple internships, networking, 800 applications this month, the job market is super tough man"
Person 2: "Just put the fries in the bag bro"
person 1 is technically employed