Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?

Then I'm not posting job openings at all, and I'm working my personal network extra hard to get a pipeline of actual candidates setup.

And it's not just the ATS doing this -- oooodles of goobers who are nowhere near qualified are using AI and slamming the hiring pipelines. I'm already leaning on the personal networks because of that, anyway, but Parent Poster's idea just means I push for that explicitly instead of informally.

See also: layoffs.fyi -- the market is just SATURATED with quality talent

That will never happen. We've got employers making employees sign ridiculous Non-compete, non-disclosure, non-disparagement, agreements. Do you really think this will ever happen? We've collectively decided that corporations are people and people have freedom of speech. We've spent years doing the H1B dance. (I'm not anti-immigration. I'd love to simply give them citizenship. I've met some amazing people on H1Bs. The system is exploitive to US workers AND the H1B recipients). Face it, as someone who is actually doing the work of IT, you lost a long time ago.

Idk about interviewing, but there are many benefits to opening fake job listing (gathering a database of people, keeping track of people looking for jobs, etc) which is why people do it. Data is valuable.

Companies can have legal requirements to post the job, but have no intention of hiring a random outsider.

It costs nothing to simulate activity, the costs are incurred on the candidate.

Pipelining, mostly.

Besides legal requirements, job hiring is a growth metric.

All of silicon valley is playing a stupid bubble game.

It is one trick that allows management to lie to everyone, and to implement downsizing. Fact is that A LOT of US businesses became unsustainable due to the tariffs (which Trump totally did for "US first" and not, I repeat NOT to get an extra tax started for him to spend), the retaliatory tariffs, followed by Trump doing the largest mass-firing in US history, presumably because this is listed in introductory economics textbooks in the chapter "what caused the great depression".

So a LOT of businesses are now in the position that they have to raise prices significantly into the worst market in decades. So they'll get significantly less revenue and they'll have to go into overdrive on saving money. That means no hiring, layoffs, price hikes, shrinkflation, ... the whole thing. They have to do a lot less with a lot less.

How does management respond to this? Well, management generally isn't competent. Their only job is to negotiate, and now that will really be put to the test. The smarter ones know that negotiation doesn't even matter under these circumstances (since it's a fixed pie being divided: someone has to lose). So they're maximizing their runway and getting out. And first, of course, they lie. They tell people even inside companies that they're hiring, even to the point of having interviews. They post job postings, because that's part of doing covert layoffs: they replace full time employees by temporary ones, even interns. They wait with price hikes until they're through inventory. They notice they've signed long-term contracts with Walmart that they cannot fulfill. And so on. So they lie to maintain their reputation for after the crisis (so on their next interview they can believably claim "I could have saved the company, but I found a better opportunity ...").

So I bet we'll be seeing a LOT of managers, especially higher up, suddenly decide they need to find a new job, and when it turns out that doesn't work, take a 2-3 year excuse to take a break.

As for replacing these people with AI: they're not spending ... and AI is expensive. Sure there's startups using AI, but larger companies are just firing people and not replacing them. Certainly they don't see the current period as a good time to change ... anything.

Governments should be "countering the crisis" and hire, according to economics textbooks, and increase social spending with the savings from the decade past ... except ... there are no savings from the decade past. So governments are firing, laying off, saving on healthcare, and so on and so forth. The US obviously has everyone's attention but the UK is doing the same (frankly, worse) and so is the EU.

Trump will be the most desperate manager of all, doing anything and everything he can to delay this from happening until the midterm elections in November, like lowering interest rates. But the thing everyone needs to remember about interest rates: they only lower for a good reason. The problem for Trump is ... either he delays this to beyond November or he becomes a "lame-duck" president, unable to do anything.

>try to unionize next time

Amazon had a whole paper about how bringing migrants and diversity makes unionization less likely and successful. It's part of the point.

Also it's not just the US. Here in Europe it's the same. Hell the government spent it's money trough the employers org training Moroccans to become programmers to then bring em in. I knew a fair few programmers who believe this is all just for low skill low paying jobs as if paying better wages for those is impossible and as if those deserve to be undercut. The weird thing is how this kind of plainly rightwing economic rhetoric is often masquerading as left wing.

The only silver lining in this mess is that it does seem like this was finally the push for my industry to start seriously pushing for unions. Of course, corporate won't let it come easy but I only see momentum building now.

Good luck unionizing together with offshore office in Bangalore.

> Record profits reported by tech companies says the opposite. Money are there, but no will to spend them on people.

And you buy things/services from these major tech companies, but in return they buy nothing from you.

The circular stream that was "supposed to be" capitalism is broken.

... which was needed because no/less profit can and does send the stonk price tanking. That's also a "there are no resources left to do the right thing" - the stonk market dynamics are a part of what is eating our economies alive.

“Companies” don’t hire people, a few human individuals acting autonomously, with their own beliefs and biases, are ultimately responsible for bringing someone new onboard.

Once you hit 40s just get the botox anyway. Looks better. Only lasts 3 months or so. Good for a few rounds of interviews.

This is America, the land of grifters and carnival barkers. Everything is about marketing and image. Always has been.

The industry had turned to shit long ago when we deviated from the path of the UNIX philosophy and fell into cargo cult frontend programming. We had the most powerful UI in the world, the command line, and we gave it up for pretty pixels and shiny buttons. We have lost what it truly meant to be an engineer, now just look at the kinds of people entering the industry today: No passion for the science, just chasing cash and quick thrills. And you wonder why our interview process has gotten so shallow?

> So you read nothing about how graduates during 2008 pretty much had forever stunted careers?

Myself included. Graduated in '08, had to work various minimum wage jobs in retail for several years because no one was hiring. I'm just now at a point in my career, nearing 40, where I should have been at 28.

Degree doesn't matter much when your only work experience is 5 years of working at Starbucks, and you barely have personal projects because you're too busy working 2 jobs to just to survive.

Those of us who suffered through that time period barely recovered, and many didn't recover at all. It shaped an entire generation.

Here's the study on that:

https://academic.oup.com/psychsocgerontology/article/77/4/78...

>> Across a generation’s life course, early-life advantages are magnified through disparate occupational and social trajectories that lead to wide late-life disparities in financial and health resources, in a process first termed by Crystal and Shea as one of “cumulative advantage and disadvantage” (CAD; Crystal, 1982, 1986, 2020; Crystal et al., 1992, 2017; Crystal & Shea, 1990b; Dannefer, 1987, 1988). Dannefer (1987) described the trend of increasing inequality over the life course as the “Matthew effect,” applying a biblical dictum first used by Merton (1968), stating that “to he who has much, more is given, and to he who has little, even that is taken.” This ongoing process has also been described as an “obdurate tendency” for increasing inequality over the life course (Dannefer, 2020).

I mean, it caused me to emigrate to a growth economy. If I stayed in the West, I don't think I would have been OK.

You telling someone with 50k in debt, turning in 1000's or job apps struggling to find a job they studied 4+ years for and not being able to even pay rent to "just save"... is exactly how we got into this situation to begin with.

I'm gonna have to hold your hand when I tell you this: when you tell the younger generation to "save" or "invest" they are going to walk away from that conversation knowing they were just speaking with one of the most mind-numbingly naive Olds they're going to encounter in probably the next several months.

Please, if you ever want any respect from anyone younger than you ever again in your entire life, do not say those words again.

That advice isn't correct for someone who is just finishing school now. They need to stay alive in a down ecconomy where they can't find a job.

In a couple years when things recover (or at least they find a job) it starts to be good advice. Even then I question max 401k - time works for the young and so a maxed 401k makes for too much money in retirement and not enough to enjoy now. Save for retirement yes, but max is too much when you are young - and if you keep saving will always be too much. Max 401k is good for the rich, or those who didn't start young and so their accounts are way behind.

I'm a bit over 40, not liking parts of my FAANG job, worried I'll lose it, and worried no where in the industry is as fun as 12 years ago, but being on the low end of Fat FIRE makes it a lot easier.

If you save for retirement, you will be outbid for housing by those who are not saving.

Others are criticizing you but the reality is that people usually spend more and save less than they could. There are plenty of people with modest income who manage to build a decent retirement. But it takes discipline. You have to be okay with sacrificing for the future.

> I tell the younger generation the same thing. Save, invest, max 401k, before you go off and party. Your older self will thank you.

401k max is $24,500. How much do you expect a person to earn to be able to max it out? And what percentile income is that at the bottom and top of the age range you consider “young”?

https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-by-age-calculator/

Tldr: you are telling almost every 20 to 30 year old to not party.

Nah. It's not different. Money in the tech industry has always chased the hype cycle. We're approaching the peak of inflated expectations for LLMs and then in a few years the AI industry will crash into the trough of disillusionment. That doesn't mean that LLMs are useless but in many sectors of the real economy they will have only a slow and limited impact.

https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hy...

New folks will never be hired. RIP to the CS degree.

Old staff will be exited. Especially senior and mid level management.

If you lose your job, you won't get the same comp again. The days of $500K TC are long behind us.

It's the era of downsizing and outsourcing while blaming AI.

None of this has anything to do with AI. That's just a scapegoat.

Google and Amazon are culling entire US teams and rebuilding them in Asia where the cost of labor is significantly lower.

The best thing ICs can do is fight for big tech monopolies to be broken up. (Call your reps leading up to the midterms.) If several members of the Mag 7 are broken up into smaller companies, that'll inject tons of energy back into the ecosystem and enable the wheels of competition and employment.

Bonus - if big conglomerates are fighting to pick up the pieces of a Ma Bell style dismantlement, they won't have time to manage teams 12 hours away.

Nothing against our colleagues in Asia. They're brilliant. But American companies built with American labor shouldn't shut us out in the cold while they reach record profits and continue to hollow out entirely new industries simply by outstretching their arms.

We gotta gather ourselves and remind companies why they once paid handsomely to not let potential disruptiors run rampant on the market. Long term new teams will form once productivity is valued again and not this giant incestuous GDP-maxmizing scheme.

> I think we ought to be keeping people trained and employed

I never understood this sentiment. We don't have a massive manual weaving industry anymore, 95%+ of people used to be farmers in 1900. Tech comes and replaces humans, and the transition can be extremely painful especially for the people replaced, but ultimately it's better than keeping people artificially employed in obsolete jobs.

(I don't think SWE will be obsolete, but even in this case I'd rather switch careers)

The comparison to greenhouse gases doesn’t make sense. Corps pay a lot for developers right now because they get more value out of them than they cost. As long as that remains true, devs will be fine.

Depends on your definition of “compete”. Compete for VC funding and continually increasing growth? You’re right. Compete as in stay profitable and have a future? Less clear-cut.

For me, I saw it happening around 2014. I was six years out of the long fog of my “expert beginner” phase and trying to figure out what I was going to do next. I was considered a “senior” [1] full stack developer and no matter what I did - mobile, actually learn front end better, I was still going to top out at around $150K (and sadly enough, that is still what I’m seeing in Atlanta when I lurk on LinkedIn).

I knew I had to get into BigTech or adjacent after my son graduated as a software engineer.

Around 2016 I belatedly discovered cloud consulting where consultants would come in and “transform” organizations. I learned in hindsight that they were a bunch of old school net ops folks who only knew how to do bad lift and shifts that costs the company more money and treated AWS like a Colo.

I wanted to do the same but focus on what I learned the term for years later was “modernization”. Bringing in a software developers mindset on cloud consulting. By 2020, I was no longer thinking about BigTech and was focused on getting into consulting. I had never heard of AWS’s Professional Services department until a recruiter told me about it. Even then I didn’t know it was full time working for AWS directly until that was also explained to me.

It's easier to lower standards than to raise them.

There's always a race to the bottom. I don't think it's a big leap to suggest that what's considered the "minimum viable product" has decreased over the years. It's also no secret that software is getting worse.

As to salaries, I think you forgot how things worked before. The reason companies like Google introduced free food and all the incentives was because increasing salaries was not a better way to attract better talent, since salaries were already high. So either now something has changed where better talent cares more about money or we're attracting talent that cares more about money. As in either the same people changed or we're attracting a different type of person. Personally, regardless of age, regardless of field, I've seen a strong correlation with the best people not caring as much about money. Once the salary is good then they care more about how interesting the work is or how they can reduce stress in their life. Money matters, but it has decreasing utility as it grows.

It was very much bimodal. If you were working in BigTech or adjacent, that was definitely true. If you were working in enterprise dev like most of the 2.5 million+ developers working in a tier 2 city outside of the west coast in the US, comp was definitely stagnating.

In 2016, I knew I had to do something when my (step)son graduated in 2020 and my wife was willing to move anywhere the money took us.

It just so happened that a job fell into my lap at AWS working (full time) in the consulting department. I am no longer there. I now work at a third party consulting firm as a staff consultant specializing in app dev.

Yeah someone joining a good company as a senior engineer in 2015 would retire with about 15M in assets now assuming smart investments (say... half on big tech stocks, half in market indices)

Someone joining now on the other hand, might have to resort to physical work at some point in the next ten years of things go south.

Love that HODL optimism. Looking at the longer charts there seems to be support around $80k so maybe. This could just be holiday shopping. The timing of economics with this though has me worried the support will falter causing a sell off and Monday’s bell will be a bloodbath.

A common pattern is: people (I supposed I mean: investors) are somewhat worried that markets are over valued. They ponder, think, research, binge-watch Prof G videos... Then they travel to have Thanksgiving dinner with a bunch of in-laws. Market gets discussed over cigars. If they get a confirmation signal from the brother in law attorney or sister in law dentist that they are worried too...then after mulling it over on the flight back to Denver...the market dumps on Monday.

Even if you waste half your groceries its still cheaper than eating out. And wasting that much is difficult to do, most staples will last weeks to years without risk of spoilage.

There are some fresh fruits and vegetables that are exceptions because they dont take well to refrigeration or freezing but really not much.

This is just wrong. Beans and rice are more than an order of magnitude cheaper than McDonald's per calorie and they're non-perishable. Combine that with whatever fruit and veg is affordable fresh or frozen, a bit of cheap seasoning, and you're still coming out ahead.

You obviously need access to cooking and storage facilities to eat like this, but the target audience of McDonald's is the time-poor, the resource-constrained, or the depressed and disabled, rather than just the money-poor.

What hourly wage are you imputing to your cooking to get US$10 for a meal of asparagus, chicken, and rice? My estimate for the materials would be:

- 250g raw chicken wings: $375 ≈ 30¢ (I bought these on Saturday, so this is the current price)

- 200g asparagus: $1500 ≈ US$1 (this is a rough guess because I never buy it and the greengrocer doesn't have a web site)

- 100g dry long-grain rice: $100 ≈ 7¢ (just checked the price online, and I think this is rather high)

- water to drink and cook the rice is unmetered here

Total: US$1.37. But you could easily get it down to less than half that with a different vegetable. Salts, spices, and oils might add a few pennies.

Possibly if you are at McMurdo Base or something your ingredient prices might be unusual.

10/meal is very expensive, fyi. A rotisserie costco chicken is $5 for reference; rice and beans is essentially free. Cabbage nearly so.

>cooking is about US$10/meal give or take (asparagus, chicken, rice, water to drink).

You must be eating an absolute TON to eat $10 worth of chicken, asparagus, and rice. I just checked the prices at Target and rice is $1.89 for 2 pounds, chicken thighs are $1.69 a pound. Asparagus is spendier at $5 for 1 pound.

How many pounds of chicken and asparagus are you eating? Even if you ate two pounds of chicken and the entire pound of asparagus you aren't hitting $10.

...and add the time for preparation, cleaning up etc.: Thats one of the most frustrating things when cooking for one person - you invest 45min to eat 5min and the rest is "organisation & logistics"

> ... at pay far lower than they're used to ...

Is this saying something more about the relative expectation of compensation bands?

New grads are unlikely to have a comparable benchmark.

People who've worked in Big Tech and finding themselves applying to regular companies where the revenue per employee is in the $200k range are likely going to have difficulty adjusting to such.

I work in the public sector and make very low six digits. Others I know have compensation that is 3x or 4x what I make while working in technology industries.

If both I and the people I chat with were to find themselves suddenly out of a job, I suspect I'd find an acceptable job elsewhere more easily than they would because anything I did would be a pay raise while anything they took would be a pay cut. This in turn translates to that I would be the less risky candidate (that I wouldn't be looking for a new position that would pay more within the year)... and thus I believe not only would I be more likely to accept the job I would also be more likely to be extended the position.

Browsing reddit there are a lot of people on cscareerquestions (and similar) who have the mindset of FAANG or bust as a new grad. That they wouldn't even consider working at a company like Little Cesar's or Home Depot despite those companies having open positions.

---

Furthermore, this gets into a lemon market situation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons ). Where it becomes harder to distinguish a good candidate for a poor one and that can only be found out after someone is hired, the companies that have people are more afraid of hiring a lemon than so don't hire anyone. This further depresses the market for the highly skilled candidates. Additionally, people who are skilled are less likely to look for a new job because the market is depressed and they're not as likely to get a good position afterwards.

I am at 10 different supply stores too, Lowes, Ashby, Truitt and I get a shit ton of stuff delivered.

Everyone competes on price, so when I see everyone at Home Depot with their thumbs up their asses because the computers are down, I know that Ashby is eating their lunch on the margin. I'm sure Home Depot has enormous economies of scale that make up for it, but this is a current issue.

I don't think that's an appropriate conclusion to draw from a single point of data.

Back in the early 2000's I did consulting work with Home Depot's backend developers. Their office is the "store support center", which is in the NW suburbs of Atlanta. I remember the team as being very good, but surprisingly small.

I've worked with a vendor listing products in their IDM (Item Data Management) System. IIRC, it's from https://www.stibosystems.com/ . From a SMB vendor supplying one type of product it's frustrating to work with, with a lot of back and forth and workflows for verifying all manner of compliance with data quality, global regulations, and laws. From their internal perspective, it's probably the bee's knees, supporting a wide variety of taxonomies, considering the variety of products they sell & support, some rather dangerous and hazardous.

From looking over the shoulders of the staff, some aspects of the system that I've seen as a supplier are directly visible to them too.

Offshoring has been a thing for decades. Seriously, Yourdon wrote a doom-and-gloom book about it in the 90s. It was called “Decline and Fall of the American Programmer,” published 1992.

Then in 1996, he wrote “Rise and Resurrection of the American Programmer.”

The software industry is extremely fad-driven. During the pandemic, the fad was to hire programmers. That created a lot of busywork and coordination jobs that didn’t contribute to the bottom line.

Then Musk bought Twitter, laid off a bunch of folks, and things kept running. So the trend became “cut the fat.” In fairness, there actually was fat to cut.

Now boards are in cost-cutting mode and fantasizing about AI, so the pendulum has swung back towards offshoring. But that cost-cutting focus is going to lead to stagnation and self-cannibalization. Somebody’s going to buck the trend, have a splashy success, and the herd will trample back in the other direction.

Offshoring affects the pipeline. That means once people leave the workforce or get promoted there are no locals who’ve the acumen to take over as those roles are overseas. Now you have to hire them H1Bs because you don’t have locals with the requisite experience. Of course managers wonder why there aren’t Americans with experience to fill those roles …

It's easy to get a foot in the door to any of the trades but you're gonna slog out 5+yr of doing "bitch work" before you even have a chance to make real money because that's the nature of the licensing systems that these trades have that are enshrined by various degrees of law.

> I've never experienced a slow down

You didn’t experience a slowdown at the height of the recession circa 2008?

Seconding this, I work as a SWE for a large construction company, while the IT department is small considering the large scope of the company as a whole, but we’ve been extremely busy. Construction is absolutely booming.

How did you get into construction/remodeling, and how would someone best reach out to this community? I have been thinking about some construction related ideas (mostly around prefab automation and sales) and haven't the slightest idea how to reach these types of people.

I am always curious about people who are strongly oriented towards one thing (computing) but somehow wind up in another area, such as construction.

> there is no safety net in many cases (401k, pension, reasonable health insurance, etc. outside of union shops

Residential construction is the absolute bottom of the barrel. It is trades equivalent of webdev monkeys flinging javascript poo at the web. You get benefits by not sucking and getting out of residential and into something else.

You'll have to give some context. What did hella mean? How many months of your current spend rate do you have in the bank?

Yep, they are 100% doing that and it’s working. The people only applying selectively are being drowned out.

Overseas labor spend their salary overseas and pay no US taxes. still not the samething.

Probably a step in the right direction. But if you can hire someone abroad for 20% of the cost of an American worker, then instead of replacing one American with five workers, you replace them with four.

The 100k fee on new applicants? drop in the ocean.

The h1b people spend (most) of their salary in the USA and pay US income taxes. Whereas overseas labor spend their salary over seas and pay no US taxes.

With the growth we already had in 2025 you'd have to nuke LA to end the year with a decline.

Generally speaking, the rich is anyone who makes slightly more than you.

Then if you're successful, you can sell it to a PE firm where it will further buoy the rich!

Can't see how this positive feedback loop gets us to a bad place at all!

>No, it is not normal for 10% of the coountry to power half the spending.

Yet, if you look at your chart, it was 40% in 1989s and have been slowly edging up. While 40% is a smaller number than 50%, you can make the same argument about 40% not being "normal", yet society has been chugging along just fine.

It may also affect it a lot. Retirees I know have a retirement plan that involves their retirement accounts being at a specific level at the end of each year. If their accounts are over that level because the stock market had a good year, they consider it funny money that they're allowed to spend.

I am also hiring, in Europe with very good work/life balance but modest salaries and like the parent I'm also not that impressed with candidates, so to me the other explanation is that candidates have a wildly incorrect estimation of what is a somewhat reasonable pay in 2025.

The position with FAANG like salaries have reduced drastically. Companies paying 6 figures just to have the privilege to have an entry level developer with this then seen as magical skill of being able to type code was a dream that is over. Look at salaries of engineers in other industries, breaking 6 figures needs a lot of seniority, $150k is rarely heard of for ICs.

It’s more likely than you think. In fact, this was true for almost the entirety of human history. The last 100 years, where the common person is NOT in destitute poverty, is the exception to the rule.

There will not be no one who is able to consume. The investment thesis is that the investment classes' servant robot armies will be doing trillions of USD of consumption, mostly in metals, munitions, chips, etc.

I don't agree with the thesis, but that is what the thesis is.

The point of an economy is to put a stupid flag on mars. Or to melt the ice caps so that Russia has access to ports that aren't clogged with ice. Or to get revenge and throw lavish parties. Or any of a million other arbitrary goals dreamed up by those few who get to steer this thing.

For most of us its just gas or breaks, but those at the top have non economic goals. The economic indicators are looking positive because progress is being made towards those goals, but the gloom persists because most of us don't want the outcomes that were progressing towards.

We're in a car that we can't steer, and the economist article says everything is fine because look how high the number on the speedometer is.

The ones who own the robots will be doing the consumption.

Of course, this all implies that the rest of us will just sit and starve quietly. Somehow I don't think that's likely.

Mixing two things up.

A point for the economy.

The mechanics of trade.

Or the objective outcomes vs subjective goals.

It is entirely possible for an economy to land up in an equilibrium point that works for a small set of people and not for the majority.

The point of the economy is a subjective societal thing, achieved via laws, regulation and enforcement of those rules.

more importantly, good luck to any country that has to deal with an environment full of huge swathes of people festering with the anger and nihilism that comes from going from something to nothing...not for me

Recession are a natural part of the business cycle though. Like it's good to have them, Democrats not allowing a recession to occur just makes the next bubble even bigger. And all kinds of inefficient businesses are allow to zombify when the resources could be used elsewhere.

Now, the bigger problem is that you're supposed to raise taxes during the boom so that you can run deficits during the recession to recover quickly. Unfortunately we run deficits during the boom so that the crash is even bigger as well ...

Have you ever read Yonatan’s article on Shock Wealth and how the ruling class is incentivized to cause shocks?

https://medium.com/newco/your-financial-shock-wealth-4845e6d...