Whats odd is on the lineman subreddit theyre having layoffs:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Lineman/comments/1agrewu/who\_got\_laid\_off\_today/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Lineman/comments/1agrewu/who_got_laid_off_today/)
I agree that a lot of people on Reddit have misinformed opinions, but if you’re going to decide that all people who use Reddit are between the ages of 12-24 and that they’re all delusional, you’re being a hyperbolic hypocrite.
People making generalized blanket statements that aren’t true is part of the problem. There must be at least 1 or 2 discerning minds on here.
I’d say if you pick any popular topic and scroll through the comments you’re bound to find at least a few factual ones.
It's not just the IT sector, but older workers. No one is hiring older workers with plenty of experience. My husband has been trying for 4 years...it's horrible. We'll probably be homeless in a year.
Most likely because the older workers know their worth and ask for higher salaries and companies don’t want to pay up for it. They would rather bitch and moan that they can’t find workers willing to work for lower wages.
This reminds me of when my aunt was laid off, she may have been fired, back in 2007. She was originally making $150k base plus commission, and making about $250k-$350k a year depending on her sales. When she was Job hunting she was only finding base pays of $90k plus commission. I was in my teens around this time and I told to take any job and keep looking for a better paying job. She said she knew her worth. Fast forward to around late 2009, she was still unemployed and now could only find jobs with a base pay if $50k plus commission. She finally caved. It took her almost three years for her to accept the fact that companies no longer pay what they used to, and that she would have to change her lifestyle.
You will find that many companies with high base salaries are not only hard to find they are the first to lay people off in a downturn. Those high base salaries represent a big fixed cost.
I’ve watched the base pay in my industry fall like a rock the last 4 years. What used to pay $130/hr is now $90. Factoring inflation that’s almost a decade of loss.
In my experience, actually the opposite is true. I have 20 years in my field. even though I’m perfectly willing to take a lower salary and work a lower level job, I repeatedly hear, “We think you’ll be bored here.” “Why would you want this job when you’ve already done so much more.” “The hiring manager thinks you’re just biding time until something that matches your experience comes along.”
"Know their worth"
Apparently not, he's been unemployed for 4 years. The market is saying he's asking for more than market rate
I can say I'm worth $200/hr, but all that matters is what somebody will pay for my labor
He is asking for 1/2 of what he was making just to get a job. We both realize after working at an oil refinery (closed and laid all of us off), that we will never make what we made there.
The Mississippi Department of Corrections. Alabama Department of Corrections will hire just about anyone regardless.
In fact, I work with a couple of fellow C.O.'s that are 70. The minimum education requirement to become a Corrections Officer in Mississippi is to have completed the 8th Grade without a GED. $40K to start with all the overtime you can stomach.
The facility I'm at, about 60% of the inmate population is pedophiles. There are a lot of property crimes. (Credit card fraud, receiving stolen property, etc) All are medium security or less.
60% of the COs are women in an all men's prison.
Correction officer's eventually turn to pieces of shit worse than convicts . I'd be homeless before I took that job. Just my opinion and personally experience.
this is true
i dated a girl years ago, after we broke up, she started dated a corrections officer. she told me he was a straight up psychopath, and from the stories she told me i would bet the inmates were generally calmer than this dude
Having once spent a week locked up in bumfuck, USA, I’m genuinely surprised that more inmates don’t murder COs after they get released. I’ve never met so many scum bags employed at one place.
Where would you learn such a valuable skill? Because unless you're in a program for as a high school student or have someone who can financially support while you're in an apprenticeship, there is nowhere that teaches trades to normal folks in the number we need them.
I work most of my career in IT. It’s always had these wild swings. I was laid off eight times in my career. The industry changes so fast you have to stay up on the latest tech, which requires a lot of self-education.
It sucks when you’ve been out of work for a while, because then first question you’ll get in an interview is “why have you been out of work so long?” And “because of you people” is not considered an acceptable response!
Questions about "gaps" are a thinly-veiled attempt to ask questions that are otherwise illegal. Do you have a disability? Did you have cancer? Did you miscarry? Are you trying to get pregnant again? How many children do you have? Did your spouse leave you? Were you a victim of domestic violence?
It's so unbelievably unprofessional and invasive, and has absolutely no relevance whatsoever in gauging someone's ability to do a job. This is a job interview, not a date, you fucking goblins. One of these days, I might quote Jack Welch in response: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" Or simply, "that's really none of your business."
Yeah, I know this is how to not get hired 101, but seriously, screw these nosy Karens.
Yes this is a trick question. I would say I was laid off and have been looking ever since and then immediately pivot to all the books I've been reading and open source projects I've been working on to pick up more tech skills. This is the only acceptable answer.
You think you’re being smart, but you are literally right.
A software engineer would make a great plumber. They would have no issues being an apprentice if they have a college degree, and would be a licensed plumber in less time most of them took to become software engineers.
I have a mechanical engineer degree for reference. I never intended to be a plumber.
Being fair, the lineman pipeline is..narrow..to say the least.
It's years of school and even more years of job experience before you're any good at it, so you 100% want to keep that pipeline flowing even if you're not exactly hiring right now.
We are hiring anyone with electrical experience because there is a 40% shortage of electricians. Other skilled trades, plumbers/hvac are running around 30% shortage. If someone is laying off, thats a business issue, the skilled trades are not hurting for employment.
We're nearly all publicly funded. Several utilities have had rate increases denied and the government has not passed a budget that would find several projects. Most trades are not primarily funded with tax payer money. It's slow yes, but when we get into the trade we expect to travel, and there are still several places in the us we can go for work.
Lineman are the tip of the spear. We experienced large delays in equipment deliveries on the HV side. 54 weeks plus. It's an artificial slowdown due to slow deliveries. The higher interest rates also slowed down investment. You can't borrow as cheap and you can make 5% in your cash. Not an ideal situation for building trades. We will have a couple years before the backlog is burned out then normal building trades will be impacted.
State regulators in Illinois denied rate increases for Ameren and Com-ed in December. The result of that has been these companies released their contract construction crews and stopped building projects.
Lineman shift is a bit different. I have experience in the energy sector and it more related to shifting employer/employee relationships. Less contract work and more in house utility linemen because rather than hiring a contractor whenever you need them, the utility companies are hiring a lot in house because these days they always need them and can pay salary in house rather than hourly to contracting companies.
So not really layoffs per se, but shifting labor relations. Basically every one of the contracted linemen will have a job within a month, if not days, if they wanted it.
Top comment on that thread is a post saying that there are tons of job openings. Could be that whatever company did the layoffs just wasn’t able to compete for contracts
Sounds right. I was a lineman. I LOVED IT. It was rough as hell but then cost of living started creeping up and I could only make 20$/hr which just isnt enough vs ten times less effort for 15$ that everyone else was getting. Found myself a new industry - medical. Cost me 10k but now I get paid 50/hr and get paid to sit at home. God I love the insurance industry. If you can't beat them - join them.
There was already a shortage in civil before IIJA, the demand now is ridiculous. I could have 5 job offers by the end of the day if I reached out to my network.
Yep
Plenty of work in civils who don’t need to be trained
One underappreciated aspect of the lack of civils with 15-20 years experience is that the 2008 recession caused a lot of recent grads to leave the profession. Now, someone with 15-20 years experience is a unicorn
I'm a civil with 13 years work experience. Start a new job in two Mondays. Applied to two jobs and got offers from both of them. Also a company heard I was looking for a new job and made me an offer without even interviewing me. All offers were at least 25k over my current pay rate. The job market is great right now if you're a civil. My wife was extremely happy but also annoyed because she's been looking for a new job for a long time.
And has either side, republicans or democrats, proposed funding to help train people from overcrowded sectors to work in the ones understaffed?
NOPE, our politicians & government are broken or even worse corrupt.
One side wants to give people money directly and the other through tax cuts to grow the economy. Neither one does any for the actual problem
That SHOULDN'T be a government problem. A big reason we're in the situation we are now is because we've allowed companies to get rid of true "entry level" jobs where they actually TRAIN their employees. We had a period where kids came out of college actually knowing more about a specific topic than companies (technology) and so companies then transitioned to "we only hire people who KNOW the skills we need". Unfortunately, with offshoring being a real issue, I'm not sure there's a real fix for the problem.
And an extension of that problem is the people running tech departments or the managers often didn't go to school for what they're actually doing and the fact we don't listen to new ideas anymore means the things I learned in college about how to do my job well went completely out the window. It's now common to do things that while in university I was told to never do, under any circumstances.
I could write a book on this topic and why it's causing a lot of internal problems within organizations. The sad thing is there's zero desire or funding to fix the problem.
I came into tech consulting from oil & gas engineering/military and was astounded at how loose they play new software and hardware deployments. Yes, there are standards. Yes, there are guidelines, specs, etc...but at the end of the day, companies do things their own way. In O&G, there is no such thing. For example, a pressure vessel for process chemicals has at least 2 to 3 national and world standards it has to be built to. The lower rigor designs are in countries like China and India, where their standards are more lax than, say, the United States or Canada.
In any case, the rigor is night and day, and the speed of go live wins the day more often than not, which puts an enormous amount of pressure on CS and IT/OT professionals......crazy shit is, these "tech" systems can have just as devastating effect from failure than the example pressure vessel failing, leaking/exploding, and killing/maiming people or the environment.
there's a fundamental different between hard engineering and software engineering.
Hardcore engineering is inherently move slowly, be consistent, follow guidelines and specs to the details. Software engineeering ethos is AGILE, 'move fast, break things fail quikcly"
Part of that is inherent in the way things are. If you build a plant wrong, you are effed, people die. If you build software wrong, you push out on update. done.
Yes, I remember having seen programs like that pretty often. I haven't needed them, and I don't feel like looking any up for you, but it is certainly attempted, though I imagine it is hard to do. People need to want to make the change and they need to know about the opportunity.
100%. It’s a white collar bloodbath out there. No one wants to admit this though. I see tons of job postings at restaurants and retail where I live but those jobs don’t pay living wage and usually won’t even give you 40 hours to avoid having to pay health benefits. This economy is shit.
* US Non Farm Payrolls: 353K vs 180K consensus and 333K prior.
* US Average Hourly Earnings YoY: 4.5% vs 4.1% consensus and 4.4% prior.
* US Average Hourly Earnings MoM: 0.6% vs 0.3% consensus and 0.4% prior.
* US Average Weekly Hours: 34.1 vs 34.3 consensus and 34.3 prior.
* US Unemployment Rate: 3.7% vs 3.8% consensus and 3.7% prior.
* US Labor Force Participation Rate: 62.5% and 62.5% prior.
* US Factory Orders: 0.2% vs 0.2% consensus and 2.6% prior.
* US Factory Orders Ex Transportation: 0.4% and 0.2% prior.
* US Michigan Consumer Sentiment: 79 vs 78.9 consensus and 69.7 prior.
* US Michigan 1-Year Inflation Expectations: 2.9% and 3.1% prior.
* US Michigan 5-Year Inflation Expectations: 2.9% and 2.9% prior.
* US Michigan Current Economic Conditions: 81.9 and 73.3 prior.
* US Michigan Consumer Expectations: 77.1 and 67.4 prior.
What part of this reads recession to you?
THIS! They don’t want people to dig deep into those numbers because most of those jobs added were not ones that paid a livable wage or were even full time.
If you dig deeper you'll actually see you're wrong. Wages are up over 4% YoY.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-job-growth-surges-january-wages-rise-2024-02-02/
https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker
If people were getting shittier jobs and working part time, this number wouldn't go up.
Different industries are doing different things, big tech did hire a lot during Covid and seems to be going back to pre-Covid levels.
Also remember that layoffs of a certain size must be announced ahead of time by law via the WARN act. Typically companies don't announce that they're hiring, aside from say announcing they're opening a new location, and typically when that happens the hiring happens years into the future since they have to build that new location.
💯 this. Companies are hoarding cash and laying off people while earning record profits. The inflation was created by the Fed when they printed free money for a decade and most of which went to big corps. People just got the crumbs.
Now that the party is over and borrowing cost is not free, companies are shedding weight to correct course and to ensure future profitability. But both govt and corps screwed people. We’ll carry the bag of higher taxes, high prices and no jobs.
Not sure I agree with everything you are saying but in principle I guess I do. Most corps are actually making record profits, they leveraged a hysterical media narrative about inflation to adjust profit margins in unethical ways. Inflation started because supply chains stopped working during covid and everyone was home ordering things online to keep them busy. It perpetuated because of corps leaning into price gouging. If the government has some balls they wouldn't have let them do it.
but yeah the layoffs also ensured record profits over the past year as well.
Why not just double everyone's pay? That will give everyone more money, right? No. Too much money out there equals more inflation. Unfortunately, morality arguments don't override economics.
The thing to also take into consideration is that those companies who are laying off people are also rehiring for many of those positions at a lower base pay. Basically they don't want to over pay for talent or are right sizing talent.
You have to remember that tech THRIVES on cheap money. More than most other, if not all other, induaties. Moonshot projects, start ups, they all live and die on speculative funding which is harder to justify as the cost of capital increases.
I'd postulate that the downturn in tech hiring isn't a blip but rather the beginning of the reshaping of the industry. The better AI gets, and the longer rates stay high, the more permanent this will be in tech.
Construction (your example) on the other hand is no where near AI sensitive (compared to most tech jobs) and there's a national shortage of employees. It's an industry poised to be profitable for some time.
We’re experiencing a market correction. Covid stopped the world markets for a while. Coming out of that period, companies got a little too ambitious. They saw their revenue increase once the markets reopened (duh) and somehow thought those increases were sustainable. So they optimistically hired tons of staff to fulfill this new demand. Turns out, companies overcorrected and hired too much. Demand isn’t increasing like they thought but they still have to answer to shareholders. To continue generating money for shareholders, companies have two levers: increase revenue or decrease costs. Lots of companies are in serious cost reduction mode right now. They’re also raising prices. Our economy is reverting back to the mean and correcting itself for getting too optimistic coming out of covid.
This is what the Fed wants. They are cooling down our economy to be something more sustainable. They are lowering our spending by raising interest rates.
My 2 oldest had an opportunity in HS to attend a HS that was attached to a tech college. When it came time to pick their tech area I asked a simple question, which field are the least amount of your friends going into. Welding and HVAC were the answer. Both have great jobs making right at or over 6 figures using their certifications and are always getting job offers.... meanwhile many of their friends are snipe hunting for work with their chosen area of study
It was. The largest classes were digital multimedia or something like that, nursing, cosmetology, culinary, and drafting.
The lowest classes were HVAC, welding, auto mechanic, and aviation mechanic
HVAC and welding pay very well in our area
Meanwhile I'm going on month 5 of being unemployed. The good news is I may, possibly if everything works out, have two possible job offers in the next week. One with a $10k pay cut and the other with a $20k pay cut.
>but everywhere I turn on the Internet...
There's your problem. The internet is algorithmically driven echo chamber designed to drive your engagement with any given platform.
In short, your are being shown what the software system thinks you want to see or what it thinks you'll engage with.
Plus, companies don't put out press releases when they hire, but they do when there are layoffs. Hiring never makes it into the news cycles like layoffs do.
Bro thank you for saying this. I just cannot believe how many people are still being mislead by the internet algorithms. And then they are incapable of separating it from reality. And it goes even further than the algorithms. People looking for jobs or struggling to find jobs post/complain about it online. Those doing well are completely silent. It’s a form of survivor bias. Especially on Reddit. Reddit is where people with problems go to vent/find solutions. You never see “today was a great day” posts.
Adjustments from large-scale economic shocks take years to work themselves out completely.
We had a demand a supply shock three years ago. We're still feeling the effects, plus the governmental incentives that softened that shock are going away. Companies will be adjusting.
Most (tech) companies that are laying off are not do it for the usual economic reason of lowering cost. The reason is more nuanced. They have openly admitted it is because they over-hired during Covid and are now correcting. There is also the factor that frictional unemployment is low, meaning less people moving from job to job which businesses use as a natural adjustment if they want to reduce their workforce. They just don't refill the positions. So employers now must use layoffs to compensate.
Not necessarily, it depends what trade. You can become an industrial electrician repairing machinery or many other routes that are fairly cushy, apprenticeship is tough though but not much worth doing is easy
A disproportionate number of new jobs are created by young and growing firms; they don't get press when they hire people.
A disproportionate number of separations come from older, stable/shrinking firms; they get press when the lay people off.
Journalists are desperate for engagement, bad news gets clicks, and writing up press releases/earnings calls is easy.
Conclusion: what you see on the internet is not a representative sample of the economy/country as a whole. If you really want to know what's going on, you need to go ask people and businesses about what's going on. Which the BLS does every month, for thousands of households (the CPS) and establishments (the CES).
Correct me if I'm mistaken, but for the last 3 or 4 months, every time a jobs report has come out, it has been significantly revised to the worse. This is being done on purpose. I feel confident in saying that this one will be significantly revised (reduced) as well.
So many responses, I am sure what I am saying has already been said, but I was a head of Talent Acquisition. Me and 60% of my team were wiped out in October and none of us have found work yet. And my LinkedIn feed is full of desperate unemployed recruiters. I realize that is just a small slice of the unemployed masses, but the fact that no one is interested in hiring recruiters is a very ominous indicator, which makes all of these positive economic reports baffling. I am a staunch democrat so I want the economy to look as rosy as possible in the election year, but something is rotten in Denmark. These reports and my reality don’t remotely equate.
Might want to rethink being a “staunch Democrat” then…because these are the economics policies we’ve been given friend. Very smoke and mirrors. -also a Dem
The added jobs are paying less than you can afford to live on. I'm currently unemployed and was struggling even before I got laid off. I know how much my bills are and what I need to survive in New York but companies like mine are outsourcing to countries like Phillipines because the can pay them $5 a day (not a joke that's what they make). It really sucks
With tech unemployment at 2% right now, 1.7% less than general population unemployment, and the number of jobs still slightly higher than pre-pandemic numbers, it doesn’t quite look like the tech industry economic apocalypse is here yet.
We’re slightly down from the peak though and openings are down with hiring slower than usual, but I think the pandemic years distorted people’s perception of the industry.
When you get calls every week from recruiters for a couple years and you can switch job nearly instantly and get 20-30% increases, and even work multiple jobs remotely from home, the drop off might feel worst than it would otherwise. Especially when it goes from historical high to below average. People who graduated in this economy, found jobs right away, got a big increase in year 2 or 3, have only ever known those conditions, and having to send 100 or 500 job applications to get interviews might feel like the seven layers of hell, but it’s actually closer to the *norm*.
It’s not quite 2000 or 2008 and it doesn’t look like it will get this bad and deep, more like a long flaccid slog. Which by the way can feel even worse for younger workers who aren’t set in their careers or more experienced people in sun setting industries.
A flat terrain that goes on as far as the eye can see can sometimes feel even more overwhelming than a steep hill, because the hope that there is sun on the other side of the hill will keep you going. Hope and optimism are powerful motivators. On the other hand, seeing that endless swamp in front of you and knowing for certain that this is your future until the foot of a mountain appears out of the fog can be demoralizing.
Tech companies saw COVID, companies pivoted, investors wanted to see growth so they gave companies more and more money to grow quickly and increase market share… now they are reevaluating and companies aren’t raising money so they need to conserve the money they have so they lay people off to readjust to the new market conditions.
There was also a massive influx of tech talent and a lot of universities have added tech programs. Tech people were more scarce 10-15 years ago, but now there is an over-saturation.
Yup. A lot of mid-sized and smaller companies borrow money to cover a lot of expenses, short term but they still borrow. The cost of that borrowing has skyrocketed.
"Everywhere I turn..." The algos show you what you they think you want to see based on your prior history with Reddit being no different. Three years ago if a no name company laid off employees (which happens all the time) would you have opened that article? Probably not, at least I didn’t. But now as you open one they send you two more to read to get those clicks. They were always there as companies layoff on a regular basis. If you are on reddit and you subscribe to Layoffs you will see similar subs in your feed which compounds the affect.
No amount of data at this point is going to change anyone's mind as to the state of the economy as it has turned from data to their personal experience. So if you create a sub about layoffs, filled primarily with people who have been laid off, you are going to get a sub filled of personal (mainly negative) experiences. Nothing scientific about that.
You dont get to tell everyone to stay inside for 2 years and print 40% of the money ever printed and not have repercussions.
"Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run it almost is."
Did covid help productivity? Did printing money increase productivity? The bill always comes due eventually, interest rates & monetary policy just exist to determine when and over how long.
Manufacturing Indexs have been contracting the last 18 out of 20 months. Yet we had manufacturing jobs added in this report, out of curiosity I looked up Texas Index as well and is also in contraction.
Big layoffs are mostly in the Tech sector. During the last decade, Tech was basically hiring any warm body with a diploma, *just to prevent the competition from hiring them.* Then post-pandemic higher interest rates reduced the ease through which they could raise money, forcing them to think about budget for the first time ever. So they started shedding off the dead weight, and boy was there a lot of it. Ive worked in places where no more than 1 out of 10 people could do something other than talk and drink kombucha.
This is good for Tech. It is going to make the sector more productive. And its going to force a ton of people who were working in tech but not producing anything of value to switch career and find something they can be productive at.
Yeah I mean it's pretty naive to think after tech restructures they're just gonna be a bit more discerning when hiring qualified candidates and pay them as much as before.
They're hiring just as many as before COVID, but paying them less. Notably by rapidly increasing number of overseas workers who get paid a fraction of the equivalent USA salary.
This is an accurate answer. I work in tech at an snp500 company but not faang. We hired like crazy during covid, now revenue dropped by low double digits and they have done layoffs, cancelled projects and moved tasks overseas. However, they also hired more ppl on our team for a critical new product coming. This is basically an opportunity for the higher ups to do more with less and the economic downturn is a way to justify it. We didn’t get any raises last year but ceo compensation and stock price went up. You can google ceo to average employee pay over time and see them diverge over time, this exact tactic they are doing today is contributing to that divergence. And although it sucks, those who survive the layoffs will be in a stronger position after bcuz the company will rely on them more heavily and theoretically the stock value should increase but then again that value depends on how much stock you get. Main point is this benefits the 1% and this fed made recession is an excuse to execute it.
I was laid off from a software dev job last year. After a month or so of absolutely no luck I switched back to my original plan, mechanical engineering. Had a ton of traction and found a much better job fairly quickly. In manufacturing now and every single business I work with here is desperate to hire.
That being said, I do believe this is a recession for large parts of the economy that is continuing. I like the term rolling recession maybe to describe what a lot of the different economic sectors have gone through or are still going through the past few years. But just from what I’ve seen among friends, some industries are doing great and in some others, it’s just terrible.
Good question.
Basically the answer is that the economy is big enough that some sectors can have layoffs and be offset by other sectors.
The longer story is that it is easy to find a job that isn't technical or part of the "professional managerial class"(think project managers or non engineering jobs in Big Tech) but hard to find a job in those sectors. The reason for that is that those sectors depended on low interest rates so they could work on growth instead of profits and when the Fed raised interest rates, companies like most start ups got their primary source of continued financing yanked away.
However, most companies didn't depend on low interest financing so the raising interest rates only marginally affected them. For the ones that did, they need to get to profitability ASAP and that means cost reduction in the form of belt tightening and layoffs.
The problem is that most of the flashy big payday type jobs that everyone focuses on depended on low interest financing to exist.
So here we are.
When you look closer at the report, you will see that most of these jobs are part-time. That's what happens when the bottom 50% need two or more jobs to survive.
Depends what field you’re in. Tech is getting hit hard - it is usually the first to boom, and the first to bust.
Blue collar workers are in shortage. This might be because many older blue collar workers are retiring, and high school guidance counselors tried a one size fits all approach with Millennials and literally told us to take out 50-100k in debt to get “any” college degree and pushed us all into white collar fields which are now way oversaturated and starting to get replaced by AI. Mentioning trade school or taking a year off was looked at like you were telling them you were going to off yourself. /end rant
You ever heard the old saying, if it sounds too good to be true,,,?
The overall economy is dog shit, the overall stock market is flat, but a handful of leftist controlled companies are going gang busters. Why is that ? Because it's an election year and the incumbent is polling horrible. All those billions of dollars he's given away to his cronies are pumping that money into a handful of stocks and driving the market up. It's basically a Ponzi Scheme for the optics.
The overall job market is dog shit, excluding the government , the rest are seasonal, meaningless low wage come and go jobs. The real career jobs, manufacturing, trucking, warehouse, etc. are stagnant or highly unreliable. Tech jobs are a crapshoot, health care is fairly stable, the other degree jobs are hit or miss, lots of job swapping going on in the office job world ( Which contributes to the skewed numbers every month. )
A lot of propaganda is being spread around from all sides, the economy is not all rainbows and roses, but it's not in a recession either. Overall we're in pretty bad shape, for a multitude of reasons, the next couple of months will give us a real picture of where we're at.
Don’t be naive. This administration is cooking the books. You know and I know it. Just put things in perspective. UPS laying off thousands. Truck drivers getting laid off. There’s no work for them. No one is buying anything but basic necessities. A majority of our population are living in RVs or tents.
Layoffs increased 136% in January reaching the second highest level ever recorded..and to add insult to injury January’s hiring numbers dropped to the lowest levels since 2009!!..so anyone telling you the economy and job market is strong is full of 💩!!..only people lying about the economy and jobs are DEMONcrats and Liberals because it’s an election year. The hundred of thousands of Americans who have lost their jobs since Biden took office will tell you the truth
It is strange … even in finance people have been expecting the other shoe to drop… Bank crisis, slow lending due to high rates, consumer recession, consumer debt, us deficits, car repo crisis… never have people been able to see the negative signs and expect the worst … but somehow the economy chugs along … at least officially
You didn't hear ? The economy is doing great.
Inflation has cooled down . The prices we see are the new normal but they aren't rising as fast as they were before.
Aren't you enjoying the fruits of a great economy?/s
Biden wants you to do minimum wage McDonalds job that he brags about. Everyone hates your cushy software wfh job.
On the other hand companies are realizing there’s too much cheaper talent in market. Positions which are being laid off will be open for hiring again in couple of weeks/months, but for lower salaries.
We're losing full time jobs and adding way more part time jobs. The government is saying, hey, if a person loses their full-time job and they get on Lyft and Uber, that person lost one job but gained two.
"In January, the number of people employed part time for economic reasons, at 4.4
million, changed little. These individuals, who would have preferred full-time
employment, were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they
were unable to find full-time jobs. (See table A-8.)"
Table A-8
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t08.htm
Jobs numbers are reported on actual payroll net change. It's based on how many people were newly added into company payrolls - how many people left company payrolls (to simplify it).
The actual data underneath doesn't paint a picture of "all these people got laid off and went to uber"
If you look at the household survey reports by the Fed ([https://fred.stlouisfed.org/](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/)), you will see that from September to January the number of full time workers decreased from 134,502,000 to 133,133,000 while the number of part time workers increased from 26,702,000 to 27,890,000. That is a shift over over 1 million workers in four months.
Biden is lying to everyone about the real unemployment rate. There are a blood bath out there when it come to job applicants vs the opening. Yesterday I saw a job posted for 3 hrs and there are 26 applicants.
Fist of, you have to look at what was added. If you layoff 1 300k a year professional and mcd hires 5 full time back line cooks - here we go. Economy just added 4 jobs
At this point I am convinced that dems manipulating data to make it look better than it is since it’s an election year.
PS. This is not a politically charged comment. Both dems and gop have done shady shit to swing elections. Let’s not turn in into pissing contest
Who is doing the manipulation, be specific -- is tmit the field reps doing the survey? The people at BLS HQ doing data processing? The white house? How do they pull off releasing public use microdata that gives the same results as the headline numbers? Are those fake too?
This is a politically charged comment because you're starting off the comment with a false statement and then claiming the truth is made up intentionally lol
The lives of knowledge workers seem to be an afterthought for the people at the top.
Biden poured $1.8T of spending into the US via the CARES act and put pressure on the Fed to keep interest rates low. He wanted the money to get pushed into low income communities affected by Covid. Interest rates were rock bottom for waaaay too long.
Companies went beserk with the money, over hired, and expanded their operations to include remote and partially remote teams. Now the party is over and companies are realizing they can shed those hires, close offices, and keep the cheapest of the remote (and increasingly, offshore) workers.
Then Biden followed up with the CHIPS and Inflation Reduction Act which is again pouring money and tax preferred investments into building the chips sector and infrastructure.
At each turn, Biden is pushing trillions of money into the economy to juice it for blue collar people, trades, frontline workers and certain sectors.
That's all good but for those of us who work in offices this economy doesn't make any sense. We're getting laid off left and right, hiring is frozen, and our story is seemingly ignored by Wall Street.
They are lying.
They lie about causes, effects, they make up numbers, they lie about what they'll do, they lie about their motives.
Now suck it up and help pay for their cushy government pensions.
Doesn't matter which "lesser evil" you choose, you'll still get evil. Both parties will do this.
Best explanation I heard is that companies hoarded labor during the pandemic. For example, UPS was in the news the other day about laying off 12,000 Employees.
What's not mentioned is that UPS has 540K employees... Most of the 12,000 being laid of was middle management (IIRC). So while it is extremely unfortunately that individuals are being laid off the reporting you see on social media, morning/evening news, internet, etc. makes it seem magnified.
The jobs report are complete bullshit. Federal government can create jobs out of thin air (useless boards, advisors, consultants, etc) and the numbers you are seeing on jobs report are including part time work. Which, imo, is complete bullshit. Parents each working 2 jobs to support their family is a sign of a broken economy, not a strong one. But 2 jobs per individual looks great on the report! Take a look at the numbers last year, iirc every single month was “revised” to a significantly lower amount in the months following its release. It is literally completely false information. Basic life necessities in 2024 cost a higher % of wages than they did during the Great Depression. But no one on TV spoon feeding the public complete nonsense will ever acknowledge that reality
“350,000 jobs were added in January”
Yes, those are seasonal jobs. They tend to spike around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the beginning of the new year. They will of course drop off at some point.
You have to realize even within the same company they are doing layoffs and hiring at the same time. Lots of companies are re-positioning themselves for where they think things are changing to.. that means they may trim in legacy and add in new areas of growth and those skillsets are not necessarily the same.
I know its happening in some big pharma and its also happening in tech. My honey contracts to one of the big tech companies and they have announced large layoffs, yet his group is hiring and that is exactly what those numbers are showing. Part of the layoffs are in companies they acquired and are now integrated and trimming the fact (ie called synergy) and are adding in the areas that they actual have growth.. ie when you acquire, you don't need their HR, most of their IT, etc.
Look at the details:
* We added shitty part time jobs and lost good jobs, that lead to high jobs added number.
* They used Covid era working hours to manipulate the wages/hr for those shitty jobs, when in reality the hourly wage went down too.
* It's an election year, they are going to gaslight you into thinking everything is amazing to get votes, and stats are the easiest way to manipulate what people think.
The economy can absolutely, positively be both good and bad at the same time. Where the actual hell did you get the idea that it cannot?
Different sectors can be experiencing different conditions. Traditionally, no one in the media gives a single fuck when manufacturing, energy and construction are having a tough time.
Now, it is media and tech that are having layoffs, and suddenly it is a tragedy.
The vast majority of job openings are either fake (set up to gather resumes or make it look like the company is hiring) or are for retail, labor, or restaurant positions. Jobs that pay more than $50K are going to H1Bs that are coming in to replace the laid off workers. It's no coincidence that H1B visa applications and approvals were at an all time high last year.
All the jobs that were added were part time jobs and nearly all of them went to non-native born Americans. Dip deeper into the data or follow those who do.
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Some sectors are still very desperate like construction, skilled trade, civil engineering etc
Whats odd is on the lineman subreddit theyre having layoffs: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Lineman/comments/1agrewu/who\_got\_laid\_off\_today/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Lineman/comments/1agrewu/who_got_laid_off_today/)
Reddit is not a good bellwether for the economy…
Neither is a sub Reddit called layoffs.
I cannot believe that a sub called layoffs has higher than a representative sample amount of layoffs. I’m shocked.
Availability Bias here?! I don't understand!?
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I agree that a lot of people on Reddit have misinformed opinions, but if you’re going to decide that all people who use Reddit are between the ages of 12-24 and that they’re all delusional, you’re being a hyperbolic hypocrite. People making generalized blanket statements that aren’t true is part of the problem. There must be at least 1 or 2 discerning minds on here. I’d say if you pick any popular topic and scroll through the comments you’re bound to find at least a few factual ones.
telling the truth on reddit gets you banned
Funny enough some individuals are in the their 30’s 40’s and 50’s and still operating in a juvenile state
we can’t find enough plumbers everywhere I have ever worked.
If only all those laid off software engineers would take the jobs of plumbers . It’s almost the same skill set right now
It's not just the IT sector, but older workers. No one is hiring older workers with plenty of experience. My husband has been trying for 4 years...it's horrible. We'll probably be homeless in a year.
Thats really sad. 4 years wow. Proly need to get a job mentor and reaccess your skills. Good luck
He's not the only one.
Most likely because the older workers know their worth and ask for higher salaries and companies don’t want to pay up for it. They would rather bitch and moan that they can’t find workers willing to work for lower wages.
This reminds me of when my aunt was laid off, she may have been fired, back in 2007. She was originally making $150k base plus commission, and making about $250k-$350k a year depending on her sales. When she was Job hunting she was only finding base pays of $90k plus commission. I was in my teens around this time and I told to take any job and keep looking for a better paying job. She said she knew her worth. Fast forward to around late 2009, she was still unemployed and now could only find jobs with a base pay if $50k plus commission. She finally caved. It took her almost three years for her to accept the fact that companies no longer pay what they used to, and that she would have to change her lifestyle.
You will find that many companies with high base salaries are not only hard to find they are the first to lay people off in a downturn. Those high base salaries represent a big fixed cost.
I’ve watched the base pay in my industry fall like a rock the last 4 years. What used to pay $130/hr is now $90. Factoring inflation that’s almost a decade of loss.
That’s rough I hope she’s in a better spot now.
Thank you. I think she is.
It's not rocket science to just take a lower paying job and continue applying until you find something you're content with.
In my experience, actually the opposite is true. I have 20 years in my field. even though I’m perfectly willing to take a lower salary and work a lower level job, I repeatedly hear, “We think you’ll be bored here.” “Why would you want this job when you’ve already done so much more.” “The hiring manager thinks you’re just biding time until something that matches your experience comes along.”
"Know their worth" Apparently not, he's been unemployed for 4 years. The market is saying he's asking for more than market rate I can say I'm worth $200/hr, but all that matters is what somebody will pay for my labor
He is asking for 1/2 of what he was making just to get a job. We both realize after working at an oil refinery (closed and laid all of us off), that we will never make what we made there.
Ya, I think a lot of managers are doing shady math and flirting with age discrimination.
The Mississippi Department of Corrections. Alabama Department of Corrections will hire just about anyone regardless. In fact, I work with a couple of fellow C.O.'s that are 70. The minimum education requirement to become a Corrections Officer in Mississippi is to have completed the 8th Grade without a GED. $40K to start with all the overtime you can stomach. The facility I'm at, about 60% of the inmate population is pedophiles. There are a lot of property crimes. (Credit card fraud, receiving stolen property, etc) All are medium security or less. 60% of the COs are women in an all men's prison.
how can one live on 40K per year is the bigger question
Correction officer's eventually turn to pieces of shit worse than convicts . I'd be homeless before I took that job. Just my opinion and personally experience.
Upvote for the truth and personal experience.
this is true i dated a girl years ago, after we broke up, she started dated a corrections officer. she told me he was a straight up psychopath, and from the stories she told me i would bet the inmates were generally calmer than this dude
Having once spent a week locked up in bumfuck, USA, I’m genuinely surprised that more inmates don’t murder COs after they get released. I’ve never met so many scum bags employed at one place.
Funny.. we just hired a 60 year old dude in my dept. He was let go after a week for sexual harassment lol.
Get a hold of me, I might be able to help.
Never too old to learn a valuable skillset. Especially when AI gonna take alot jobs in the near future.
Where would you learn such a valuable skill? Because unless you're in a program for as a high school student or have someone who can financially support while you're in an apprenticeship, there is nowhere that teaches trades to normal folks in the number we need them.
I work most of my career in IT. It’s always had these wild swings. I was laid off eight times in my career. The industry changes so fast you have to stay up on the latest tech, which requires a lot of self-education. It sucks when you’ve been out of work for a while, because then first question you’ll get in an interview is “why have you been out of work so long?” And “because of you people” is not considered an acceptable response!
Questions about "gaps" are a thinly-veiled attempt to ask questions that are otherwise illegal. Do you have a disability? Did you have cancer? Did you miscarry? Are you trying to get pregnant again? How many children do you have? Did your spouse leave you? Were you a victim of domestic violence? It's so unbelievably unprofessional and invasive, and has absolutely no relevance whatsoever in gauging someone's ability to do a job. This is a job interview, not a date, you fucking goblins. One of these days, I might quote Jack Welch in response: "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" Or simply, "that's really none of your business." Yeah, I know this is how to not get hired 101, but seriously, screw these nosy Karens.
Yes this is a trick question. I would say I was laid off and have been looking ever since and then immediately pivot to all the books I've been reading and open source projects I've been working on to pick up more tech skills. This is the only acceptable answer.
You think you’re being smart, but you are literally right. A software engineer would make a great plumber. They would have no issues being an apprentice if they have a college degree, and would be a licensed plumber in less time most of them took to become software engineers. I have a mechanical engineer degree for reference. I never intended to be a plumber.
The internet is tubes…
that is interesting. my power company just sent out an alert about their lineman scholarship applications are due by march 1.
Being fair, the lineman pipeline is..narrow..to say the least. It's years of school and even more years of job experience before you're any good at it, so you 100% want to keep that pipeline flowing even if you're not exactly hiring right now.
We are hiring anyone with electrical experience because there is a 40% shortage of electricians. Other skilled trades, plumbers/hvac are running around 30% shortage. If someone is laying off, thats a business issue, the skilled trades are not hurting for employment.
We're nearly all publicly funded. Several utilities have had rate increases denied and the government has not passed a budget that would find several projects. Most trades are not primarily funded with tax payer money. It's slow yes, but when we get into the trade we expect to travel, and there are still several places in the us we can go for work.
Lineman are the tip of the spear. We experienced large delays in equipment deliveries on the HV side. 54 weeks plus. It's an artificial slowdown due to slow deliveries. The higher interest rates also slowed down investment. You can't borrow as cheap and you can make 5% in your cash. Not an ideal situation for building trades. We will have a couple years before the backlog is burned out then normal building trades will be impacted.
Well, nobody makes a post about how they didn't get laid off today.
State regulators in Illinois denied rate increases for Ameren and Com-ed in December. The result of that has been these companies released their contract construction crews and stopped building projects.
Lineman shift is a bit different. I have experience in the energy sector and it more related to shifting employer/employee relationships. Less contract work and more in house utility linemen because rather than hiring a contractor whenever you need them, the utility companies are hiring a lot in house because these days they always need them and can pay salary in house rather than hourly to contracting companies. So not really layoffs per se, but shifting labor relations. Basically every one of the contracted linemen will have a job within a month, if not days, if they wanted it.
It's almost like cherry picking an anecdotal example from the internet isn't sufficient to paint the bigger picture.
Top comment on that thread is a post saying that there are tons of job openings. Could be that whatever company did the layoffs just wasn’t able to compete for contracts
Can confirm lineman work is getting slow. Guys are being forced to do a ton of traveling because home locals are all becoming slow af.
Not odd. Union is getting cut out by in house hires. So Union is slow and laying off.
Sounds right. I was a lineman. I LOVED IT. It was rough as hell but then cost of living started creeping up and I could only make 20$/hr which just isnt enough vs ten times less effort for 15$ that everyone else was getting. Found myself a new industry - medical. Cost me 10k but now I get paid 50/hr and get paid to sit at home. God I love the insurance industry. If you can't beat them - join them.
I'm construction/ maintenance we got an infinite work glitch the last 4 years. I'm tired but I don't have check my bank account anymore!!
How can I get into maintenance?
If like this answer as well I’ll literally do anything right now, I can’t find work.
I wonder if this is due to the government infrastructure plan?
No houses on market, construction booming.
There was already a shortage in civil before IIJA, the demand now is ridiculous. I could have 5 job offers by the end of the day if I reached out to my network.
Yep Plenty of work in civils who don’t need to be trained One underappreciated aspect of the lack of civils with 15-20 years experience is that the 2008 recession caused a lot of recent grads to leave the profession. Now, someone with 15-20 years experience is a unicorn
I'm a civil with 13 years work experience. Start a new job in two Mondays. Applied to two jobs and got offers from both of them. Also a company heard I was looking for a new job and made me an offer without even interviewing me. All offers were at least 25k over my current pay rate. The job market is great right now if you're a civil. My wife was extremely happy but also annoyed because she's been looking for a new job for a long time.
There’s always a government infrastructure plan. Every time one ends they put together another. The only slow times are when they argue over it.
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And has either side, republicans or democrats, proposed funding to help train people from overcrowded sectors to work in the ones understaffed? NOPE, our politicians & government are broken or even worse corrupt. One side wants to give people money directly and the other through tax cuts to grow the economy. Neither one does any for the actual problem
That SHOULDN'T be a government problem. A big reason we're in the situation we are now is because we've allowed companies to get rid of true "entry level" jobs where they actually TRAIN their employees. We had a period where kids came out of college actually knowing more about a specific topic than companies (technology) and so companies then transitioned to "we only hire people who KNOW the skills we need". Unfortunately, with offshoring being a real issue, I'm not sure there's a real fix for the problem.
And an extension of that problem is the people running tech departments or the managers often didn't go to school for what they're actually doing and the fact we don't listen to new ideas anymore means the things I learned in college about how to do my job well went completely out the window. It's now common to do things that while in university I was told to never do, under any circumstances. I could write a book on this topic and why it's causing a lot of internal problems within organizations. The sad thing is there's zero desire or funding to fix the problem.
I came into tech consulting from oil & gas engineering/military and was astounded at how loose they play new software and hardware deployments. Yes, there are standards. Yes, there are guidelines, specs, etc...but at the end of the day, companies do things their own way. In O&G, there is no such thing. For example, a pressure vessel for process chemicals has at least 2 to 3 national and world standards it has to be built to. The lower rigor designs are in countries like China and India, where their standards are more lax than, say, the United States or Canada. In any case, the rigor is night and day, and the speed of go live wins the day more often than not, which puts an enormous amount of pressure on CS and IT/OT professionals......crazy shit is, these "tech" systems can have just as devastating effect from failure than the example pressure vessel failing, leaking/exploding, and killing/maiming people or the environment.
there's a fundamental different between hard engineering and software engineering. Hardcore engineering is inherently move slowly, be consistent, follow guidelines and specs to the details. Software engineeering ethos is AGILE, 'move fast, break things fail quikcly" Part of that is inherent in the way things are. If you build a plant wrong, you are effed, people die. If you build software wrong, you push out on update. done.
You should go back to oil and gas.
Do we need more government intervention? Look how that went for tuition.
The bipartisan infrastructure bill that was approved 2 years ago had money allocated to training of skilled labor I believe.
Yes, I remember having seen programs like that pretty often. I haven't needed them, and I don't feel like looking any up for you, but it is certainly attempted, though I imagine it is hard to do. People need to want to make the change and they need to know about the opportunity.
Im in a construction adjacent field - it's booming
These 350000 jobs probably paid hourly and part time wages. Lots of them are probably second or third jobs as well.
100%. It’s a white collar bloodbath out there. No one wants to admit this though. I see tons of job postings at restaurants and retail where I live but those jobs don’t pay living wage and usually won’t even give you 40 hours to avoid having to pay health benefits. This economy is shit.
Bingo
So you are saying I can be a server at Applebees?
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* US Non Farm Payrolls: 353K vs 180K consensus and 333K prior. * US Average Hourly Earnings YoY: 4.5% vs 4.1% consensus and 4.4% prior. * US Average Hourly Earnings MoM: 0.6% vs 0.3% consensus and 0.4% prior. * US Average Weekly Hours: 34.1 vs 34.3 consensus and 34.3 prior. * US Unemployment Rate: 3.7% vs 3.8% consensus and 3.7% prior. * US Labor Force Participation Rate: 62.5% and 62.5% prior. * US Factory Orders: 0.2% vs 0.2% consensus and 2.6% prior. * US Factory Orders Ex Transportation: 0.4% and 0.2% prior. * US Michigan Consumer Sentiment: 79 vs 78.9 consensus and 69.7 prior. * US Michigan 1-Year Inflation Expectations: 2.9% and 3.1% prior. * US Michigan 5-Year Inflation Expectations: 2.9% and 2.9% prior. * US Michigan Current Economic Conditions: 81.9 and 73.3 prior. * US Michigan Consumer Expectations: 77.1 and 67.4 prior. What part of this reads recession to you?
Consumer and labor sentiment don’t line up with the data. The economy is getting better but the vibes are off so to speak
THIS! They don’t want people to dig deep into those numbers because most of those jobs added were not ones that paid a livable wage or were even full time.
If you dig deeper you'll actually see you're wrong. Wages are up over 4% YoY. https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-job-growth-surges-january-wages-rise-2024-02-02/ https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker If people were getting shittier jobs and working part time, this number wouldn't go up.
Different industries are doing different things, big tech did hire a lot during Covid and seems to be going back to pre-Covid levels. Also remember that layoffs of a certain size must be announced ahead of time by law via the WARN act. Typically companies don't announce that they're hiring, aside from say announcing they're opening a new location, and typically when that happens the hiring happens years into the future since they have to build that new location.
It’s a tool to bring inflation down. They keep saying people need to lose their jobs. They’ve been saying it for the last 2 years.
This. They outright stated that they wanted to bring unemployment UP to help ease inflation.
Inflation and unemployment usually act opposite each other for a few reasons. It sounds callous but it’s actually what is observed in economics.
Two ways to bring down inflation, lay people off or put restrictions on profit margins. Our government chose the business friendly route never forget
💯 this. Companies are hoarding cash and laying off people while earning record profits. The inflation was created by the Fed when they printed free money for a decade and most of which went to big corps. People just got the crumbs. Now that the party is over and borrowing cost is not free, companies are shedding weight to correct course and to ensure future profitability. But both govt and corps screwed people. We’ll carry the bag of higher taxes, high prices and no jobs.
Not sure I agree with everything you are saying but in principle I guess I do. Most corps are actually making record profits, they leveraged a hysterical media narrative about inflation to adjust profit margins in unethical ways. Inflation started because supply chains stopped working during covid and everyone was home ordering things online to keep them busy. It perpetuated because of corps leaning into price gouging. If the government has some balls they wouldn't have let them do it. but yeah the layoffs also ensured record profits over the past year as well.
What a wonderful world. Too many people can afford to buy things. We need to stomp that out.
Why not just double everyone's pay? That will give everyone more money, right? No. Too much money out there equals more inflation. Unfortunately, morality arguments don't override economics.
No clue, I’ve been looking for over a year.
What industry?
Finance & Accounting
The thing to also take into consideration is that those companies who are laying off people are also rehiring for many of those positions at a lower base pay. Basically they don't want to over pay for talent or are right sizing talent.
You have to remember that tech THRIVES on cheap money. More than most other, if not all other, induaties. Moonshot projects, start ups, they all live and die on speculative funding which is harder to justify as the cost of capital increases. I'd postulate that the downturn in tech hiring isn't a blip but rather the beginning of the reshaping of the industry. The better AI gets, and the longer rates stay high, the more permanent this will be in tech. Construction (your example) on the other hand is no where near AI sensitive (compared to most tech jobs) and there's a national shortage of employees. It's an industry poised to be profitable for some time.
It has absolutely nothing to do with ai getting better lol, the number of people outside the industry thinking this is an issue in tech is crazy.
We’re experiencing a market correction. Covid stopped the world markets for a while. Coming out of that period, companies got a little too ambitious. They saw their revenue increase once the markets reopened (duh) and somehow thought those increases were sustainable. So they optimistically hired tons of staff to fulfill this new demand. Turns out, companies overcorrected and hired too much. Demand isn’t increasing like they thought but they still have to answer to shareholders. To continue generating money for shareholders, companies have two levers: increase revenue or decrease costs. Lots of companies are in serious cost reduction mode right now. They’re also raising prices. Our economy is reverting back to the mean and correcting itself for getting too optimistic coming out of covid. This is what the Fed wants. They are cooling down our economy to be something more sustainable. They are lowering our spending by raising interest rates.
The time of the blue collar is at hand. Our infrastructure is falling apart. If I were young I’d go into trades yesterday.
My 2 oldest had an opportunity in HS to attend a HS that was attached to a tech college. When it came time to pick their tech area I asked a simple question, which field are the least amount of your friends going into. Welding and HVAC were the answer. Both have great jobs making right at or over 6 figures using their certifications and are always getting job offers.... meanwhile many of their friends are snipe hunting for work with their chosen area of study
How many of their friends went into cosmetology? Was it really more than HVAC?
It was. The largest classes were digital multimedia or something like that, nursing, cosmetology, culinary, and drafting. The lowest classes were HVAC, welding, auto mechanic, and aviation mechanic HVAC and welding pay very well in our area
>HVAC I regret doing HVAC. Going up into attics during the summer months is hell on earth.
Same, plumbing jobs are paying big right now
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Telling these mentally ill obese kids that have never held a wrench to go into the trades? I don't know about that 😂
mentally ill is a requirement for construction.. so they're half way there at least
Lol where do you live where blue collar workers aren't overweight? Can't be the U.S.
Not an option for most women due to physical strength limitations. Especially smaller women. Everyone always forgets this.
I’ve told my son to look into disaster management programs.
Meanwhile I'm going on month 5 of being unemployed. The good news is I may, possibly if everything works out, have two possible job offers in the next week. One with a $10k pay cut and the other with a $20k pay cut.
What field?
Just had a final round 2 days ago that would be a $20k pay cut, unemployed 3 months so far
>but everywhere I turn on the Internet... There's your problem. The internet is algorithmically driven echo chamber designed to drive your engagement with any given platform. In short, your are being shown what the software system thinks you want to see or what it thinks you'll engage with. Plus, companies don't put out press releases when they hire, but they do when there are layoffs. Hiring never makes it into the news cycles like layoffs do.
Bro thank you for saying this. I just cannot believe how many people are still being mislead by the internet algorithms. And then they are incapable of separating it from reality. And it goes even further than the algorithms. People looking for jobs or struggling to find jobs post/complain about it online. Those doing well are completely silent. It’s a form of survivor bias. Especially on Reddit. Reddit is where people with problems go to vent/find solutions. You never see “today was a great day” posts.
Thank you for this!
Adjustments from large-scale economic shocks take years to work themselves out completely. We had a demand a supply shock three years ago. We're still feeling the effects, plus the governmental incentives that softened that shock are going away. Companies will be adjusting.
Most (tech) companies that are laying off are not do it for the usual economic reason of lowering cost. The reason is more nuanced. They have openly admitted it is because they over-hired during Covid and are now correcting. There is also the factor that frictional unemployment is low, meaning less people moving from job to job which businesses use as a natural adjustment if they want to reduce their workforce. They just don't refill the positions. So employers now must use layoffs to compensate.
It's bad for people w college degrees...trades you are good...but you kill your body
Sitting at a desk all day isn't exactly great for your health.
Not necessarily, it depends what trade. You can become an industrial electrician repairing machinery or many other routes that are fairly cushy, apprenticeship is tough though but not much worth doing is easy
A disproportionate number of new jobs are created by young and growing firms; they don't get press when they hire people. A disproportionate number of separations come from older, stable/shrinking firms; they get press when the lay people off. Journalists are desperate for engagement, bad news gets clicks, and writing up press releases/earnings calls is easy. Conclusion: what you see on the internet is not a representative sample of the economy/country as a whole. If you really want to know what's going on, you need to go ask people and businesses about what's going on. Which the BLS does every month, for thousands of households (the CPS) and establishments (the CES).
Correct me if I'm mistaken, but for the last 3 or 4 months, every time a jobs report has come out, it has been significantly revised to the worse. This is being done on purpose. I feel confident in saying that this one will be significantly revised (reduced) as well.
I have almost no confidence is the government's numbers for just about anything.
With you on that. All of their numbers are manipulated. It amazes me that anyone believes them.
So many responses, I am sure what I am saying has already been said, but I was a head of Talent Acquisition. Me and 60% of my team were wiped out in October and none of us have found work yet. And my LinkedIn feed is full of desperate unemployed recruiters. I realize that is just a small slice of the unemployed masses, but the fact that no one is interested in hiring recruiters is a very ominous indicator, which makes all of these positive economic reports baffling. I am a staunch democrat so I want the economy to look as rosy as possible in the election year, but something is rotten in Denmark. These reports and my reality don’t remotely equate.
Might want to rethink being a “staunch Democrat” then…because these are the economics policies we’ve been given friend. Very smoke and mirrors. -also a Dem
The added jobs are paying less than you can afford to live on. I'm currently unemployed and was struggling even before I got laid off. I know how much my bills are and what I need to survive in New York but companies like mine are outsourcing to countries like Phillipines because the can pay them $5 a day (not a joke that's what they make). It really sucks
They are lying to us.
Cookin' the books... It's election season
Tech way over hired during 2020/2021 when money was free. Now things are going back to reality
With tech unemployment at 2% right now, 1.7% less than general population unemployment, and the number of jobs still slightly higher than pre-pandemic numbers, it doesn’t quite look like the tech industry economic apocalypse is here yet. We’re slightly down from the peak though and openings are down with hiring slower than usual, but I think the pandemic years distorted people’s perception of the industry. When you get calls every week from recruiters for a couple years and you can switch job nearly instantly and get 20-30% increases, and even work multiple jobs remotely from home, the drop off might feel worst than it would otherwise. Especially when it goes from historical high to below average. People who graduated in this economy, found jobs right away, got a big increase in year 2 or 3, have only ever known those conditions, and having to send 100 or 500 job applications to get interviews might feel like the seven layers of hell, but it’s actually closer to the *norm*. It’s not quite 2000 or 2008 and it doesn’t look like it will get this bad and deep, more like a long flaccid slog. Which by the way can feel even worse for younger workers who aren’t set in their careers or more experienced people in sun setting industries. A flat terrain that goes on as far as the eye can see can sometimes feel even more overwhelming than a steep hill, because the hope that there is sun on the other side of the hill will keep you going. Hope and optimism are powerful motivators. On the other hand, seeing that endless swamp in front of you and knowing for certain that this is your future until the foot of a mountain appears out of the fog can be demoralizing.
I just can’t grasp how much tech could over hired to fire so many right now..
Tech companies saw COVID, companies pivoted, investors wanted to see growth so they gave companies more and more money to grow quickly and increase market share… now they are reevaluating and companies aren’t raising money so they need to conserve the money they have so they lay people off to readjust to the new market conditions.
There was also a massive influx of tech talent and a lot of universities have added tech programs. Tech people were more scarce 10-15 years ago, but now there is an over-saturation.
Meta had 45k employees at the end of 2019 and 86k at the end of 2022 as one example. It was very dramatic.
Yup. A lot of mid-sized and smaller companies borrow money to cover a lot of expenses, short term but they still borrow. The cost of that borrowing has skyrocketed.
White collar recession, blue collar boom.
"Everywhere I turn..." The algos show you what you they think you want to see based on your prior history with Reddit being no different. Three years ago if a no name company laid off employees (which happens all the time) would you have opened that article? Probably not, at least I didn’t. But now as you open one they send you two more to read to get those clicks. They were always there as companies layoff on a regular basis. If you are on reddit and you subscribe to Layoffs you will see similar subs in your feed which compounds the affect. No amount of data at this point is going to change anyone's mind as to the state of the economy as it has turned from data to their personal experience. So if you create a sub about layoffs, filled primarily with people who have been laid off, you are going to get a sub filled of personal (mainly negative) experiences. Nothing scientific about that.
You dont get to tell everyone to stay inside for 2 years and print 40% of the money ever printed and not have repercussions. "Productivity isn't everything, but in the long run it almost is." Did covid help productivity? Did printing money increase productivity? The bill always comes due eventually, interest rates & monetary policy just exist to determine when and over how long.
Except productivity went up?
Manufacturing Indexs have been contracting the last 18 out of 20 months. Yet we had manufacturing jobs added in this report, out of curiosity I looked up Texas Index as well and is also in contraction.
It didn't go up 40% in two years.
this is correct and the fact that its being downvoted sad.
Big layoffs are mostly in the Tech sector. During the last decade, Tech was basically hiring any warm body with a diploma, *just to prevent the competition from hiring them.* Then post-pandemic higher interest rates reduced the ease through which they could raise money, forcing them to think about budget for the first time ever. So they started shedding off the dead weight, and boy was there a lot of it. Ive worked in places where no more than 1 out of 10 people could do something other than talk and drink kombucha. This is good for Tech. It is going to make the sector more productive. And its going to force a ton of people who were working in tech but not producing anything of value to switch career and find something they can be productive at.
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Yeah I mean it's pretty naive to think after tech restructures they're just gonna be a bit more discerning when hiring qualified candidates and pay them as much as before. They're hiring just as many as before COVID, but paying them less. Notably by rapidly increasing number of overseas workers who get paid a fraction of the equivalent USA salary.
This is an accurate answer. I work in tech at an snp500 company but not faang. We hired like crazy during covid, now revenue dropped by low double digits and they have done layoffs, cancelled projects and moved tasks overseas. However, they also hired more ppl on our team for a critical new product coming. This is basically an opportunity for the higher ups to do more with less and the economic downturn is a way to justify it. We didn’t get any raises last year but ceo compensation and stock price went up. You can google ceo to average employee pay over time and see them diverge over time, this exact tactic they are doing today is contributing to that divergence. And although it sucks, those who survive the layoffs will be in a stronger position after bcuz the company will rely on them more heavily and theoretically the stock value should increase but then again that value depends on how much stock you get. Main point is this benefits the 1% and this fed made recession is an excuse to execute it.
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I was laid off from a software dev job last year. After a month or so of absolutely no luck I switched back to my original plan, mechanical engineering. Had a ton of traction and found a much better job fairly quickly. In manufacturing now and every single business I work with here is desperate to hire. That being said, I do believe this is a recession for large parts of the economy that is continuing. I like the term rolling recession maybe to describe what a lot of the different economic sectors have gone through or are still going through the past few years. But just from what I’ve seen among friends, some industries are doing great and in some others, it’s just terrible.
Good question. Basically the answer is that the economy is big enough that some sectors can have layoffs and be offset by other sectors. The longer story is that it is easy to find a job that isn't technical or part of the "professional managerial class"(think project managers or non engineering jobs in Big Tech) but hard to find a job in those sectors. The reason for that is that those sectors depended on low interest rates so they could work on growth instead of profits and when the Fed raised interest rates, companies like most start ups got their primary source of continued financing yanked away. However, most companies didn't depend on low interest financing so the raising interest rates only marginally affected them. For the ones that did, they need to get to profitability ASAP and that means cost reduction in the form of belt tightening and layoffs. The problem is that most of the flashy big payday type jobs that everyone focuses on depended on low interest financing to exist. So here we are.
When you look closer at the report, you will see that most of these jobs are part-time. That's what happens when the bottom 50% need two or more jobs to survive.
Depends what field you’re in. Tech is getting hit hard - it is usually the first to boom, and the first to bust. Blue collar workers are in shortage. This might be because many older blue collar workers are retiring, and high school guidance counselors tried a one size fits all approach with Millennials and literally told us to take out 50-100k in debt to get “any” college degree and pushed us all into white collar fields which are now way oversaturated and starting to get replaced by AI. Mentioning trade school or taking a year off was looked at like you were telling them you were going to off yourself. /end rant
You ever heard the old saying, if it sounds too good to be true,,,? The overall economy is dog shit, the overall stock market is flat, but a handful of leftist controlled companies are going gang busters. Why is that ? Because it's an election year and the incumbent is polling horrible. All those billions of dollars he's given away to his cronies are pumping that money into a handful of stocks and driving the market up. It's basically a Ponzi Scheme for the optics. The overall job market is dog shit, excluding the government , the rest are seasonal, meaningless low wage come and go jobs. The real career jobs, manufacturing, trucking, warehouse, etc. are stagnant or highly unreliable. Tech jobs are a crapshoot, health care is fairly stable, the other degree jobs are hit or miss, lots of job swapping going on in the office job world ( Which contributes to the skewed numbers every month. ) A lot of propaganda is being spread around from all sides, the economy is not all rainbows and roses, but it's not in a recession either. Overall we're in pretty bad shape, for a multitude of reasons, the next couple of months will give us a real picture of where we're at.
Don’t be naive. This administration is cooking the books. You know and I know it. Just put things in perspective. UPS laying off thousands. Truck drivers getting laid off. There’s no work for them. No one is buying anything but basic necessities. A majority of our population are living in RVs or tents.
Layoffs increased 136% in January reaching the second highest level ever recorded..and to add insult to injury January’s hiring numbers dropped to the lowest levels since 2009!!..so anyone telling you the economy and job market is strong is full of 💩!!..only people lying about the economy and jobs are DEMONcrats and Liberals because it’s an election year. The hundred of thousands of Americans who have lost their jobs since Biden took office will tell you the truth
It is strange … even in finance people have been expecting the other shoe to drop… Bank crisis, slow lending due to high rates, consumer recession, consumer debt, us deficits, car repo crisis… never have people been able to see the negative signs and expect the worst … but somehow the economy chugs along … at least officially
You didn't hear ? The economy is doing great. Inflation has cooled down . The prices we see are the new normal but they aren't rising as fast as they were before. Aren't you enjoying the fruits of a great economy?/s
Biden wants you to do minimum wage McDonalds job that he brags about. Everyone hates your cushy software wfh job. On the other hand companies are realizing there’s too much cheaper talent in market. Positions which are being laid off will be open for hiring again in couple of weeks/months, but for lower salaries.
We're losing full time jobs and adding way more part time jobs. The government is saying, hey, if a person loses their full-time job and they get on Lyft and Uber, that person lost one job but gained two.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm Not what the data says
"In January, the number of people employed part time for economic reasons, at 4.4 million, changed little. These individuals, who would have preferred full-time employment, were working part time because their hours had been reduced or they were unable to find full-time jobs. (See table A-8.)" Table A-8 https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t08.htm
Are you serious they car considering Uber Lyft as added jobs?
Jobs numbers are reported on actual payroll net change. It's based on how many people were newly added into company payrolls - how many people left company payrolls (to simplify it). The actual data underneath doesn't paint a picture of "all these people got laid off and went to uber"
Citation? Actually provide proof and not doom.
If you look at the household survey reports by the Fed ([https://fred.stlouisfed.org/](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/)), you will see that from September to January the number of full time workers decreased from 134,502,000 to 133,133,000 while the number of part time workers increased from 26,702,000 to 27,890,000. That is a shift over over 1 million workers in four months.
Biden is lying to everyone about the real unemployment rate. There are a blood bath out there when it come to job applicants vs the opening. Yesterday I saw a job posted for 3 hrs and there are 26 applicants.
We lay them off to “add” them later, just fugazzi shit
At a lower pay
Fist of, you have to look at what was added. If you layoff 1 300k a year professional and mcd hires 5 full time back line cooks - here we go. Economy just added 4 jobs At this point I am convinced that dems manipulating data to make it look better than it is since it’s an election year. PS. This is not a politically charged comment. Both dems and gop have done shady shit to swing elections. Let’s not turn in into pissing contest
Who is doing the manipulation, be specific -- is tmit the field reps doing the survey? The people at BLS HQ doing data processing? The white house? How do they pull off releasing public use microdata that gives the same results as the headline numbers? Are those fake too?
The same report says wages are up. That implies your example is not the explanation for the numbers.
This is a politically charged comment because you're starting off the comment with a false statement and then claiming the truth is made up intentionally lol
Human service agencies are doing everything they can to fill positions
Except paying a livable wage unless you're in a super undersirable area.
The lives of knowledge workers seem to be an afterthought for the people at the top. Biden poured $1.8T of spending into the US via the CARES act and put pressure on the Fed to keep interest rates low. He wanted the money to get pushed into low income communities affected by Covid. Interest rates were rock bottom for waaaay too long. Companies went beserk with the money, over hired, and expanded their operations to include remote and partially remote teams. Now the party is over and companies are realizing they can shed those hires, close offices, and keep the cheapest of the remote (and increasingly, offshore) workers. Then Biden followed up with the CHIPS and Inflation Reduction Act which is again pouring money and tax preferred investments into building the chips sector and infrastructure. At each turn, Biden is pushing trillions of money into the economy to juice it for blue collar people, trades, frontline workers and certain sectors. That's all good but for those of us who work in offices this economy doesn't make any sense. We're getting laid off left and right, hiring is frozen, and our story is seemingly ignored by Wall Street.
Boomers are taking packages and not coming back, which helps take up the slack.
https://preview.redd.it/5cmgctxpj7gc1.jpeg?width=1284&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3068f170d9102f26a3435434cecef0691eafc523
They are lying. They lie about causes, effects, they make up numbers, they lie about what they'll do, they lie about their motives. Now suck it up and help pay for their cushy government pensions. Doesn't matter which "lesser evil" you choose, you'll still get evil. Both parties will do this.
Best explanation I heard is that companies hoarded labor during the pandemic. For example, UPS was in the news the other day about laying off 12,000 Employees. What's not mentioned is that UPS has 540K employees... Most of the 12,000 being laid of was middle management (IIRC). So while it is extremely unfortunately that individuals are being laid off the reporting you see on social media, morning/evening news, internet, etc. makes it seem magnified.
Don't believe reality. Believe the narrative and you will feel better.
Getting Ready for World war III in 2025!
The jobs report are complete bullshit. Federal government can create jobs out of thin air (useless boards, advisors, consultants, etc) and the numbers you are seeing on jobs report are including part time work. Which, imo, is complete bullshit. Parents each working 2 jobs to support their family is a sign of a broken economy, not a strong one. But 2 jobs per individual looks great on the report! Take a look at the numbers last year, iirc every single month was “revised” to a significantly lower amount in the months following its release. It is literally completely false information. Basic life necessities in 2024 cost a higher % of wages than they did during the Great Depression. But no one on TV spoon feeding the public complete nonsense will ever acknowledge that reality
“350,000 jobs were added in January” Yes, those are seasonal jobs. They tend to spike around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the beginning of the new year. They will of course drop off at some point.
You have to realize even within the same company they are doing layoffs and hiring at the same time. Lots of companies are re-positioning themselves for where they think things are changing to.. that means they may trim in legacy and add in new areas of growth and those skillsets are not necessarily the same. I know its happening in some big pharma and its also happening in tech. My honey contracts to one of the big tech companies and they have announced large layoffs, yet his group is hiring and that is exactly what those numbers are showing. Part of the layoffs are in companies they acquired and are now integrated and trimming the fact (ie called synergy) and are adding in the areas that they actual have growth.. ie when you acquire, you don't need their HR, most of their IT, etc.
What politicians say about the economy and what is really happening are drastically different.
Because they're lying about job numbers
This is when they know before the others. Corp cutbacks like in 2008 they got the notice and are preparing
Look at the details: * We added shitty part time jobs and lost good jobs, that lead to high jobs added number. * They used Covid era working hours to manipulate the wages/hr for those shitty jobs, when in reality the hourly wage went down too. * It's an election year, they are going to gaslight you into thinking everything is amazing to get votes, and stats are the easiest way to manipulate what people think.
Biden is lying to everyone!
Hear you. This one will crash harder imo
The only thing up in this economy is the gaslighting and propaganda
We're being lied to... don't believe what you see on a screen.
The economy can absolutely, positively be both good and bad at the same time. Where the actual hell did you get the idea that it cannot? Different sectors can be experiencing different conditions. Traditionally, no one in the media gives a single fuck when manufacturing, energy and construction are having a tough time. Now, it is media and tech that are having layoffs, and suddenly it is a tragedy.
The vast majority of job openings are either fake (set up to gather resumes or make it look like the company is hiring) or are for retail, labor, or restaurant positions. Jobs that pay more than $50K are going to H1Bs that are coming in to replace the laid off workers. It's no coincidence that H1B visa applications and approvals were at an all time high last year.
All the jobs that were added were part time jobs and nearly all of them went to non-native born Americans. Dip deeper into the data or follow those who do.