Is America's jobs market nearing a cliff?
(economist.com)287 points by harambae 3 days ago
287 points by harambae 3 days ago
The number of just straight out NO's I've gotten has been surprising and disheartening. I've been a developer for 20 years and genuinely don't think I've gotten an outright "no" before this year. Usually just no response. I've gotten maybe eight or nine actual rejections this year. It's honestly worse, emotionally.
Ideally I want a job outside my wheelhouse to learn and move forward, but it seems like no one these days is interested in any sort of training.
There have been two gigs I was really excited about that seemed more-or-less exactly what I have spent the past decade doing and they've BOTH actually replied that they didn't think my skills were a good fit. I genuinely have zero idea what you're looking for if the literal perfect fit isn't it.
Before COVID I would regularly apply for jobs, almost always get them, and decline largely to keep my interview skills fresh.
This last year of looking has been the total opposite. I've applied for umpteen places, and gotten a little bit of email back and forth, and a single interview (it's in a couple days, wish me luck).
> I genuinely have zero idea what you're looking for if the literal perfect fit isn't it.
The simple answer is that they probably had no intention of hiring you, or anybody, in the first place.
The amount of fake job listings is absurd.
Why do they bother wasting time on interviewing the person though? Or does it never get that far?
>I genuinely have zero idea what you're looking for if the literal perfect fit isn't it.
Maybe someone on a visa that can't leave and will take peanuts.
> Ideally I want a job outside my wheelhouse to learn and move forward, but it seems like no one these days is interested in any sort of training.
No one has the resources left to pay for it, that's the thing. Clients are cutting budgets because no one is buying their stuff, so everyone is looking for seniors and above only, and replacing juniors/intermediates with AI.
Trickle-down ideology is now beginning to eat itself, the ouroboros is complete - turns out, eventually the entire economy will crash down on itself when people can't afford things. Even Henry Ford already knew this...
>> No one has the resources left to pay for it
Record profits reported by tech companies says the opposite. Money are there, but no will to spend them on people.
We had multiple layoffs recently so parent company could report a billion USD in quarterly profits.
Before COVID I would regularly apply for jobs, almost always get them, and decline largely to keep my interview skills fresh.
Well, wait, isn't this just karma in action, then? Sounds like you deliberately wasted a lot of other peoples' valuable time.
No, because software engineering interviews are a specific skill and you need to be on top of it - eg leetcode, sys design and soft skills and hiring managers are making everything harder
Ie its a race to the bottom - there is no gold standard for a productive software engineer who is transferable to another company that really people trust
I work in a FAANG as a SWE. I'm not the on selecting candidates, but I do interview a lot of them. I'm pretty sure I've never seen a 50+ year old candidate. 99% of the candidates have less than 10 year experience, and are in their 20s or 30s.
So yes, ageism is real. I suppose the company gets away with it by saying they look for candidates with 3-10 years of experience?
At that stage, I think I would pass Leetcode with 2-3 months of practice, and I don't mind putting the work if this is what it takes. I'm just not sure I'd be given the chance.
Yeah forget it if you look old - old people like me might have to put on our glasses
Linus Torovalds is 55 - so he’s too old right? Hes about dad age for most software engineer teams in FAANG and startups…
Software engineering team culture is young and male skewed for years-
Are you in a major tech market (SF? Seattle?)
I was a laid off in the beginning of the year from my remote job, landed several interviews, and I found a new job in <2 months. My resume is less impressive than yours, ~10 years of experience.
I was able to land interviews with some remote companies. I used to work at Shopify, a got some interviews at Ruby shops from that.
Some possibilities:
1. Ageism, this is a distinct possibility.
2. You held very senior positions. I think a lot of people don't like hiring people that were more senior than them. So that CTO is being held as a negative. They are not saying "Hey I get the experience of an EM and a CTO in a Senior Engineer for a bargain salary", they are worried you will overshadow them. This is sub optimal behavior for companies.
3. Talking to people I think non-tech markets look like they are doing fine. People I know in Rochester, Syracuse, and Cleveland aren't having issues getting jobs. I think the huge layoffs in big tech have left a big supply in tech cities to less demand.
> 2. You held very senior positions. I think a lot of people don't like hiring people that were more senior than them. So that CTO is being held as a negative. They are not saying "Hey I get the experience of an EM and a CTO in a Senior Engineer for a bargain salary", they are worried you will overshadow them. This is sub optimal behavior for companies.
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Not only is there the overshadow worry, but there's the overqualified for the position.
You were CTO once, and now you're a IC again... are you looking for a CTO position still?
I had an experience (post dot com crash) where the team hired a senior engineer... who left the team within a year to be an engineering manager somewhere else in the company and our team was back to interviewing for the position again.
From our team's perspective we wasted the time interviewing and onboarding a person when they job-hopped (even within the company) in under a year. Despite being qualified as a senior engineer it wasn't what they wanted to do.
To that end, overly qualified candidates are similarly risky to hire as under qualified ones.
I've also been in situations where someone in a senior or management position is hired with previous Big Tech or startup experience and tries to make the regional retail company's internals into a Big Tech engineering department which ended poorly for everyone involved.
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To your third point, the desire to stay on the coasts and around Big Tech companies is also a thing. Being willing to move to and within the midwestern states (some companies have return to office... others don't want to create a tax nexus in another state - if you don't hire anyone in California or Colorado you don't have to follow those laws... so hire everyone in one state and only deal with one state's payroll tax and insurance options).
> I had an experience (post dot com crash) where the team hired a senior engineer... who left the team within a year to be an engineering manager somewhere else in the company and our team was back to interviewing for the position again.
Same reason I struggled to get a job at McD's or Home Depot years ago when laid off. They knew I'd be gone ASAP and that I probably wouldn't eat shit the way the local rube demographic would. These are crappy service jobs but they still want you to stick it out for at least 6-12 months.
can't comment on west coast but from perspective in NYC, i think the market for SWEs willing to work in office here is very good. might be different since there's lots of different industries hiring for SWE roles in addition to typical tech "startups" here.
i've noticed that folks who want to work remote having a tougher time if they're looking for tech jobs. makes sense if you look for jobs at a local non-tech company, you might have better luck.
generally seems like remote jobs have the most competition so if you can find jobs localized to your market, you will have more luck there.
4. Overqualified can also be seen as you are seeking this job purely temporarily. While continuing to seek better. You may be gone within weeks. A more alert project might seek to use your experience at low cost for that little while. But a harried manager already had a problem and might see it as now having two problems.
I don't mean this as a judgement; I am genuinely curious: with a career like that, how are you out of money after twelve months? Do you have unusual expenses? I am 31, currently making $180k (the most I've ever made) as a bog standard 'senior SWE', and I have nearly a million dollars. I am not frugal, I don't think; I just bought a $900 pair of sunglasses last week, and that wasn't a huge outlier expense. I have at least twenty years of savings right now. What is eating up your (and any onlookers', if you care to comment) budget?
It's also possible that OP means short term savings kept for circumstances like these, and long term investments bear more cost (e.g. keeping money in a money market fund vs in stocks has different tax implications when you take the money out).
I bet poor investment planning and low-paying roles despite the years of experience.
> I bet poor investment planning
Or good investment planning. I only recently built up savings after spending my entire career maxing out 401ks. If I was laid off, I'd only have like 6 months or so of savings before I run out despite having a coastFIRE/leanFIRE NW.
Yes, there are hardship withdraws from 401ks, but the older you get, the more retirement account means retirement account. Meaning, it becomes more clear that the money in that account needs to be left alone until things get dire. You're not going to be more employable in 20 years.
A 401k and an IRA together constitute only $31,500 this year, and less in each previous year, before taxes. That shouldn't be the main factor. FWIW I was including those accounts in my 'savings' number.
Getting replaced by H1Bs after a year and then being out of work for six months (because ageism), four times in a row--that'll do it! Especially now since H1Bs replacing you makes you look like a job-hopper so your job search becomes more impossible every time.
"Now it's different". Is it really? One aspect of these stories is that we all do age and we do climb into higher positions. So we run into "too old" and "too qualified" and "will leave asap for something better". And the reason is not that the economy or job market are different. The reason is that we are older. Nothing wrong with both happening at the same time but this "I never ran into this problem before" does have a common difference which is "I was never that old before".
I use "old" for shock value here while being totally in the camp that companies would do well to find ways to use older, more experienced talent at a lower cost than "normal". (Even after I have run into "older" as inflexible and a pain to work with.)
But there is also another problem in many of these reports: Older and still applying by sending resumes in response for job postings! If you are older you should have a network you can use. If they find nothing for you - or don't care to talk to you, then THAT is the better signal. And still not necessarily a signal about the job market.
Not sure what you are on about - I have a giant network in linkedin and it did help me find a job eventually…
You only cultivate a regional network if you live in the same spot for years - i moved from the south to Seattle - Im not moving back to the South- so my network is mostly useless
I have for example a network with OpenAI, Google and Anthropic - all it got me was getting to the team match stage with Google followed by denial after almost 6 months in the interview process
As for OpenAI and Anthropic you need to have success in the AI startup world+network+ be young (old is only allowed id you have massive career success eg VP at Google or Amazon)
Yeah, once you hit 50 the wall is real.
You need to maximise your earnings during your 30s and 40s to be able to just do contracting, etc. then.
Take care of yourself: exercise, skin care, fashion trends, botox, hair dye, etc. so you do not look 50+ and no one will know the difference.
If botox is required to secure an engineering job when you have a long proven track record of solving hard technical problems successfully- the company is a fraud and the jobs are fake.
Can we just pause and consider what happened to this industry where this is the advice.
This is the natural consequence of marketing and fundraising completely destroying engineering. It's not about real things anymore. It's about image. It's an industry of carnival barkers turning everything it touches to shit.
Possibly besides the point but I wouldn't consider botox "taking care of yourself", taking care of yourself is staying in shape, eating healthy, and maybe dressing well and practicing good hygiene.
Were you flexible with re-location or you were looking just at you current region or it is that bad no matter your flexibility?
Do you have a thesis for why that might be happening? Ageism? Overqualification? The next generation of hiring managers not knowing what to do with you? Past experience being deemed irrelevant to modern SWE problems? Is it all just a bad market? Your profile strikes me as the last one that would struggle with landing a gig.
Uncertain outlooks in general + why hire people if AI soon will solve everything everywhere all at once?
Yeah, this ageism factor mixed with how unstable in general my industry is had me adjusting my long term plan to focus on being able to survive off my own products. I'm still far off from that point but it's probably best to plan my mid-late career before industry locks me out...
Doesn't help that I've tried to specialize for quite a while but simply can't stay around long enough without layoffs happening. Hard to be a domain expert when companies let you go ever 3 years. T shaped generalist it is, then.
> 7 round interview with NBCUniversal in 2023
Name and shame, this should be the norm. People are too shy on this subject. Thank you.
Try taking 10-12 years off of your resume. Especially if you don't have grey hair this might help a lot.
This is what I do. I leave just enough on the resume to look "senior" while not appearing to be older than 30 or so on my resume.
Having a great, timeless linkedin profile picture helps too.
My brother who is nearly 50 and has worked in tech since the dot com boom, got laid off in January and couldn't find a job until last week. This job, too, was just a contractual position at his old Fortune 50 firm.
He has an engineering degree from one of the top 5 engineering colleges in India, a Master's from one of the top 5 engineering schools in the US. He built some of the systems that form the foundation of the entire call center industry.
And now he pivoted to GenAI and has dozens of very impressive public projects including some heavily starred open source repos
And yet...nothing.
Ageism in the tech industry has never been worse
Are you ready for great age of suffering? Because there will be no saving, no UBI, no plan B. This is it. This is the end of careers and beginning of centuries of misery. AI will replace everyone except around 3%. If you aren't one of those 3%, start accepting the reality of infinite pain.
I think there's something quite interesting (well to me anyway) where if you go by the internet, there is this bloodbath (slight exaggeration perhaps but feels like that) in jobs out in the US, UK, Aus and major European countries (the volume of anecdotes & complaints would suggest a significant downturn in employment) but out in the official data, and less so but still true in the real world, things are still bobbing along. Not great guns but still ok. The interesting thing is how much is internet chatter a leading signal for this thing now than in previous cycles?
Outside of the unique circumstances of covid, we've never had, to my knowledge, a notable downturn when social media, and all the chatter it generates, has been so prominent or mass engaged. How much of it is just internet noise vs canary in the coal mine stuff. Who knows? But curious to find out in coming months/year
Reality is not particularly rosy for new graduates AFAIK. If I lose my job, I wouldn't be super surprised that I might never get a similar job for the rest of my life -- it is not that I do not have the skills, but 1) the amount of time for a laid off SDE to get a new job could reach to years, not months, so I need to do something else to earn $$$, and 2) why are companies going to hire me, who have gap years and are older, but not some fresh graduates who can work 80 hours per week and only demand half of the salary?
And yes I believe this time it's going to be different. I believe that if the economy dumps again, we are really going to see more hot wars. It is different from 2001, and different from 2008. We have kicked the can for almost 20 years and I kudos the policy makers who managed to achieve this.
I have heard that story every few years for the last 30. I know when it is your personal situation things are hard, but your story is nothing new and people recover. Some get back into whatever their degree was, others start a new career and never do. this will happen again.
>and people recover.
So you read nothing about how graduates during 2008 pretty much had forever stunted careers?
They aren't put on the streets, but it's clear some very long term damage is being done to people simply as a matter of bad luck.
I was going to say this. Money comes, money goes, that’s life. Ideally you’re smart enough to save and invest to weather these storms but for those (like myself) that are still working hard post 40, we know it’s all part of the game.
I tell the younger generation the same thing. Save, invest, max 401k, before you go off and party. Your older self will thank you.
I pray you are right and I'm wrong. But I do have reasons to believe that this time is a bit different.
> but not some fresh graduates who can work 80 hours per week and only demand half of the salary
Cause garbage in, gets garbage out. With AI models being all the more rage in the coming years, unexperienced hires will prove many times more costly. (10x garbage with agents).
So companies are going to concentrate their worker base even more with experienced folks. They need fewer of them. Yes. But quality matters more than ever.
I really feel bad for the new graduates. For no fault of their own, the bar went up so high. Unless they’re a child prodigy doing some coding projects on the side since the age of 10 - no one will hire them. So how will they ever gain the experience they need?
Maybe, just maybe, we’ll see a reinvention of coding schools - that will now focus on fundamental and industry knowledge - imparted by other veterans, instead of teaching applied skills.
I agree with you, but I forgot to mention that in the original reply I meant to say that "After the economy turns around, there is no point to hire me, an older guy with maybe a couple of gap years, who worked as a Uber driver for the last two years and can't leetcode".
But yeah, new graduates is going to suffer anyway.
And I'm scared of the collapse of the existing world order. Maybe we won't see a turn around for many years if it does collapse -- and we are already seeing many cracks on it.
We haven’t passed the stage where we convince policy makers to stop dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
We’re not going to convince anyone to keep hiring software developers.
I think we ought to be keeping people trained and employed but it seems we’re not on the winning side here.
Or, more dystopian take... it won't matter. If software reliability continues to degrade in a normalized fashion, it won't matter. First mover advantages and networking effects will make it impossible for an outfit trafficking increased quality to ever get enough breaths to even compete.
I saw this coming way before AI became a thing around 2016 when I was 42. Software development was becoming a commodity where there were plenty of “good enough” developers where no matter what, it was going to be saturated.
If someone is trying to sell themselves as an undifferentiated developer in 2025 or later, it’s going to be an uphill battle unless you can lean on your network.
At 51, if my only differentiator is I can code, I’ve done something horribly wrong in my life.
Anecdotally, I found software development adjacent roles quickly when I was looking both last year and the year before.
Software developer salaries went up significantly after 2016 and it was a super hot market for developers in 2020. So whatever you saw wasn’t a good indicator.
> At 51, if my only differentiator is I can code, I’ve done something horribly wrong in my life.
I think software is going through what scribes went through when education went universal.
At one point, just knowing how to read and write gave you a cushy job. It didn't matter what, maybe you were in government, maybe you were a clerk organizing trade.
Somewhere in the last 20 years, this happened with coding. At the start of the millennium, knowing how to code meant you could fill some role. Now, everybody knows enough of how to do it that it's assumed for many roles, just as reading and writing is for every office job.
Your competition isn’t new grads. It’s experienced engineers in other countries who will work for half your wage in your own city on an H1B or similar.
You're half correct. H1Bs in your own city aren't working half your wage.
However, engineers in developing countries will work half your wage, remote from their home, where that's a great salary where they live. When the average annual salary in India is the equivalent of $4,200 USD/year, there are a lot of talented engineers there that if they don't win the H1B lottery, will end up working for big tech remote.
H1Bs don’t work for “half your wage”. This is a myth. H1Bs have a higher average salary.
>Reality is not particularly rosy for new graduates AFAIK
I looked at the statistics[1], and while you could argue new graduates have seen worse (recent grad unemployment is actually lower than much of the 2010s), you can also see that in contrast to previous periods where new grad unemployment is lower than all worker unemployment, this time around new grad unemployment is actually slightly higher. However if you look at the chart this wasn't a post pandemic phenomena. The gap has been closing since the back half of the 2010s, and doesn't show much of a spike after the release of chatgpt, so "AI" isn't a good explanation either.
[1] https://www.newyorkfed.org/research/college-labor-market
Break it down by degree. You're losing some important information in the aggregate. Going to degree you see that Computer Science has the 7th highest unemployment rate: anthropology, physics, computer engineering, commercial art & graphical design, fine art, sociology, computer science, chemistry, information systems & management.
Of course you also need to look at underemployment too. Which CS is on the lower end of that. So you have to consider things like that even though there's a higher unemployment rate than performing arts (2x) there is far lower underemployment because people expect to get jobs in their field for CS.
There's more you need to look at too. It's not so easy and you shouldn't just use such a high level approximation if you want to make sense of the data.
Hiring lab has some more interesting information to like the number of postings. CS is way down from "prepandemic" levels, but unfortunately only goes to 2020 (hence the quotes).
There's a recent podcast that talked about this if you have 15 minutes to watch a segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYRCYdxVMaM
TL;DR Gen Z is "slightly better off" in pure financial status compared to older generations , even with inflation adjusted. But the distribution on what got cheaper overtime and what got more expensive is causing the true strain among Gen Z.
It also helps to explain a bit of a generation clash when you see how older generations can chastise the younger ones over what were "luxuriies" when they were that age. The entire market is flipped.
> why are companies going to hire me, who have gap years and are older, but not some fresh graduates who can work 80 hours per week and only demand half of the salary?
Given cost of living, I have a hard time believing young people come out being cheaper. I live in an area with cheap rents and my mortgage is still less than the average price of a one-bedroom apartment in the area. My cars are new and paid off, and I have pretty much all of the stuff I'd ever need in my life. Plus, no student loans.
That might be one of the real root causes of the job market for new grads being shit. The amount of money people need to meet their basic needs has skyrocketed, and young people bear the brunt of the burden. The only people who can readily afford to work too cheap are those with parents who can continue to support them to a degree.
At least in the US we haven't had official data for quite some time. The BLS lost its chief because of "bad numbers"
The numbers we do have show significantly worse jobs numbers compared to prior years.
We might get data again, maybe not, but the US government has had an internal revolution, and it's doubtful we will have data as good as in the past, and it's quite likely that any bad news will be deeply buried.
I believe you’re in the minority here. Perhaps your experience is different because of your skill set or the market you’re in. Anyone that I know personally who got laid off (in tech) took at least 6 months to find a job. I don’t know about anyone else but that to me is pretty brutal. More so as the people getting laid off are mid career, some with kids.
Edit: Add to the above that companies like Walmart are seeing an uptick in high wage earners becoming their customers, and McDonalds seeing a shrinking population of low-wage customers.
It’s easy to infer the rest from there. People who used to do well are cutting expenses and those who were already struggling are..I seriously don’t know what they’re doing. Where do you eat when you downgrade from McDonalds..Wendy’s? It’s a sad state of affairs.
Source: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-11-16/mcdonalds-...
You ask, "Where do you eat when you downgrade from McDonalds..Wendy’s? It’s a sad state of affairs." On the off chance that this isn't a joke, you need to know that eating out is very expensive in the US, even at McDonald's. According to the obviously highly credible https://mcdonalds-menu-prices.us/ a Quarter Pounder With Cheese costs US$7.99 now. I think home-cooked rice and lentils costs about US$0.20. Other similarly low-cost foods include polenta, homemade bread, homemade mayonnaise, zucchini, spaghetti, sunflower-seed cheese, homemade peanut butter, onions, potatoes, etc. Those numbers aren't even the same order of magnitude.
> Where do you eat when you downgrade from McDonalds?
You buy groceries. And if you must downgrade from there you eat the rich.
the advantage of fast-food over groceries, is that you don't have to worry about spoilage and waste. So the delta is probably less than you think. Now granted McD is an s-show, they are no longer the restaurant of the poor, You likely can get a better burger meal deal at a Chilis than a McD, as sad as that is.
McDonald’s is expensive. Much cheaper to cook yourself.
Situational.
IMO, I think it breaks even, but eating out saves a lot of time! Healthier cooking at home? Yes. I studied this for myself (N=1), and my cooking is about US$10/meal give or take (asparagus, chicken, rice, water to drink). If you cook for two or more people, then I think cooking at home comes out ahead financially.
I believe the long-term average in the US and UK was somewhere around 20 - 25 weeks so that's still broadly in line. Not trying to dismiss anyone but there is a cacophony of voices about the difficulty in finding jobs but hard to ascertain if that is any different from normal or we just got used to a boom cycle (ex Covid) and that's causing the disconnect?
Some anecdata from Belgium: the software market is dead. Hardly anyone is hiring. Rates have plummetted. There are (virtually) no startups. Big corpos are hiring in Southern and Eastern Europe instead, when they're not outsourcing to India.
Unlike some of the US commenters, our high tax rates and lack of stock-options driven reward schemes means that most of us don't have enough money in the bank to casually found a startup.
> Unlike some of the US commenters, our high tax rates and lack of stock-options driven reward schemes means that most of us don't have enough money in the bank to casually found a startup.
That's because it effectively is gambling. Maybe if you are one of the first 50 employees in a startup that is one of 100 to reach "unicorn" stage, you have the chance to strike it big... but then you are 0.01% of all employees of startups.
The 99.99%? They'll have had their company fold or let them go due to the company "pivoting" or "having to look better in quarterly reports", they'll have left voluntarily for one reason or the other, or they'll have been let go right before the vesting period to save the company money and end up with nothing vested, or the company will have gone to three, four, five or more rounds of funding watering down existing options, or the company will have gone bust... all while having traded the "chance" of striking it big for lower pay, thus reducing payments into our tax, social security and healthcare systems.
Europe does not like gambling with the lives of its citizens and the stability of our systems.
There is a pretty good social safety net, at least in Belgium. Though its funding is under pressure due to high spending and taxes being pretty much maxed out already. And while I could probably start a company and be reasonably sure that I won't go homeless if it fails, by virtue of that social safety net. The social safety net doesn't give me the cash to hire my first couple of engineers.
This is a bit of a caricature of course. Banks exist. Startup accelerators exist. There are places and ways to get funding. But doing it with your own savings is virtually unheard of over here.
I've been unemployed for quite some time as a software developer with 13 years of experience.
The unemployment agency of my country tries to help, but the reality is that the amount of new jobs every week is staggeringly low since end-2024. The agent on my case was herself honest about the prospects. It's even worse for younger developers or very old folk.
I tuned into my old freelance network in Germany and the account manager told me they're seeing 60–70% less freelance work in tech.
I could get a job in the odd thing here and there, so I'm not immensely worried yet, plus it allows me to stay home and raise our baby. But I think everyone around me is worried, even outside tech.
I live in Finland, with over 10% unemployment according to official statistics (second highest in EU, just after Spain). From what I can tell, things really suck especially for fresh grads. There's fierce competition for jobs like cashier at supermarket, hundreds of applications for one position is normal. Lots of fresh grads with bachelor's or master's degree compete for those jobs too, since they can't find anything better. Also, of the few open positions, many are the kind of "rental work" that offer only limited hours a week, at unpredictable times.
So, this is what an objectively bad job market looks like in Europe.
Is having temporarily high unemployment that bad? Sure, demand is not as sky high as it used to be but doesn't mean people won't get a proper job eventually.
Imo it shows that you consider your people valuable and have a strong social safety net, so people are not forced to accept the first job that comes their way and compromise on pay or what you want to do.
I'm sure those grads could get underpaid crappy jobs the next day if they had to, but the point is they're not forced to.
If you can't sort this out in a couple years, then you have a real problem.
> If you can't sort this out in a couple years, then you have a real problem.
The problem is, we've been in an era of the polycrisis for decades - first 2007 the financial crisis thanks to the US subprime loan market, then the Euro crisis, then came the refugee crisis 2015, then the second refugee crisis 2018, then Covid, then the Russian invasion, then the Israel-Palestine war, and now Trump.
And the last three and a half crises are still going on simultaneously.
There has been no recovery period in which things could settle and those who got left behind could catch up, it was straight from one crisis to the next.
>out in the official data, and less so but still true in the real world, things are still bobbing along.
The Titanic had 3 days of warning and took 3 hours to sink. A large ship takes a long time to do anything, be it turn or drown.
If you've been following the breadcrumbs in pretty much any industry (especially tech), you know the market isn't in a good shape. If you're looking outside expencting to see the world burning, you gotta wait another 3 hours (or hope someone steps in first).
I know 4 people who were laid off this year. 2 federal government (1 contractor) and 2 large corporate. Entirely anecdotal, but the data I see isn't good.
The downturn of the economy, as a whole, is very real while simultaneously we are doing "just fine".
The "just fine" part is that our stock market is doing quite well, and those who are already wealthy greatly increased the velocity of their wealth. The flip side is that everything is too expensive, including labor, and we have to cut corners to make line go up. Most companies, by this point, have been more or less stripped for parts in pursuit of growth. Most are stagnating or experiencing negative growth now, because obviously, except a key few.
And those key few are pretty much holding everything together. Speculatively. Based off of the promise of growth without labor.
So, that's kind of where we're at right now.
> but out in the official data, and less so but still true in the real world, things are still bobbing along. Not great guns but still ok. The interesting thing is how much is internet chatter a leading signal for this thing now than in previous cycles?
It's really interesting to read both this comment and the featured article because my recollection is that one of the big reasons Harris lost in 2024 is that Democrats kept saying the underlying economic data was fine but voters felt things were bad, even if they weren't (the so-called 'vibecession'). Maybe also a bit of distrusting economic experts. So which is it? Are voters just being illogical and should trust when others say the economy is doing fine? Or is there something not being captured in economic data that validates people's concerns?
IMO the shift towards AI was very detrimental to the job market, because every company started to work on their AI strategy and not on their core competencies. This has resulted in most companies failing to materialize their AI strategies, while burning their cash. One of the reasons for this is that the average company competes against Goliaths that have infinite funding.
At first many companies stopped developing mobile apps and I think mobile app devs were the first hit. Second, the frontend developers were hit because of how the AI can generate good enough websites, however, they aren't hit as hard as the mobile developers.
This has spread into most parts of the stack with a variable impact.
Some anecdata from Berlin:
- It's now much harder to get a job without speaking German
- There is now competition for low-wage service jobs
- At times it felt like half of my friends were unemployed
- My dev friends have a much harder time finding work. Back in 2015-2020 I had to beat recruiters back with a stick.
Agree on all points, especially half of my friend circle being unemployed at one point.
Folks with amazing jobs having to spend >1y trying to find a "meh" job. Pretty much impossible to find a job without fluent German.
>...but out in the official data, and less so but still true in the real world, things are still bobbing along.
I don't know that the official data shows things "still bobbing along." The graph of monthly employment numbers looks like it has a decidedly downward trend overall. September jobs were unexpectedly high, but we've had a lot of subsequent downward revisions and it may happen again for September.
https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2025/11/2...
looks like a return to post GFC pre-covid trend. That's sort of what I mean, we've obviously come from a boom-ish market and correcting. How much of it now is the shock that now isnt the same as the 2021-2023 market v this is the start of a real downturn. I don't know
> we've never had, to my knowledge, a notable downturn when social media, and all the chatter it generates, has been so prominent or mass engaged
How would we even know? It's not like there's a practical way to measure this from an individual's perspective.
Well for one, the concept of a recession is entirely unrelated to employment rates
Clearly: You are not in one of the major EU-countries :-)
Based on the numbers we had before the BLS clammed up, all sectors except healthcare is going down. But yes, tech is one of the bigger slumps. If your job isn't to help take care of the aging boomer population, you're not having a good time.
I work in games and have the occasional slump. But this time is much different. all staffind agencies for temp work in my city pretty much said there's nothing out there. my local area is pretty much a bunch of fractional janitorial roles and that's it.
You mean spending all their time looking for a new job, applying for various benefits, doing side work as much as they can, at pay far lower than they're used to so it takes more hours of gig work to reach equilibrium?
There are several factors which contribute to the "rosy" official picture:
- A lot of people participate in the gig economy instead of getting registered as unemployed.
- AI has eroded a lot of employment opportunities for graduates, i.e. people relatively active on social networks.
- Official data can be horribly inaccurate (phone surveys in 2025, seriously?) with grossly outdated models (remember the recent huge revisions?). Political pressure does not help here either.
- The unemployment stats do not account for significant downgrades in salary and working conditions. They will show the same picture for a person with a cushy office job and the same person working 2 jobs in retail from paycheck-to-paycheck.
Think it's a filter effect. The areas getting hit especially hard happen to overlap strongly with the most online, which is a relatively small part of the economy overall - and, if you get cut, you've got a bunch more time to to talk about it, which amplifies things further.
Plenty of other areas doing OK for now - construction, healthcare especially - there's no shortage of money around, it's just not going into tech projects outside of the AI bubble.
Well as a single datum:
After I got laid off in late 2023 I had a devil of a time finding work (despite having AI experience) to the point my unemployment ran out -
And I was 20 years as a dev and tech lead and full stack, (never had trouble finding work) including stints as a leading EM and CTO, I’ve been an industry award winning innovation lead,a digital studio director, switching tech stacks and cloud certs all my career..mentoring juniors and doing podcasts and writing white papers etc, but peanuts - nothing
Getting ghosted by 25 year olds in interviews and doing rounds and rounds and leetcode and all that but no success- for example I had a 7 round interview with NBCUniversal in 2023 and then got ghosted (I probably doged a bullet since they had subsequent layoffs)
a 12 month stint with nothing - we lost our savings as my wife got laid off too
Since then I pivoted to AI and Gen AI startups- joining incubators and finally got some work or at least cofounded some AI startups- now money is tight and I dont have health insurance but at least I have a job… it sucks as a over 45 year old as I have so much experience but no one cares.. still dont have much grey hair so I can pass for 40 to get noticed
No one stable is hiring or your resume just goes to a dead letter queue or is lost in ether or lost amid all the ai generated resumes out there - young ML and PHds and people under 40 seem to be getting work in Gen AI but thats about it
networking is the only game left and most good recruiters I know got laid off too
At least I’ve built up production experience in agents and context engineering RL, pytorch, langchain/LangGraph, RAG, KGa, etc python, BAML, LLM and LLMops to add to my years of full stack work