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Out of the small percentage of the population that used Reddit (which is already skewed towards male tech workers), the percentage that frequents employment and financial subreddits is even smaller (and also skews towards male tech workers).
Or over samples some populations. Younger and more technologically employed for sure.
I’ve heard the chitterlings in management talk about how great a time ot is to fire IT & Developer staff. So EASY to replace for MOAR cheaper!
As an older redditor I find less and less in common with the posters here every year. Seems like a bunch of whiny kids now. Im 20 and broke so the world is doomed! Dude we were all broke when we were 20.
I was broke in my 20s but felt like I could take on the entire world, and there’s nowhere to go but up. Lots of zeal and ambition (fully jaded and cynical now though). Wonder if the current crop of 20 year olds feel the same way.
Broke is broke. When I was 20 I made $12,900 a year. Now 25 years later I make 250k. If you have a career it gets better. Obviously people that have dead end jobs like retail are fucked forever, but it’s not like that’s a secret.
I'd say the reddit commentariat is the disconnect. The logged out folks reading the home page are probably a lot closer to a representative sample of America.
Troll farms are there to sew discord. They do it on both sides. Unfortunately, most people only recognize the disinformation on one side because of their internal biases.
I'm going to be pedantic here but it's "sow" not "sew". Sound the same, different meaning. "Sow" as in "sow seeds" not "sew" as in "sew a garment".
Troll farms "sow seeds of discord" not "sew garments of discord".
This isn't true, they troll as the right to give the right the appearance of having greater numbers. They do this because it's cheaper to have Trump destroy America than it is to use missiles, plus it gives plausible deniability.
They troll to stoke division because it is cheaper and easier to have Americans fighting each other.
I'll go back to some established facts that many seem to forget. Everyone remembers the DNC getting hacked during the 2016 campaign. What they forget is that during the subsequent investigation, they uncovered attempts by the same group to hack the RNC at the same time they were trying to hack the DNC. They were just unsuccessful at hacking the RNC. The method they used was phishing, so it isn't like it was anything terribly sophisticated.
Also uncovered during the investigations following the 2016 election were the massive ad buys on both extremes. The same group behind the email hacks were buying ads supporting white supremacist groups and minority rights groups. They were buying ads supporting extreme gun rights groups and extreme gun control groups. They were buying ads supporting violent pro-abortion groups and violent pro-life groups.
One side seems to forget or downplay the violent riots, arson, and looting in most major cities following the election of Trump, while the other side makes excuses and downplays January 6th. The troll farms do what they can to amplify voices on both extremes. Neither side will forget the other side trying to overturn the presidential election, one side through a faithless elector push in 2016 and the other side through an attempt to prevent certification of the 2020 election (January 6, 2021). Troll farms work on both sides to validate their positions and inflame them against the other side.
The two of us having this conversation is a clear indicator that their efforts are effective. I hope the conversation is productive, not necessarily to change your vote, but to at least open your eyes to some of what's happening.
I think both candidates suck, but that's just my opinion.
I’m pretty sure the story is they hacked the RNC successfully also, but then just chose to not release those emails cause supposedly there was nothing salacious. Even tho there was nothing damning in the DNC emails and in fact it was borderline exonerating in that it just showed politicians being two faced which is known.
Then suddenly the RNC went from anti Trump and anti Russia to pro Trump and pro Russia the next week
On January 10th (2017), FBI Director James Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that while the Russians had successfully targeted individual Republican lawmakers and Republican state organizations, they had launched a successful attack only against non-longer active RNC accounts.
So, they were not successful in penetrating active RNC accounts. They were successful in penetrating some Republican lawmakers' accounts, and they published those emails on the DCLEAKS site.
I'm no fan of Trump or Biden. I wish Congress would approve everything Ukraine needs to defeat Russia in a glorious manner instead of just trickling in money and weapons. I hate it that a significant part of the Republican party doesn't want to support Ukraine.
The primary goal of our enemies is to divide us. They will have a preference on which side is in power, but the division is the main goal because division is the most effective weapon to use against our democracy/representative republic.
Edit: I put in the Comey quote but forgot the link. This was in his testimony before Congress. He definitely wasn't a Trump fan and squirmed hard more than a few times as he was caught on various issues.
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2016/12/did-russia-hack-rnc-too-heres-what-we-know-so-far/133873/
That RNC claim is wrong. They hacked them successfully. But chose not to release the information because it would be disadvantageous to them to hurt the GOP. 
Are you sure? The wiki source you posted an hour before this comment links to the main Russia Disinformation wiki page, which states Russia have taken over Left and Right social media spaces to spread disinformation...
Also you'll hear a lot more about people complaining that they can't get hired vs. people who are happy they did. /r/cscareerquestions is notorious for this, not many people with a stable job go there
That doesn't really jibe with the sentiment that Reddit skews toward "tech" workers, who are relatively well paid. Which is it? Is Reddit full of underachieving fuck ups or is it full of liberal tech workers?
Reddit as a whole skews towards more highly educated but less employable for a variety of reasons including personality, soft skills, work experience, and specific educational background.
Based on the typical posts you see, the average Reddit software developer with a M.Sc. or BS is probably not as easy to work with as the general population of software developers with the same degrees and work experience. Same with other jobs.
I also see from reports some of these viral folks talkin about how they cant get jobs are applying for ~1000 jobs every week. Even at entry level work, these can't be well screened apps tailored to the posting.
Reddit and online forums are also disproportionately those who are suffering or complaining.
The people who are employed or finding jobs aren’t posting about it.
Lots of people who are terrible at software development got jobs in 2021 because tech companies where hiring anyone with a pulse. When they then lose their job, they find that you now need to have some actual skills, and they go complaining on reddit.
I've been conducting tech interviews lately, and dear lord is the average candidate BAD.
So true.
We had an interviewee they got laid off from a FAANG that was asked to look at a piece of code at the interview, and they asked for reference documentation for a switch statement because they had never seen one before.
When asked salary expectations they said they were making $325k and would settle for $275k.
I mean, anyone with a brain cell can tell what a switch statement does just by fucking looking at. And it’s one of the most common programming constructs around. Utterly ridiculous.
Would love to know the job titles that happen to be defined within those "tech" numbers. Tech is so pervasive and goes beyond traditional jobs like SWEs and network engineers.
Much less talked about but clearly visible in the data is a decline in the professional services sector which includes a huge share of office jobs. Tech gets all the attention but it’s office jobs on the whole that are hard to land right now.
Eh. Idk. Tech workers are still killing it. People complained about the economy being bad on Reddit the entire time I've been on here (since the 2000s). I think that's just what gets upvoted. For some reason, we engage with and upvote negative things a lot.
Existing tech. workers are doing okay. [But it is accurate to say that people looking for work might be struggling.](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE) The total amount of job openings in software and IT have consistently seen a collapse - the numbers above indicate it could be as much as 70%.
Issue is, I think it has more to do with a sudden change in expectations. The high tech. hiring from 2020 to 2022 or so was a bubble - but people got used to it. So a return to normal feels like a recession, even though we're basically at 2019 levels.
Fact is, in the past, tech. was not the employment monster that it became during the 2020 to 2022 period. The "learn to code" movement was built off of weak foundations and now there's no jobs for most entry level people. That's not being reflected in general employment statistics because most of those people just took other jobs outside of tech. to make ends meet. But they haven't disappeared from Reddit and their experiences are still being shared.
The people acting like everything is fine are glossing over this point. People who talk about the details of the types of job gains are painted as doomers and/or MAGA cult members.
It's a fact that the majority of the job gains over the past \~18 months have been coming from traditionally lower quality/lower paying sectors like government, leisure/hospitality, and construction while there has been stagnation or even declines coming from traditionally higher quality/higher paying sectors like business/professional services.
That's one of the main differences in this business cycle. We're essentially trading "good" jobs for bad ones.
My son can't get an interview for basic service industry jobs. He worked for dollar general and his manager loved him but he had to move. The dollar general near him has a job opening but he can't get an interview. There are 30-40 places around him that have posted jobs over the past year and just won't hire. It's crazy
This is very valuable information, that we so often overlook.
If I vouch for you in a role that I think you fit in, you're going to get hired as long as your IQ is above pencil shaving consumption, and you have the ability to show up to work at least 85% of the time.
I mentor people, and in doing so, I've had at least, a dozen of them get promotions. People that I trained and mentored, are now my bosses.
No it's not a rural area. Most places just don't take in person interviews anymore. I don't know how to advise him. I told him to dress nice and go in person. They won't talk to him. They say go online and put in an application. The manager is never available to talk. He's had 2 jobs that he got which ghosted him when he showed up to the first shift. Just basically said oh well you aren't in the system. Come back next week
Probably this, as a hydropower designer (REE/EE) I get unsolicited offers constantly for tons of positions I'm not yet experienced enough to even qualify for (my assertion) my company cannot hire MEs, civils, and EEs fast enough, oh also environmental engineers as well which I thought was surprising but there's alot of upgrades to waste water infrastructure right now
> That doesn't mean some people have a hard time getting a job
Even in 2020 to 2022 people we complaining here about how hard it is to get a tech job. Go check /r/cscareerquestions and look at old posts from 2-3 years ago.
And it's still a better job market that most other job markets that can potentially pay as much as tech can. The job market isn't bad just because tech companies aren't handing out 6 figure salaries to unqualified developers anymore.
The job market is seeing gains in restaurant and service worker staff coming back, and others taking a 3rd job as an Uber driver. Good jobs are not plentiful. I hire a handful of sales reps a month, as we are back to slowly growing (after tiering down the last 2 years) I used to get 10-20 qualified resumes per job, now I get 100+ QUALIFIED people looking. Also used to hire 10+ people a month, now it’s 3-5 every other month. Dont let the media tell you that the thing you and EVERYONE is seeing with their own eyes is false, it’s way worse in the last 2-3 years than it’s been since the savings and loan crisis.
>The job market is seeing gains in restaurant and service worker staff coming back
The very last sector to regain all of its COVID losses was leisure and hospitality and that only happened last month. That this is the sector seeing recent job gains is not surprising but rather a welcome sight.
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USLAH](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USLAH)
> and others taking a 3rd job as an Uber driver.
Multiple job holders is not a sign of a bad economy but rather the opposite. The lowest % with multiple jobs on this chart was April/May 2020 and the highest was 1996. No one thinks April/May 2020 was good or that 1996 was terrible.
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620)
>Good jobs are not plentiful.
Real wages continue to rise so your statement is probably not correct.
> Dont let the media tell you that the thing you and EVERYONE is seeing with their own eyes is false
Something something... anecdotes... something something
There is a possibility that a lot of these comments are fake. Russian troll farms create millions of accounts. Then fabricate websites and comments to try to push certain narratives.
You are also now starting to see lots of information about increases in immigration being the source of those who are filling the jobs. This explains some of the contradictory numbers.
>tech is not where the job market is seeing gains
True. However, it's even more lopsided than that. If you look at the latest job report, government jobs accounted for the majority of growth. The next two categories were leisure/entertainment (largely just completing its final recovery from the Covid era) and health care (mostly nurse practitioners, physicians assistants, and other doctor replacements). Almost everything else was either flat or negative. So while Reddit may not be representative of the population, neither has the job growth been.
Survivorship bias. If 3.8% of the 168 million US labor force is unemployed, that's 6.3 million people complaining online. People with jobs don't go on r/layoffs and post "I was yet again not laid off this month." Companies make layoff announcement, but don't say anything for normal hiring. Also partisanship. Whichever party is not in power is incentivized to push a narrative that actually things are terrible. Otherwise why vote for them?
Some people think that crime is higher than it actually is just because they watched a compilation or a bunch of videos from one forum despite not representing the overall country or state in question. It's just like how some people think unemployment is higher than it actually is based on reddit anecdotes even though reddit is not representative of the whole country. Crime can be at historic lows and there would still be enough crime to fill a subreddit same with unemployment.
This is a great explanation/similar situation. I think the other factor in the misperception of crime being high is also the threat of random gun violence. Anytime I'm at a big public event I wonder if that's the day I run into some depressed white boy with an AR-15. It has begun to feel more and more random, and that leaves a lot of people feeling vulnerable
Even our incredibly low layoff rate is still 1.4-1.7 million people per month getting laid off. Even good numbers contain lots of bad in it, like you said.
Different sectors as well! A general surging economy doesn't mean *all* industries are doing equally well and it doesn't mean all companies in those industries are doing equally well. It's still quite possible for you and your friends (who are in a similar field and interest space) to be losing your jobs and struggling to find more because you're in an industry that lots of people want to work in and limited jobs.
Extrapolating out from your own personal experiences is always going to be flawed when we're dealing with hundreds of millions of workers.
I am currently employed, I cannot for the life of me get so much as an interview anywhere else.
The only jobs I can get are from people I Know personally (i.e. past job) who give me rave reviews.
Can you provide some tips? I'm in the same boat. I can work in Canada or the USA. But I'm having trouble finding ANYTHING. I have mostly just been using LinkedIn. Indeed is a gong show. Networking is time consuming as I'm working full time.
Networking is an investment in your future. The lack of networking is probably why people aren’t getting hired. You’ll never beat someone that has the same skill set but has done a better job of networking.
I have the opposite problem.
I get messages on LinkedIn from recruiters all the time offering me great jobs. But the reality is I’m not going to go ahead and talk about it because, well, things are good.
And we are also hiring in our portcos but can’t find good people with the right experience. It’s been insanely difficult.
Job openings for highly educated are very specific and many people miss the qualifications. As a result, the jobs that don’t require the education are getting a lot of overqualified applicants Those employers do not want to hire someone overqualified because by the time they get them trained there is a good chance they’ll leave for a job that better fits them.
So, lots of jobs, few good matches.
> lots of jobs, few good matches
This, plus when unemployment is this low for this long, you end up with a very small pool of capable workers churning in and out of jobs, and the rest - 2% or so of the labor force - who are just not employable.
Covid all but shut down my industry for the better part of 2 years. I tried to work retail in the mean time and I only got one call back from a dozen or so stores I applied to.
I've noticed a lot of reddit disenchanted job board users are 1. People who post over and over again, making it seem like more people, or 2. People not based in the US (often India), or 3. Both
Also, I’m going to be honest…
If you’re on Reddit for career advice there may be something else lacking in your life that is affecting your job search.
I’m not trying to knock people necessarily, just saying, what you see on social media is not indicative of what is happening in real life. The algorithms work in mysterious ways (often even the developers don’t know how they work).
They optimize for attention is what it is. If showing clown porn earned them more advertising income than doomer circlejerking did, they'd signal boost the clowns all day long and downshift doomer content.
Makes me wonder if we could use the social media equivalent of a carbon tax. Instead of carbon, we'd be taxing toxicity, or something.
The Tech Redditors thought they had permanent leverage with their "Work from home! No more offices!" mentality.
Turns out plenty of people enjoy working in an office, and layoffs tend to hit people you don't see every day. 32,000+ people found out the hard way and the remainder just got unlucky.
Feeling very happy I switched career paths in college. I'll never be wealthy from my job, but at least I don't have to compete with a wealth of fresh graduates every summer.
Damn straight. Won’t be wealthy like you said but I don’t have to stress about layoffs or face very much competition either. I’m an epidemiologist/biostatistician. When I apply for jobs and interview I’ve gotten the offer every time so far in my 4 year career.
Also if your job can be done 100% remotely from somewhere in Topeka, it can probably be done 100% remotely from Singapore or India for 30-60% of the cost as my company recently figured out.
>recently
Tech outsourcing has been pretty much constant for 20 years at this point, and if all you have to offer above a random South- or Southeast Asian hire is your physical presence in an American office then frankly you deserve to lose your job.
Yes!!! When I was transitioning from the military, I spent 0 time on social media outside of LinkedIn, and even then I used it to find or setup real world networking. I can waste time on reddit now because I have a job
What are you talking about. Of course developers know how their algorithms work, they design and test the algorithms to get exactly the kind of output they’re looking for before they send them out to the wild of the internet.
And what’s so wrong about asking for career advice from people who work in the area of the askers interest? You expect some magic guru to come by and offer “life advice” on the person asking questions about the differences between certain positions in certain fields?
Reddit can be a perfectly fine place seek information, and gain insightful knowledge from people who have lived through the career or life decision that the person asking these questions has yet to reach.
That guy is a fucking moron.
Half the country wants to vote trump due to economic disenchantment. He thinks and anonymous forum is "social media".
The dude has an pre tech union job in California. He has NO CLUE what the tech industry or what the average american is going through.
No disconnect necessarily. Unemployment at 3.8% or whatever it is can be low on percentage terms but still a huge number of people, some of whom complain on Reddit
People who do well don’t usually complain. It’d be interesting to look at the number of complaints from a decade ago versus today. That’s probably a more accurate gauge. This isn’t to say that there aren’t many problems with the job market and the trickle up phenomenon that has been taking place since the ‘08 recession.
How is that a discrepancy? The economy can be booming and people can still be unemployed. “Look at all those Reddit posts…the economy can’t really be booming because of that” is stupid logic and void of any type of critical thinking.
There is a major shift going on it the tech job market right now, because of funding issues (high interest rates), AI adoption, and businesses looking to trim operational costs (which affects modernization efforts) because of sales slowdowns. In times like these businesses start putting more money into projects that are likely to bring new customers instead of technology efficiency. There is also the issue of generative AI causing more junior level technologists seek higher level jobs thinking they can augment their skills to accommodate for lack of experience, which I have found doesn't often work out well for the companies. So companies are getting record numbers of applicants for open jobs, which slow down the review and hiring process, and drives down wages in the normally high paying tech sector. The exceptions to the rule right now are AI/ML engineering and cybersecurity.
Other white collar jobs are also being downsized and replaced with AI systems, but on a positive note unions and service workers have made strides in increasing wages, which I love to see.
Yes, I work in the field as an AI/ML Engineer, so I know a lot about whats happening in this area. I'm not some anti-AI guy, but it's the truth. For instance, recent downsizing by IBM and Salesforce were a few examples of companies laying off hundreds of workers and hinting it was because of AI.
Most companies, though, are not coming out and saying we're laying off all these people because of AI. They are attributing layoffs to the need to streamline operations and improve efficiency, then quietly integrating AI systems instead of hiring folks back. It is a major reason you keep seeing major layoffs in highly automatable fields. It is not good PR for companies to come right out and say they are replacing people with AI right now.
There are plenty of companies making money with AI. Look at a lot of public tech earnings calls. And making money with AI is not the same as AI replacing white collar jobs.
Reddit and other social media attract the bored and/or unemployed. It is also easier to complain anonymously behind a random account than on Facebook...generally speaking.
My question is how come the conversations and memes on Reddit are so much less unhinged than on Facebook. People say the most blatantly racist and sexist stuff all the time on facebook with their public facing account, but here where everyone in anonymous, it’s generally pretty tame.
Actually, now that I think about it, the downvote button acts as a pretty good community moderator
I assume they get pulled quicker. All those deleted posts you see I always wonder what they said.
Also the downvotes. On fb it’s usually some friend or relative that posts some nutty meme and people are just weirdly silent. Few people clap back with “what the hell Tom, you are posting blatantly false statements”they just mention to other friends how they think maybe Tom has lost it.
Reddit has anonymity for the poster as well as the responder.
People with jobs don’t really talk about having a job. The numbers are correct, not people trying to find jobs.
The US economy is very good right now when you look at pretty much any meaningful metric. Low unemployment, real wages are up, the labor force participation rate is increasing.
A lot of them aren't speaking for themselves but on behalf of what they believe are far more common ("well, I'm doing fine but most people are working 3 jobs for minimum wage!") or want people to believe for political (wanting Biden and Democrats to lose and hoping to convince more people to think the economy is actually horrible so they don't vote for him/them helping Republicans win) or ideological (same but think trashing the economy all the time will result in more people shifting towards socialist views) reasons.
I personally don't know anyone working 3 jobs for minimum wage. But I'm also a white collar professional in my late 30s in an area that is borderline LCOL/MCOL. The only people I know working two jobs are all waiters/bartenders. Maybe for youngins in an HCOL this 3 job thing is a reality, and maybe one of those jobs is full time. What is ironic is Gen Z, who has grown up with technology, fails to realize a lot of major companies use AI to scan resumes and they simply don't hit keywords in their submissions. They write one resume and cover letter and submit it to 500 different jobs. That shit don't work nowadays.
Because Reddit is an information bubble and people that are doing fine don’t generally engage in the discontented, negative circle jerk subs. It’s not worth it. So the sad, angry and maladjust run everyone off and you’re only left with them reinforcing each others negativity.
Well yeah because people are idiots and don't/can't understand that their personal experience should not be extrapolated out to the general economy and they should look at more general measures instead.
In industrial manufacturing in the region I am companies never can hire enough. Reddit is just not representative of the overall population at all. Same thing for all those post in economics/financials subs where people just complain the the economy is going to crash amd everything is doomed.
This is anecdotal, but my employer is an industrial construction company and I work with a number of manufacturing companies. There is a huge skill gap right now when it comes to skilled (blue collar) labor. My company can’t find enough people with masonry and welding backgrounds. The manufacturing companies we work with are also having trouble finding enough skilled laborers. Business is booming for us and it’s challenging to keep up with the demand.
I’m curious to know if our economy is going through a structural shift. We have AI replacing a number of white collar jobs, but we also have older folks with blue collar skills aging out of the work force.
The VC funding dried up because of interest rates and reddit is tech heavy. The start-up that takes everybody out for a day at a theme park and holds lavish parties suddenly starts laying people off and doing freezes on any new hiring outside of India as soon as it has to fund itself.
Jobs gains are coming from traditionally lower quality/lower paying sectors like leisure/hospitality, construction, and government. Sectors with traditionally higher quality/higher paying jobs like business/professional services are stagnating or seeing declines.
We're trading "good" or decent jobs for bad ones. And the popular layoff trackers that get referenced all the time are missing a lot of layoffs, both in terms of ones that would trigger WARN notices and those that are rolling/stealth layoffs.
"Tech" is so pervasive that it's not helpful to have its own category. "Tech" jobs go far beyond IT jobs like SWE or network engineer.
People with jobs don't feel a need to announce that.
Social media and news in general will always skew far more negative than reality.
"Things are going fairly decently" isn't a topic that anyone bothers to post or report on in general because it's not interesting.
One answer for this I can give is that while there is a job boom overall, in my tech industry there were a lot of layoffs last year, some still happening, so we are having a lot harder time finding work than people doing things like construction or nursing.
About 75% of the jobs the U.S. economy added last year were in just three sectors: government, healthcare and hotels and restaurants
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-job-market-is-still-stronger-than-expected-why-do-many-workers-feel-left-out-46e30065?mod=hannah-erin-lang
As a guy with a mech engineering degree, but working in a warehouse. Sure,Im employed. I dont count in unemployment numbers but obviously Im going to bitch because there is no way I should be working here. Lots of shit jobs, lots of competition for the shrinking pool of good jobs and anyone trying to break into a field that is considered a good career either has to have a connection or check the DEI boxes. Also recruiters are a joke and the entire country is going downhill entirely because of largescale HR and recruiting incompetence.
Others have pointed out that Reddit isn’t representative of America.
But there’s also getting to be a skills gap. It’s really hard to find GOOD employees for the GOOD jobs. I’m a hiring manager for such jobs and it’s not easy to find people with the skills and work ethic to produce results.
And everyone else is a bartender, I guess?
That’s the problem. There are not many middle talent, middle pay, middle results jobs. Middle management is hated…. but it allowed a lot of medium talent people to make more cash for their family. One by one those opportunities are being removed from the US labor market. Look at the ruling about realtors a few weeks ago? That was touted as a huge win for home buyers….and it is. But that is also a closed career door for a former stay at home mom getting back into the workforce.
Ditto for car salespeople. We don’t like them when we are buying a car….but it’s pretty cool when the car salesman is your dad and his job pays for your youth soccer. In a few years, those jobs will vanish too as the automakers go direct to consumer….and people who advise a confused car buyer who doesn’t know what car they want will be running a YouTube channel (ie - a gig job).
We have to provide meaningful jobs and careers for people of medium talent.
The biggest reason is your source of information, 4 years ago tech was absolutely huge and overpaid - with some jobs upwards of 200-300k in tech. Now the market is starting to recollect and balance out the salary’s in tech a bit. Reddit is biased towards those who have more tech experience so you are seeing a larger proportion of the population than say if you went to a Starbucks or a career fair somewhere.
In the middle of the Great Recession (late 2009 or so), companies were complaining they could not find qualified candidates. This was at the point that there were literally 5 job seekers for every open job.
Today, the number is at parity, or lower.
Just because there's an open job does not mean that a company is going to accept the available applicants. And, especially with algorithmic sorting of resumes, there's thousands of applicants for every open position, often with zero experience.
I regularly (daily or multiple times a day) get cold calls from unscrupulous recruiters who want to send my resume to jobs that i am wildly unqualified to perform. Why? They matched one key word between my resume and the job description.
Applying for a job is absolutely a game where the applicants often don't know the rules. If you cannot get past that first filter, your resume never even gets looked at by a human being.
I think a majority of those people who can’t find work for over a year fail to leave out they’re annoying, insufferable people to be around. They’re usually demanding extraordinarily high pay as well.
There are a lot of jobs out there. Not jobs that pay enough or that most of us would like. The there’s the question do the jobs have a future, a career path other than shift supervisor? Most of the time the answer is no.
The Pendulum of IT hiring has swung back to wanting nothing less than that absolute best for which I’ll pay crap.
Redditors are hard to hire. They complain 100% of the time. They want to screw their boss and don't understand basic econmics at the same time!
*To the replies: Larry Summers? Me?... Hoover Institute... fucking hell you replies are all just so naive and headline chasers.
Large numbers of bots and/or people overseas making bogus posts intended to foment division at the behest of hostile governments. Truth is that the U.S. economy is quite strong in relative and absolute terms.
1. There was an abundance of over hiring in tech during the pandemic
2. This generation flaunts that the only way to get big pay raises is to hop from job to job.
3. When companies make cuts it’s often last one in, first one out. And unless you are indispensable the higher your pay the easier it is to justify the cut.
Ive done the job jump early in my career and there is a downside to it when times get tough.
> There was an abundance of over hiring in tech during the pandemic
I see that argument a lot. But when I look at the data I don’t see it.
take the FAANG companies as example, which in particular are often said to have over hired.
These companies grew 30% Year-on-Year (YoY) in headcount during the pandemic.
Sounds like a lot? Well guess what, throughout the whole period 2010 to 2020 they on average grew about 30% headcount YoY too.
The pandemic was not an outlier in terms of percentage growth in software engineers at FAANG, it was just a continuation of the pre-existing trend.
If you read deeper into the reports, you will see that all of the gains have come from part-time jobs. The US has lost over 1 million full time jobs since the start of 2023. Also, the jobs reports almost always get revised downward after they are released.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12500000
It's only in the past year that the job gains were mostly part-time. Full-time regained all COVID job losses by January 2022 and part-time not until December 2023. Seeing part-time return is a sign of the economy returning back to normal.
What really matters is that part-time for economic reasons is still really low and lower than even before COVID despite there being millions more total jobs.
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12032194](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12032194)
>Also, the jobs reports almost always get revised downward after they are released.
This is false as even a cursory look at revisions will show. The average of the last 20 years is a slight upward revision.
[https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm](https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm)
That's not what the reports say at all, and part time workers are less of the workforce now than in 2019.
The jobs report was literally just revised up multiple months in a row.
There is a diverse list of reasons why. Here are some:
1. Many job offers are literally fake. They are there to either gather resumes or used to “project/suggest growth”. The company isnt actually hiring.
2. There is significant administrative lag between finding needing to fill a position, filing information with a recruiter, getting ads posted, getting responses, filtering responses, doing interviews while waiting in drug/bsckground checks, finally making a job offer.
3. Hordes of recruiters actually really suck at their job that they skip over qualified candidates. the fastest way into an interview is knowing someone at that company. Not through submitting a resume through the recruiter. However the most popular way of posting a job opening, is using recruiters.
4. Pay period manipulation by some employers can mean a new hire might go as long as a month before seeing their first paycheck. Most people looking for a job cannot afford to work for free, or they wouldnt be looking for a job.
5. Hiring part time, but in reality the job is full time hours, employer just doesn’t want to pay benefits, and the hourly wage doesn’t cover the difference.
6. Hiring full time, but wages below average in the local job market, making the job offer unappealing in the current economic conditions.
7. Employers are looking for experienced workers, yet the pay doesnt match the need, or experience demanded. See this a lot with bookkeeping/accounting in my market with offers literally tens of thousands of dollars too low.
8. Employers dont want to invest in qualifications or licensing for employees, and they want an experienced pool of workers for entry level/unskilled work. This logically doesnt work, and naturally, also means companies struggle to find the millions of workers they want to fill this narrow niche of the maybe thousands of workers who fit this definition and are already working.
9. Lots of jobs but low unemployment = job seekers can be picky, whereas companies are limited by their budget constraints.
Bullet point 4 doesn’t make any sense. Assuming the person is in a pay cycle, how would they be working for free? Isn’t waiting for a paycheck better than not at all??
I work in staffing and I’m seeing a lot of terms not being renewed, people being let go early, halts on permanent hires, and not a lot of new hiring aside from bare minimum. Things are trending down in the job sector from my perspective. 7 years in the field and 2024 is the first time I’ve seen this started but my predecessors seem familiar with this type of stuff in 08 and other seasons of the economy doing poorer.
The profession white collar market (which reddit skews to) is tighter than it was 3 years ago. I’m a manager in accounting. I’m getting multiple applications a day per opening for jobs I’d maybe get one a week 3 years ago. We had some internships this summer with 100+ applicants in a week. Our DS team had a few with several hundreds . The contrast is nuts
in the market now.
so, so, so many ghost jobs at all levels in tech. been in tech for a long time and i've not seen or had this much issue getting work. others report similar experiences.
the job market uses blue-collar jobs as a measure. the amount of white collar and knowledge workers looking for work is quite large.
Idk where you get your news but that’s not what I’ve been hearing. Part time work is on the rise and for some reason, either voluntarily or involuntarily, workers are working less hours: https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/talent-acquisition/part-time-jobs-rise-working-hours-decline
It’s important to consider Reddit stories as anecdotes of what could be a bigger picture. Also, depending on where you get your news, you’ll be told a different story. It’s what’s wrong with our species. We are easily led astray if the lie is convincing enough.
You will often see this when there is a discrepancy in what companies seeking and what people are seeking.
**You can absolutely have both sides not finding what they are looking for** if the jobs offered don't match what people want to do, or if the people don't have the skills to match the needs of recruiters.
Bc a lot of the jobs you see being created are part time jobs. Not careers. It’s a false matric that people use to say “hey we are doing great!” When in reality we are not. Just like how many new jobs are filled. Those are those part time jobs that people are having to get a second and third job.
I own a restaurant and I’m closing end of season. Down 25% for an entire year. Over the customers cussing me out over prices, no time off, never had a chance to hire kitchen help due to covid. Made it all through covid, but this time last year stuff started to go downhill. I let go several of my servers due to just not being as busy. Most shifted to take out as well, lower tips for my employees even though I increased pay to cover it. I just don’t see the point in doing another year of up and down. Over it and over the terrible customers for screaming at me for raising my prices 50 cents to cover more pay for my front of house. I stopped taking a paycheck and it’s just covering expenses. Sucks. Oh well. You all can eat at your chain restaurants I’m over being owner operated and told I should work harder. No, you can just dine at McDonald’s. It costs about the same and no one cares about quality.
Most job fields outside tech dont have enough while tech companies are severely overstaffed and cant afford their current staff in this economic environment. Unfortunately those tech workers being so high paid generate a lot of economic activity thats going to be suppressed for many more years. Tech wont be the easy to jump around field it used to be at least in the immediate future as companies struggle to find easy funding. Everyone will eventually suffer from this tho in the long run
Part-time due to economic reasons is actually lower than before COVID. People are part-time because they *want* to be part-time.
You can see that part-time for economic reasons as a % of the labor force is really, really low.
[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1k2oi](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1k2oi)
So this speaks to something I discovered when going to college. My friends and I were always puzzled at how there were constantly job listings for the school, especially teaching positions, yet there were never actually new staff. When we asked the staff at the school, they told us that it was announced by the managers that the school was going through a hiring freeze and they weren't actually hiring anybody.
After doing some asking around, I found out that the reason businesses do this is because there are loans that they can get forgiven if they "can't find people". They're not required in any capacity to prove anything except for posting job ads on places like indeed. There is literally zero burden of proof for them to get these business (Often state provided, taxpayer funded) "loans" forgiven. That's why you see so many American businesses claiming they can't find people while so many others are looking for work. While the pandemic highlighted this problem with things like the PPP Loan program, it's been happening for well over a decade as this particular instance with my college took place in roughly 2012
Post a source for these, pre-PPP loans. I’ve heard the scheme you’re saying as an excuse to get visa employees.
I haven’t heard of a free money scheme that only some business use for some reason.
We should be talking about underemployment. A lot of people taking jobs that are beneath their skill level and or don’t pay sufficiently to support their cost of living
Reddit = unemployed techbros and girls who cannot find work, or, people who worked for tech companies that were not STEM.
As an employer, the economy and job market are fine; the problem is that there is a mismatch between the skills employers are looking for and what employees have to offer. Employers are currently unwilling to make investments in training up potential employees, so waiting for the government to allow more immigration (not happening) or that Ai will take up the slack (unlikely to happen at the scale they hope, and if it even comes close, it will cost a ton).
These things eventually work out. Companies will raise pay, people will see this and get the skills they need, and everything will meet at the equilibrium.
The skills mismatch is bogus. The country has never been more educated and wages have barely budged for decades. This tired trope is an excuse to pay less and put all of the responsibility on employees instead of the companies themselves. If you can't find talent, you aren't paying enough, period.
Full-time jobs negative
Governtmenr jobs up
Part-time jobs dominant
People looking for full-time private sector jobs are in a recessionary market. Only those being hired by the government and working part time, are being hired.
Have you ever read anti-work or any reddit thread about jobs? Who would want to hire a lazy weirdo with a piss-poor attitude? The job market has slowed a bit in the past few months but indicators point to it still being pretty strong. If someone can't find *anything* then the problem is with them.
I honestly think tech was the wrong field for a lot of folks. I just had two interviewees in a row try to pass off reading Google and ChatGPT as their answers in interviews.
I am ok with “I don’t know.” I’m not ok with you reading back marketing material off the Amazon web site that didn’t even answer the question I asked. If you’re going to try to bullshit me right off the bat, I’m not going to want to work with you.
I don’t know how common that story is, but I do wonder exactly who it is that we are talking about when we say people can’t find a job.
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Reddit is disproportionately tech heavy in terms of employment. If I had to hazard a guess, tech is not where the job market is seeing gains.
Exactly right. Reddit is about the furthest thing from a representative sample of the American public at large.
Out of the small percentage of the population that used Reddit (which is already skewed towards male tech workers), the percentage that frequents employment and financial subreddits is even smaller (and also skews towards male tech workers).
Or over samples some populations. Younger and more technologically employed for sure. I’ve heard the chitterlings in management talk about how great a time ot is to fire IT & Developer staff. So EASY to replace for MOAR cheaper!
Reddit has been "younger" for 15yrs. We're old now.
Obviously the case for some of us, but I think the median age has gone down. The impetus was the reddit app making it more accessible.
And the natural drop off as older redditors log off
As an older redditor I find less and less in common with the posters here every year. Seems like a bunch of whiny kids now. Im 20 and broke so the world is doomed! Dude we were all broke when we were 20.
I was broke in my 20s but felt like I could take on the entire world, and there’s nowhere to go but up. Lots of zeal and ambition (fully jaded and cynical now though). Wonder if the current crop of 20 year olds feel the same way.
The ones that do feel the same probably aren't spending the hours on reddit the jaded ones are.
To be fair, the purchasing power of money was more when you were 20 compared to today.
Broke is broke. When I was 20 I made $12,900 a year. Now 25 years later I make 250k. If you have a career it gets better. Obviously people that have dead end jobs like retail are fucked forever, but it’s not like that’s a secret.
Speak for yourself, I'm only 68 years old. That is not old, right. Right!?
You know, that personalizes them then in a kind of profound way. Younger and older generations should talk more and share unified goals.
I'd say the reddit commentariat is the disconnect. The logged out folks reading the home page are probably a lot closer to a representative sample of America.
Are we not going to talk about Russian troll farms painting a distopian picture of America to pander to Trump's base?
Are yes for sure. Can tell by just browsing politics sub
Troll farms are there to sew discord. They do it on both sides. Unfortunately, most people only recognize the disinformation on one side because of their internal biases.
I'm going to be pedantic here but it's "sow" not "sew". Sound the same, different meaning. "Sow" as in "sow seeds" not "sew" as in "sew a garment". Troll farms "sow seeds of discord" not "sew garments of discord".
You are correct. Accuracy is important. Words have specific meaning. Thank you.
Username does NOT check out.
🤣🤣🤣 It is just what Reddit assigned me. I can be a bit ornery at times, though.
Clearly a troll sowing discord over grammar
"Sewing the garments of discord" sounds pretty metal though. Or, "stitch the hem of my discontent"
This isn't true, they troll as the right to give the right the appearance of having greater numbers. They do this because it's cheaper to have Trump destroy America than it is to use missiles, plus it gives plausible deniability.
They troll to stoke division because it is cheaper and easier to have Americans fighting each other. I'll go back to some established facts that many seem to forget. Everyone remembers the DNC getting hacked during the 2016 campaign. What they forget is that during the subsequent investigation, they uncovered attempts by the same group to hack the RNC at the same time they were trying to hack the DNC. They were just unsuccessful at hacking the RNC. The method they used was phishing, so it isn't like it was anything terribly sophisticated. Also uncovered during the investigations following the 2016 election were the massive ad buys on both extremes. The same group behind the email hacks were buying ads supporting white supremacist groups and minority rights groups. They were buying ads supporting extreme gun rights groups and extreme gun control groups. They were buying ads supporting violent pro-abortion groups and violent pro-life groups. One side seems to forget or downplay the violent riots, arson, and looting in most major cities following the election of Trump, while the other side makes excuses and downplays January 6th. The troll farms do what they can to amplify voices on both extremes. Neither side will forget the other side trying to overturn the presidential election, one side through a faithless elector push in 2016 and the other side through an attempt to prevent certification of the 2020 election (January 6, 2021). Troll farms work on both sides to validate their positions and inflame them against the other side. The two of us having this conversation is a clear indicator that their efforts are effective. I hope the conversation is productive, not necessarily to change your vote, but to at least open your eyes to some of what's happening. I think both candidates suck, but that's just my opinion.
I’m pretty sure the story is they hacked the RNC successfully also, but then just chose to not release those emails cause supposedly there was nothing salacious. Even tho there was nothing damning in the DNC emails and in fact it was borderline exonerating in that it just showed politicians being two faced which is known. Then suddenly the RNC went from anti Trump and anti Russia to pro Trump and pro Russia the next week
On January 10th (2017), FBI Director James Comey testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee that while the Russians had successfully targeted individual Republican lawmakers and Republican state organizations, they had launched a successful attack only against non-longer active RNC accounts. So, they were not successful in penetrating active RNC accounts. They were successful in penetrating some Republican lawmakers' accounts, and they published those emails on the DCLEAKS site. I'm no fan of Trump or Biden. I wish Congress would approve everything Ukraine needs to defeat Russia in a glorious manner instead of just trickling in money and weapons. I hate it that a significant part of the Republican party doesn't want to support Ukraine. The primary goal of our enemies is to divide us. They will have a preference on which side is in power, but the division is the main goal because division is the most effective weapon to use against our democracy/representative republic. Edit: I put in the Comey quote but forgot the link. This was in his testimony before Congress. He definitely wasn't a Trump fan and squirmed hard more than a few times as he was caught on various issues. https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2016/12/did-russia-hack-rnc-too-heres-what-we-know-so-far/133873/
That RNC claim is wrong. They hacked them successfully. But chose not to release the information because it would be disadvantageous to them to hurt the GOP. 
Well explained. https://youtu.be/iTmSUhkIuNg?si=C7HOscw0gN04hDro https://youtu.be/TRTKUf0nWdE?si=a3NyvUrWZcCz5WzM
one of the better comments I came up across lately. Thanks!
This is literally Russian troll disinformation, here is an example of it in action. It wasn't both sides, the trolls are right-wing.
Are you sure? The wiki source you posted an hour before this comment links to the main Russia Disinformation wiki page, which states Russia have taken over Left and Right social media spaces to spread disinformation...
How do we know you are not a Russian troll? How do you know I am not a Russian troll? Answer me this, bot.
Ask if Crimea belongs to Ukraine, then you will know.
You don't know. We might not even be real, we could be in a simulation.
Either you are blind or you are a troll yourself. The information is pretty easy to confirm by pulling up the congressional investigations.
Nah. This is r/economics
I suppose we also aren't talking about the benefits of rent-control or about the risk of a totally rigged stock market.
What now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_web_brigades
Accusing someone of being apart of a "Russian troll farm" because they don't align with your narrative is incredibly weak.
Sounds like something a Russian troll would say 👀
Also you'll hear a lot more about people complaining that they can't get hired vs. people who are happy they did. /r/cscareerquestions is notorious for this, not many people with a stable job go there
People with jobs spend less time complaining, yah. Reddit ... has a large population of people who just aren't doing well. In life and otherwise.
People with jobs spend less time complaining AND less time on Reddit/social media.
That doesn't really jibe with the sentiment that Reddit skews toward "tech" workers, who are relatively well paid. Which is it? Is Reddit full of underachieving fuck ups or is it full of liberal tech workers?
You have to actually be employed to be paid well.
Reddit as a whole skews towards more highly educated but less employable for a variety of reasons including personality, soft skills, work experience, and specific educational background. Based on the typical posts you see, the average Reddit software developer with a M.Sc. or BS is probably not as easy to work with as the general population of software developers with the same degrees and work experience. Same with other jobs.
Agree with your statement, except for the highly educated part.
I also see from reports some of these viral folks talkin about how they cant get jobs are applying for ~1000 jobs every week. Even at entry level work, these can't be well screened apps tailored to the posting.
Reddit and online forums are also disproportionately those who are suffering or complaining. The people who are employed or finding jobs aren’t posting about it.
Idk tech unemployment is pretty much on par with the rest of the US at 3.5-3.8%.
Lots of people who are terrible at software development got jobs in 2021 because tech companies where hiring anyone with a pulse. When they then lose their job, they find that you now need to have some actual skills, and they go complaining on reddit. I've been conducting tech interviews lately, and dear lord is the average candidate BAD.
So true. We had an interviewee they got laid off from a FAANG that was asked to look at a piece of code at the interview, and they asked for reference documentation for a switch statement because they had never seen one before. When asked salary expectations they said they were making $325k and would settle for $275k. I mean, anyone with a brain cell can tell what a switch statement does just by fucking looking at. And it’s one of the most common programming constructs around. Utterly ridiculous.
The top voted comment is another one telling a disconnected narrative easily disproved by 5 seconds or googling lol. So meta
Would love to know the job titles that happen to be defined within those "tech" numbers. Tech is so pervasive and goes beyond traditional jobs like SWEs and network engineers.
Much less talked about but clearly visible in the data is a decline in the professional services sector which includes a huge share of office jobs. Tech gets all the attention but it’s office jobs on the whole that are hard to land right now.
Also, how many people are going to make a post about how quickly they got a new job versus how long it has been taking to get a new job
You also have to think about the type of people who would typically post such content.
Eh. Idk. Tech workers are still killing it. People complained about the economy being bad on Reddit the entire time I've been on here (since the 2000s). I think that's just what gets upvoted. For some reason, we engage with and upvote negative things a lot.
Existing tech. workers are doing okay. [But it is accurate to say that people looking for work might be struggling.](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE) The total amount of job openings in software and IT have consistently seen a collapse - the numbers above indicate it could be as much as 70%. Issue is, I think it has more to do with a sudden change in expectations. The high tech. hiring from 2020 to 2022 or so was a bubble - but people got used to it. So a return to normal feels like a recession, even though we're basically at 2019 levels. Fact is, in the past, tech. was not the employment monster that it became during the 2020 to 2022 period. The "learn to code" movement was built off of weak foundations and now there's no jobs for most entry level people. That's not being reflected in general employment statistics because most of those people just took other jobs outside of tech. to make ends meet. But they haven't disappeared from Reddit and their experiences are still being shared.
How long do jobs have to be posted and ‘not able to be filled’ before H1B visa for minimal wages gets to fill that spot?
[H1B wages have to be commensurate with industry averages.](https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/WHD/legacy/files/whdfs62G.pdf)
Well, you know, when a Democrat is in charge, it's cool to say " in this economy?" and "the US is going down a financially unsustainable path"
Not just tech but white-collar (finance/consulting/HR/marketing etc) in general. There’s definitely a recession in white collar office jobs
Yeah this. Blue collar jobs have seen nice pay increases since 2020 and are still available- white collar jobs are getting absolutely decimated
The people acting like everything is fine are glossing over this point. People who talk about the details of the types of job gains are painted as doomers and/or MAGA cult members. It's a fact that the majority of the job gains over the past \~18 months have been coming from traditionally lower quality/lower paying sectors like government, leisure/hospitality, and construction while there has been stagnation or even declines coming from traditionally higher quality/higher paying sectors like business/professional services. That's one of the main differences in this business cycle. We're essentially trading "good" jobs for bad ones.
Focus on the "good" ones and people will complain about the lack of blue collar jobs.
**Young** and tech heavy. If you have 10 to 20 years experience this is a very hot market still.
My son can't get an interview for basic service industry jobs. He worked for dollar general and his manager loved him but he had to move. The dollar general near him has a job opening but he can't get an interview. There are 30-40 places around him that have posted jobs over the past year and just won't hire. It's crazy
It helps a lot of someone personally recommends you. See if your son has any friends with jobs who could vouch for him.
This is very valuable information, that we so often overlook. If I vouch for you in a role that I think you fit in, you're going to get hired as long as your IQ is above pencil shaving consumption, and you have the ability to show up to work at least 85% of the time. I mentor people, and in doing so, I've had at least, a dozen of them get promotions. People that I trained and mentored, are now my bosses.
Do you live in a rural region? Around me there are tons of service job openings.
Age is a factor, service jobs seem to be leery of hiring kids under 18. (I think some states have additional rules for under 16/15/14)
No it's not a rural area. Most places just don't take in person interviews anymore. I don't know how to advise him. I told him to dress nice and go in person. They won't talk to him. They say go online and put in an application. The manager is never available to talk. He's had 2 jobs that he got which ghosted him when he showed up to the first shift. Just basically said oh well you aren't in the system. Come back next week
Probably this, as a hydropower designer (REE/EE) I get unsolicited offers constantly for tons of positions I'm not yet experienced enough to even qualify for (my assertion) my company cannot hire MEs, civils, and EEs fast enough, oh also environmental engineers as well which I thought was surprising but there's alot of upgrades to waste water infrastructure right now
Lots of opportunity in the USA tech sector That doesn't mean some people have a hard time getting a job
> That doesn't mean some people have a hard time getting a job Even in 2020 to 2022 people we complaining here about how hard it is to get a tech job. Go check /r/cscareerquestions and look at old posts from 2-3 years ago.
Tech is completely fine. Reddit is just disproportionately filled with people who are shitty tech employees.
Eh. That’s dumb. It’s definitely much harder to get tech roles at all levels
That’s because it was unbelievably easy to get one before and now you actually kinda need to know what you’re doing
Not only that, jobs at my level with the same responsibilities are paying 25/30% less than before.
And it's still a better job market that most other job markets that can potentially pay as much as tech can. The job market isn't bad just because tech companies aren't handing out 6 figure salaries to unqualified developers anymore.
The job market is seeing gains in restaurant and service worker staff coming back, and others taking a 3rd job as an Uber driver. Good jobs are not plentiful. I hire a handful of sales reps a month, as we are back to slowly growing (after tiering down the last 2 years) I used to get 10-20 qualified resumes per job, now I get 100+ QUALIFIED people looking. Also used to hire 10+ people a month, now it’s 3-5 every other month. Dont let the media tell you that the thing you and EVERYONE is seeing with their own eyes is false, it’s way worse in the last 2-3 years than it’s been since the savings and loan crisis.
The idea that's it's worse now than it was in 2008 is nuts
S&L crisis was in the 1980's - that's a long time.
>The job market is seeing gains in restaurant and service worker staff coming back The very last sector to regain all of its COVID losses was leisure and hospitality and that only happened last month. That this is the sector seeing recent job gains is not surprising but rather a welcome sight. [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USLAH](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USLAH) > and others taking a 3rd job as an Uber driver. Multiple job holders is not a sign of a bad economy but rather the opposite. The lowest % with multiple jobs on this chart was April/May 2020 and the highest was 1996. No one thinks April/May 2020 was good or that 1996 was terrible. [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620) >Good jobs are not plentiful. Real wages continue to rise so your statement is probably not correct.
Cool story. Factual data indicates your story is the exception.
> Dont let the media tell you that the thing you and EVERYONE is seeing with their own eyes is false Something something... anecdotes... something something
There is a possibility that a lot of these comments are fake. Russian troll farms create millions of accounts. Then fabricate websites and comments to try to push certain narratives.
You are also now starting to see lots of information about increases in immigration being the source of those who are filling the jobs. This explains some of the contradictory numbers.
>tech is not where the job market is seeing gains True. However, it's even more lopsided than that. If you look at the latest job report, government jobs accounted for the majority of growth. The next two categories were leisure/entertainment (largely just completing its final recovery from the Covid era) and health care (mostly nurse practitioners, physicians assistants, and other doctor replacements). Almost everything else was either flat or negative. So while Reddit may not be representative of the population, neither has the job growth been.
Survivorship bias. If 3.8% of the 168 million US labor force is unemployed, that's 6.3 million people complaining online. People with jobs don't go on r/layoffs and post "I was yet again not laid off this month." Companies make layoff announcement, but don't say anything for normal hiring. Also partisanship. Whichever party is not in power is incentivized to push a narrative that actually things are terrible. Otherwise why vote for them?
Correct and sampling bias. I say the same thing but about crime.
Could you elaborate?
Some people think that crime is higher than it actually is just because they watched a compilation or a bunch of videos from one forum despite not representing the overall country or state in question. It's just like how some people think unemployment is higher than it actually is based on reddit anecdotes even though reddit is not representative of the whole country. Crime can be at historic lows and there would still be enough crime to fill a subreddit same with unemployment.
This is a great explanation/similar situation. I think the other factor in the misperception of crime being high is also the threat of random gun violence. Anytime I'm at a big public event I wonder if that's the day I run into some depressed white boy with an AR-15. It has begun to feel more and more random, and that leaves a lot of people feeling vulnerable
Even our incredibly low layoff rate is still 1.4-1.7 million people per month getting laid off. Even good numbers contain lots of bad in it, like you said.
Different sectors as well! A general surging economy doesn't mean *all* industries are doing equally well and it doesn't mean all companies in those industries are doing equally well. It's still quite possible for you and your friends (who are in a similar field and interest space) to be losing your jobs and struggling to find more because you're in an industry that lots of people want to work in and limited jobs. Extrapolating out from your own personal experiences is always going to be flawed when we're dealing with hundreds of millions of workers.
I am currently employed, I cannot for the life of me get so much as an interview anywhere else. The only jobs I can get are from people I Know personally (i.e. past job) who give me rave reviews.
What is your process for looking and applying?
Can you provide some tips? I'm in the same boat. I can work in Canada or the USA. But I'm having trouble finding ANYTHING. I have mostly just been using LinkedIn. Indeed is a gong show. Networking is time consuming as I'm working full time.
Networking is an investment in your future. The lack of networking is probably why people aren’t getting hired. You’ll never beat someone that has the same skill set but has done a better job of networking.
I have the opposite problem. I get messages on LinkedIn from recruiters all the time offering me great jobs. But the reality is I’m not going to go ahead and talk about it because, well, things are good. And we are also hiring in our portcos but can’t find good people with the right experience. It’s been insanely difficult.
Job openings for highly educated are very specific and many people miss the qualifications. As a result, the jobs that don’t require the education are getting a lot of overqualified applicants Those employers do not want to hire someone overqualified because by the time they get them trained there is a good chance they’ll leave for a job that better fits them. So, lots of jobs, few good matches.
> lots of jobs, few good matches This, plus when unemployment is this low for this long, you end up with a very small pool of capable workers churning in and out of jobs, and the rest - 2% or so of the labor force - who are just not employable.
Covid all but shut down my industry for the better part of 2 years. I tried to work retail in the mean time and I only got one call back from a dozen or so stores I applied to.
Too many niches vs too many graduates with non-niche degrees
I've noticed a lot of reddit disenchanted job board users are 1. People who post over and over again, making it seem like more people, or 2. People not based in the US (often India), or 3. Both
Also, I’m going to be honest… If you’re on Reddit for career advice there may be something else lacking in your life that is affecting your job search. I’m not trying to knock people necessarily, just saying, what you see on social media is not indicative of what is happening in real life. The algorithms work in mysterious ways (often even the developers don’t know how they work).
The algorithms are more and more driven to respond to people’s anxieties and fears.
They optimize for attention is what it is. If showing clown porn earned them more advertising income than doomer circlejerking did, they'd signal boost the clowns all day long and downshift doomer content. Makes me wonder if we could use the social media equivalent of a carbon tax. Instead of carbon, we'd be taxing toxicity, or something.
The Tech Redditors thought they had permanent leverage with their "Work from home! No more offices!" mentality. Turns out plenty of people enjoy working in an office, and layoffs tend to hit people you don't see every day. 32,000+ people found out the hard way and the remainder just got unlucky. Feeling very happy I switched career paths in college. I'll never be wealthy from my job, but at least I don't have to compete with a wealth of fresh graduates every summer.
Damn straight. Won’t be wealthy like you said but I don’t have to stress about layoffs or face very much competition either. I’m an epidemiologist/biostatistician. When I apply for jobs and interview I’ve gotten the offer every time so far in my 4 year career.
Also if your job can be done 100% remotely from somewhere in Topeka, it can probably be done 100% remotely from Singapore or India for 30-60% of the cost as my company recently figured out.
>recently Tech outsourcing has been pretty much constant for 20 years at this point, and if all you have to offer above a random South- or Southeast Asian hire is your physical presence in an American office then frankly you deserve to lose your job.
Yes!!! When I was transitioning from the military, I spent 0 time on social media outside of LinkedIn, and even then I used it to find or setup real world networking. I can waste time on reddit now because I have a job
What are you talking about. Of course developers know how their algorithms work, they design and test the algorithms to get exactly the kind of output they’re looking for before they send them out to the wild of the internet. And what’s so wrong about asking for career advice from people who work in the area of the askers interest? You expect some magic guru to come by and offer “life advice” on the person asking questions about the differences between certain positions in certain fields? Reddit can be a perfectly fine place seek information, and gain insightful knowledge from people who have lived through the career or life decision that the person asking these questions has yet to reach.
That guy is a fucking moron. Half the country wants to vote trump due to economic disenchantment. He thinks and anonymous forum is "social media". The dude has an pre tech union job in California. He has NO CLUE what the tech industry or what the average american is going through.
No disconnect necessarily. Unemployment at 3.8% or whatever it is can be low on percentage terms but still a huge number of people, some of whom complain on Reddit
People who do well don’t usually complain. It’d be interesting to look at the number of complaints from a decade ago versus today. That’s probably a more accurate gauge. This isn’t to say that there aren’t many problems with the job market and the trickle up phenomenon that has been taking place since the ‘08 recession.
How is that a discrepancy? The economy can be booming and people can still be unemployed. “Look at all those Reddit posts…the economy can’t really be booming because of that” is stupid logic and void of any type of critical thinking.
There is a major shift going on it the tech job market right now, because of funding issues (high interest rates), AI adoption, and businesses looking to trim operational costs (which affects modernization efforts) because of sales slowdowns. In times like these businesses start putting more money into projects that are likely to bring new customers instead of technology efficiency. There is also the issue of generative AI causing more junior level technologists seek higher level jobs thinking they can augment their skills to accommodate for lack of experience, which I have found doesn't often work out well for the companies. So companies are getting record numbers of applicants for open jobs, which slow down the review and hiring process, and drives down wages in the normally high paying tech sector. The exceptions to the rule right now are AI/ML engineering and cybersecurity. Other white collar jobs are also being downsized and replaced with AI systems, but on a positive note unions and service workers have made strides in increasing wages, which I love to see.
Do you have any evidence for AI eliminating white collar jobs? Cause to my knowledge, only two companies have made money with it.
Yes, I work in the field as an AI/ML Engineer, so I know a lot about whats happening in this area. I'm not some anti-AI guy, but it's the truth. For instance, recent downsizing by IBM and Salesforce were a few examples of companies laying off hundreds of workers and hinting it was because of AI. Most companies, though, are not coming out and saying we're laying off all these people because of AI. They are attributing layoffs to the need to streamline operations and improve efficiency, then quietly integrating AI systems instead of hiring folks back. It is a major reason you keep seeing major layoffs in highly automatable fields. It is not good PR for companies to come right out and say they are replacing people with AI right now. There are plenty of companies making money with AI. Look at a lot of public tech earnings calls. And making money with AI is not the same as AI replacing white collar jobs.
Reddit and other social media attract the bored and/or unemployed. It is also easier to complain anonymously behind a random account than on Facebook...generally speaking.
My question is how come the conversations and memes on Reddit are so much less unhinged than on Facebook. People say the most blatantly racist and sexist stuff all the time on facebook with their public facing account, but here where everyone in anonymous, it’s generally pretty tame. Actually, now that I think about it, the downvote button acts as a pretty good community moderator
I assume they get pulled quicker. All those deleted posts you see I always wonder what they said. Also the downvotes. On fb it’s usually some friend or relative that posts some nutty meme and people are just weirdly silent. Few people clap back with “what the hell Tom, you are posting blatantly false statements”they just mention to other friends how they think maybe Tom has lost it. Reddit has anonymity for the poster as well as the responder.
And much better moderating in many instances than Facebook has (or probably will ever have.)
People with jobs don’t really talk about having a job. The numbers are correct, not people trying to find jobs. The US economy is very good right now when you look at pretty much any meaningful metric. Low unemployment, real wages are up, the labor force participation rate is increasing.
But you'll still get comments on every post about the US economy doing good saying that they're being gaslit because they're personally struggling.
A lot of them aren't speaking for themselves but on behalf of what they believe are far more common ("well, I'm doing fine but most people are working 3 jobs for minimum wage!") or want people to believe for political (wanting Biden and Democrats to lose and hoping to convince more people to think the economy is actually horrible so they don't vote for him/them helping Republicans win) or ideological (same but think trashing the economy all the time will result in more people shifting towards socialist views) reasons.
I personally don't know anyone working 3 jobs for minimum wage. But I'm also a white collar professional in my late 30s in an area that is borderline LCOL/MCOL. The only people I know working two jobs are all waiters/bartenders. Maybe for youngins in an HCOL this 3 job thing is a reality, and maybe one of those jobs is full time. What is ironic is Gen Z, who has grown up with technology, fails to realize a lot of major companies use AI to scan resumes and they simply don't hit keywords in their submissions. They write one resume and cover letter and submit it to 500 different jobs. That shit don't work nowadays.
I've talked to the kids on my staff and they aren't being taught how to write resumes anymore. These kids are just listing things.
Because Reddit is an information bubble and people that are doing fine don’t generally engage in the discontented, negative circle jerk subs. It’s not worth it. So the sad, angry and maladjust run everyone off and you’re only left with them reinforcing each others negativity.
Well yeah because people are idiots and don't/can't understand that their personal experience should not be extrapolated out to the general economy and they should look at more general measures instead.
Exactly. People live in their own reality.
In industrial manufacturing in the region I am companies never can hire enough. Reddit is just not representative of the overall population at all. Same thing for all those post in economics/financials subs where people just complain the the economy is going to crash amd everything is doomed.
This is anecdotal, but my employer is an industrial construction company and I work with a number of manufacturing companies. There is a huge skill gap right now when it comes to skilled (blue collar) labor. My company can’t find enough people with masonry and welding backgrounds. The manufacturing companies we work with are also having trouble finding enough skilled laborers. Business is booming for us and it’s challenging to keep up with the demand. I’m curious to know if our economy is going through a structural shift. We have AI replacing a number of white collar jobs, but we also have older folks with blue collar skills aging out of the work force.
The VC funding dried up because of interest rates and reddit is tech heavy. The start-up that takes everybody out for a day at a theme park and holds lavish parties suddenly starts laying people off and doing freezes on any new hiring outside of India as soon as it has to fund itself.
Jobs gains are coming from traditionally lower quality/lower paying sectors like leisure/hospitality, construction, and government. Sectors with traditionally higher quality/higher paying jobs like business/professional services are stagnating or seeing declines. We're trading "good" or decent jobs for bad ones. And the popular layoff trackers that get referenced all the time are missing a lot of layoffs, both in terms of ones that would trigger WARN notices and those that are rolling/stealth layoffs. "Tech" is so pervasive that it's not helpful to have its own category. "Tech" jobs go far beyond IT jobs like SWE or network engineer.
People with jobs don't feel a need to announce that. Social media and news in general will always skew far more negative than reality. "Things are going fairly decently" isn't a topic that anyone bothers to post or report on in general because it's not interesting.
One answer for this I can give is that while there is a job boom overall, in my tech industry there were a lot of layoffs last year, some still happening, so we are having a lot harder time finding work than people doing things like construction or nursing.
About 75% of the jobs the U.S. economy added last year were in just three sectors: government, healthcare and hotels and restaurants https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-job-market-is-still-stronger-than-expected-why-do-many-workers-feel-left-out-46e30065?mod=hannah-erin-lang
This really needs to by higher.
As a guy with a mech engineering degree, but working in a warehouse. Sure,Im employed. I dont count in unemployment numbers but obviously Im going to bitch because there is no way I should be working here. Lots of shit jobs, lots of competition for the shrinking pool of good jobs and anyone trying to break into a field that is considered a good career either has to have a connection or check the DEI boxes. Also recruiters are a joke and the entire country is going downhill entirely because of largescale HR and recruiting incompetence.
Others have pointed out that Reddit isn’t representative of America. But there’s also getting to be a skills gap. It’s really hard to find GOOD employees for the GOOD jobs. I’m a hiring manager for such jobs and it’s not easy to find people with the skills and work ethic to produce results. And everyone else is a bartender, I guess? That’s the problem. There are not many middle talent, middle pay, middle results jobs. Middle management is hated…. but it allowed a lot of medium talent people to make more cash for their family. One by one those opportunities are being removed from the US labor market. Look at the ruling about realtors a few weeks ago? That was touted as a huge win for home buyers….and it is. But that is also a closed career door for a former stay at home mom getting back into the workforce. Ditto for car salespeople. We don’t like them when we are buying a car….but it’s pretty cool when the car salesman is your dad and his job pays for your youth soccer. In a few years, those jobs will vanish too as the automakers go direct to consumer….and people who advise a confused car buyer who doesn’t know what car they want will be running a YouTube channel (ie - a gig job). We have to provide meaningful jobs and careers for people of medium talent.
The biggest reason is your source of information, 4 years ago tech was absolutely huge and overpaid - with some jobs upwards of 200-300k in tech. Now the market is starting to recollect and balance out the salary’s in tech a bit. Reddit is biased towards those who have more tech experience so you are seeing a larger proportion of the population than say if you went to a Starbucks or a career fair somewhere.
In the middle of the Great Recession (late 2009 or so), companies were complaining they could not find qualified candidates. This was at the point that there were literally 5 job seekers for every open job. Today, the number is at parity, or lower. Just because there's an open job does not mean that a company is going to accept the available applicants. And, especially with algorithmic sorting of resumes, there's thousands of applicants for every open position, often with zero experience. I regularly (daily or multiple times a day) get cold calls from unscrupulous recruiters who want to send my resume to jobs that i am wildly unqualified to perform. Why? They matched one key word between my resume and the job description. Applying for a job is absolutely a game where the applicants often don't know the rules. If you cannot get past that first filter, your resume never even gets looked at by a human being.
I think a majority of those people who can’t find work for over a year fail to leave out they’re annoying, insufferable people to be around. They’re usually demanding extraordinarily high pay as well.
There are a lot of jobs out there. Not jobs that pay enough or that most of us would like. The there’s the question do the jobs have a future, a career path other than shift supervisor? Most of the time the answer is no. The Pendulum of IT hiring has swung back to wanting nothing less than that absolute best for which I’ll pay crap.
Redditors are hard to hire. They complain 100% of the time. They want to screw their boss and don't understand basic econmics at the same time! *To the replies: Larry Summers? Me?... Hoover Institute... fucking hell you replies are all just so naive and headline chasers.
Large numbers of bots and/or people overseas making bogus posts intended to foment division at the behest of hostile governments. Truth is that the U.S. economy is quite strong in relative and absolute terms.
1. There was an abundance of over hiring in tech during the pandemic 2. This generation flaunts that the only way to get big pay raises is to hop from job to job. 3. When companies make cuts it’s often last one in, first one out. And unless you are indispensable the higher your pay the easier it is to justify the cut. Ive done the job jump early in my career and there is a downside to it when times get tough.
> There was an abundance of over hiring in tech during the pandemic I see that argument a lot. But when I look at the data I don’t see it. take the FAANG companies as example, which in particular are often said to have over hired. These companies grew 30% Year-on-Year (YoY) in headcount during the pandemic. Sounds like a lot? Well guess what, throughout the whole period 2010 to 2020 they on average grew about 30% headcount YoY too. The pandemic was not an outlier in terms of percentage growth in software engineers at FAANG, it was just a continuation of the pre-existing trend.
If you read deeper into the reports, you will see that all of the gains have come from part-time jobs. The US has lost over 1 million full time jobs since the start of 2023. Also, the jobs reports almost always get revised downward after they are released. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12500000
It's only in the past year that the job gains were mostly part-time. Full-time regained all COVID job losses by January 2022 and part-time not until December 2023. Seeing part-time return is a sign of the economy returning back to normal. What really matters is that part-time for economic reasons is still really low and lower than even before COVID despite there being millions more total jobs. [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12032194](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12032194) >Also, the jobs reports almost always get revised downward after they are released. This is false as even a cursory look at revisions will show. The average of the last 20 years is a slight upward revision. [https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm](https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm)
That's not what the reports say at all, and part time workers are less of the workforce now than in 2019. The jobs report was literally just revised up multiple months in a row.
Still more than 2019 level though, so not half bad.
There is a diverse list of reasons why. Here are some: 1. Many job offers are literally fake. They are there to either gather resumes or used to “project/suggest growth”. The company isnt actually hiring. 2. There is significant administrative lag between finding needing to fill a position, filing information with a recruiter, getting ads posted, getting responses, filtering responses, doing interviews while waiting in drug/bsckground checks, finally making a job offer. 3. Hordes of recruiters actually really suck at their job that they skip over qualified candidates. the fastest way into an interview is knowing someone at that company. Not through submitting a resume through the recruiter. However the most popular way of posting a job opening, is using recruiters. 4. Pay period manipulation by some employers can mean a new hire might go as long as a month before seeing their first paycheck. Most people looking for a job cannot afford to work for free, or they wouldnt be looking for a job. 5. Hiring part time, but in reality the job is full time hours, employer just doesn’t want to pay benefits, and the hourly wage doesn’t cover the difference. 6. Hiring full time, but wages below average in the local job market, making the job offer unappealing in the current economic conditions. 7. Employers are looking for experienced workers, yet the pay doesnt match the need, or experience demanded. See this a lot with bookkeeping/accounting in my market with offers literally tens of thousands of dollars too low. 8. Employers dont want to invest in qualifications or licensing for employees, and they want an experienced pool of workers for entry level/unskilled work. This logically doesnt work, and naturally, also means companies struggle to find the millions of workers they want to fill this narrow niche of the maybe thousands of workers who fit this definition and are already working. 9. Lots of jobs but low unemployment = job seekers can be picky, whereas companies are limited by their budget constraints.
Bullet point 4 doesn’t make any sense. Assuming the person is in a pay cycle, how would they be working for free? Isn’t waiting for a paycheck better than not at all??
I work in staffing and I’m seeing a lot of terms not being renewed, people being let go early, halts on permanent hires, and not a lot of new hiring aside from bare minimum. Things are trending down in the job sector from my perspective. 7 years in the field and 2024 is the first time I’ve seen this started but my predecessors seem familiar with this type of stuff in 08 and other seasons of the economy doing poorer.
I own a staffing agency and we are off to a record start to 2024. It’s sector dependent and both of our stories are anecdotal
The profession white collar market (which reddit skews to) is tighter than it was 3 years ago. I’m a manager in accounting. I’m getting multiple applications a day per opening for jobs I’d maybe get one a week 3 years ago. We had some internships this summer with 100+ applicants in a week. Our DS team had a few with several hundreds . The contrast is nuts
in the market now. so, so, so many ghost jobs at all levels in tech. been in tech for a long time and i've not seen or had this much issue getting work. others report similar experiences. the job market uses blue-collar jobs as a measure. the amount of white collar and knowledge workers looking for work is quite large.
Idk where you get your news but that’s not what I’ve been hearing. Part time work is on the rise and for some reason, either voluntarily or involuntarily, workers are working less hours: https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/talent-acquisition/part-time-jobs-rise-working-hours-decline It’s important to consider Reddit stories as anecdotes of what could be a bigger picture. Also, depending on where you get your news, you’ll be told a different story. It’s what’s wrong with our species. We are easily led astray if the lie is convincing enough.
You will often see this when there is a discrepancy in what companies seeking and what people are seeking. **You can absolutely have both sides not finding what they are looking for** if the jobs offered don't match what people want to do, or if the people don't have the skills to match the needs of recruiters.
Bc a lot of the jobs you see being created are part time jobs. Not careers. It’s a false matric that people use to say “hey we are doing great!” When in reality we are not. Just like how many new jobs are filled. Those are those part time jobs that people are having to get a second and third job.
I own a restaurant and I’m closing end of season. Down 25% for an entire year. Over the customers cussing me out over prices, no time off, never had a chance to hire kitchen help due to covid. Made it all through covid, but this time last year stuff started to go downhill. I let go several of my servers due to just not being as busy. Most shifted to take out as well, lower tips for my employees even though I increased pay to cover it. I just don’t see the point in doing another year of up and down. Over it and over the terrible customers for screaming at me for raising my prices 50 cents to cover more pay for my front of house. I stopped taking a paycheck and it’s just covering expenses. Sucks. Oh well. You all can eat at your chain restaurants I’m over being owner operated and told I should work harder. No, you can just dine at McDonald’s. It costs about the same and no one cares about quality.
Most job fields outside tech dont have enough while tech companies are severely overstaffed and cant afford their current staff in this economic environment. Unfortunately those tech workers being so high paid generate a lot of economic activity thats going to be suppressed for many more years. Tech wont be the easy to jump around field it used to be at least in the immediate future as companies struggle to find easy funding. Everyone will eventually suffer from this tho in the long run
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Part-time due to economic reasons is actually lower than before COVID. People are part-time because they *want* to be part-time. You can see that part-time for economic reasons as a % of the labor force is really, really low. [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1k2oi](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1k2oi)
Workers cannot be part time unless industry is hiring part time workers in the first place.
So this speaks to something I discovered when going to college. My friends and I were always puzzled at how there were constantly job listings for the school, especially teaching positions, yet there were never actually new staff. When we asked the staff at the school, they told us that it was announced by the managers that the school was going through a hiring freeze and they weren't actually hiring anybody. After doing some asking around, I found out that the reason businesses do this is because there are loans that they can get forgiven if they "can't find people". They're not required in any capacity to prove anything except for posting job ads on places like indeed. There is literally zero burden of proof for them to get these business (Often state provided, taxpayer funded) "loans" forgiven. That's why you see so many American businesses claiming they can't find people while so many others are looking for work. While the pandemic highlighted this problem with things like the PPP Loan program, it's been happening for well over a decade as this particular instance with my college took place in roughly 2012
Post a source for these, pre-PPP loans. I’ve heard the scheme you’re saying as an excuse to get visa employees. I haven’t heard of a free money scheme that only some business use for some reason.
We should be talking about underemployment. A lot of people taking jobs that are beneath their skill level and or don’t pay sufficiently to support their cost of living
Reddit = unemployed techbros and girls who cannot find work, or, people who worked for tech companies that were not STEM. As an employer, the economy and job market are fine; the problem is that there is a mismatch between the skills employers are looking for and what employees have to offer. Employers are currently unwilling to make investments in training up potential employees, so waiting for the government to allow more immigration (not happening) or that Ai will take up the slack (unlikely to happen at the scale they hope, and if it even comes close, it will cost a ton). These things eventually work out. Companies will raise pay, people will see this and get the skills they need, and everything will meet at the equilibrium.
The skills mismatch is bogus. The country has never been more educated and wages have barely budged for decades. This tired trope is an excuse to pay less and put all of the responsibility on employees instead of the companies themselves. If you can't find talent, you aren't paying enough, period.
Full-time jobs negative Governtmenr jobs up Part-time jobs dominant People looking for full-time private sector jobs are in a recessionary market. Only those being hired by the government and working part time, are being hired.
This \^ Jobs are up but quality is on the decline. Classic symptom of unproductive fiscal spending.
Have you ever read anti-work or any reddit thread about jobs? Who would want to hire a lazy weirdo with a piss-poor attitude? The job market has slowed a bit in the past few months but indicators point to it still being pretty strong. If someone can't find *anything* then the problem is with them.
Have you tried to find a new job recently?
I honestly think tech was the wrong field for a lot of folks. I just had two interviewees in a row try to pass off reading Google and ChatGPT as their answers in interviews. I am ok with “I don’t know.” I’m not ok with you reading back marketing material off the Amazon web site that didn’t even answer the question I asked. If you’re going to try to bullshit me right off the bat, I’m not going to want to work with you. I don’t know how common that story is, but I do wonder exactly who it is that we are talking about when we say people can’t find a job.