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
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?
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.
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 ("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.
Pipelining, mostly.
Have you tried jobs.now ? In theory those are positions legitimately looking to be filled.
>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.
how the tech world is becoming trumpian-like is a funny thing to witness - try to unionize next time
[delayed]
> 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.
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.
Being overqualified is indeed a real phenomenom. Employers can think your too expensive, or that your desperatem and that you might not stick around long. All valid concerns.
What’s admirable is that you’ve actually applied to jobs below your pay grade. Most people won’t because doing that grind in your 40s is actually hard especially if you have kids.
So what these people do if they can't find a job?
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.
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?
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.
> 7 round interview with NBCUniversal in 2023
Name and shame, this should be the norm. People are too shy on this subject. Thank you.
Not sure if it's been missed or I'm an anomaly. But as a senior level software engineer who graduated in the 10s, with a wealth of experience, I too (like the juniors who get reported on) am struggling to get a new job. Either I'm just not as good as I think I am, or the barrier is ridiculously high for the next type of job I'm trying to achieve (high paying, product focused developer).
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.
> 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.
I'm a little older but I have found it strange how well economic crisis has been almost wiped from our collective memories
it was a horrible period and I have many friends who are in the same boat especially those not in software
I think it is wiped from memories because it very specifically affected one or two years of college graduates (that had the experience the parent comment mentioned). Not an entire generation. The data shows millennials as a whole are better off than boomers were at their age.
> The data shows millennials as a whole are better off than boomers were at their age.
Perhaps true if you go east far enough, seems objectively wrong for the majority of the west though. Honest question, if you think this and it isn't just rage bait.. what data supports it? Scott Galloway disagrees and offers hard data, and goes as far as calling it intergenerational theft. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEJ4hkpQW8E
> Perhaps true if you go east far enough, seems objectively wrong for the majority of the west though.
Much of the (American) millennials generation believes a story that they’re worse off. I feel it is a convenient story for people to tell themselves and blame someone else for their perceived losses. But I pulled up several articles supporting my claim with a quick search, even though the opposite narrative is more widespread.
Example article about how inflation adjusted net worth is higher for millennials than it was for boomers at the same age:
https://www.newsweek.com/millennials-financially-better-off-...
Galloway isn’t necessarily wrong in the individual data points he raises. But if you look at the sum of all of the factors - higher rents, more student debt, etc but also the positive things - the net worth in the end is higher for millennials. And remember this is inflation adjusted already.
The numbers that interest me are comparing home ownership rates at various ages between the generational groups
Lots of research shows about a 8-10% gap, that only at very specific ages finally achieved parity.
The consequence of this is a difference in wealth building, economic security, and family planning for millions.
To add to that, an unemployed 28 year old living with his parents in the house that they own is a "homeowner" in most of these homeowner stats.
Why does home ownership on its own matter? Net worth is inclusive of housing and assets and debt. And net worth is a direct measure of the wealth that is being built.
Because homes are pretty much the only asset a millenial would have at that time that would have grown over time. a 08-9 graducate wouldn't really have much money to spar for stocks unless they made really lucky bets or happened to mine a fewbitcoin they forgot about.
Most all else would have inflated or depreciated.
As a thought experiment would you not feel (much) poorer if houses suddenly cost >$5 million tomorrow and you didn't own one yet? Even if everything else cost the same? Even if everything else cost the same and your net worth went up $100k?
Someone posted this already but a more useful "net worth" is how big of a shock can take without paying multiples on the sticker price.
And even homes are now sieving into institutional buyers.
https://medium.com/newco/your-financial-shock-wealth-4845e6d...
I've read this as well, heres an economist article with a graph: https://archive.ph/Y3vvz
However, there are certainly a lot of conflicting studies and data out there. And to be honest, it doesnt feel true given how much young people complain on the internet. Its hard to see which asserion is correct. It isnt necessarily correct just because one study says its so.
That's the average. Please compare the median wealth (especially seeing the absurd paper wealth of crypto bro and stock influencers who are almost exclusively millennials).
[Edit] also inflation is calculated based on average consumption. So you will notice that toys, clothing and electronic devices (TVs, cooking robots), all cheaper and cheaper (due to enshitiffication and quality decrease) count more for inflation than education, cars, housing and probably a lot of other stuff a 25-35 yo care more about.
A lot of the data used to claim millenials are doing better off is based on nonsense like "millenials have larger TVs on average" or "millenials all have smart phones yet boomers didn't have mobile phones", or equating 1 person making 3 times the median wage and 2 people making nothing as just as good as 3 different people making median wage.
sorry your math seems strange. You graduated from college in ‘08 - 17 years ago. You’re nearing 40. So let’s say you graduated at 23 … you’ve only had a college level job for five years?
The economy has been moving upward since 2013 - 12 years ago. What were you doing from 2013 to 2020?
I ask because I also graduated around ‘08. I’ve been a software developer since 2016. I’m currently a senior dev with almost a decade of experience.
There were really crappy years to start with, but I feel I’ve made up for it substantially.
My own parents graduated in the late 70s during a terrible economic recession.
It seems weathering economic recessions have been a tradition for several generations.
I still remember articles almost identical to the ones I see now; “this generation is screwed and there is no possible salvation.”
It’s getting old.
> I'm just now at a point in my career, nearing 40, where I should have been at 28.
What or who is the standard for where you “should have been at 28?”
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.
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.
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 literally one of these people. My only work experience is a GSoC internship in 2021. I have yet to get hired and I've been looking for 4 years, graduated in 2022 right before ChatGPT came out. I've had no choice but to become a generalist as a consequence, and over the last year or two my interviews have dropped to zero and absolutely none of the advice I've gotten from anybody has helped. Just my personal experience.
Yeah, I'm really sorry this happened. I'm managing a bit better since I graduated in 2017, but I still pretty much had my senior trajectory yoinked from under me. The market is completely different now than back when I graduated.
I don't really have any advice for the present. We're in a storm, so do what you need to weather it. If there's any downtime you do have, use it to prepare for when (if?) the market bounces back:
1. Network. Nothing serious but just get to know people in your area. Keep in contact and they might one day have an in for some work.
2. work on personal projects. They aren't being looked at now, but it'll help you stand out when the market corrects itself.
3. consider some adjacent skillsets. At some point, if this last longer than any of us expect, it may be best to vouch for yourself. learning some graphic design can help you sell your own apps or make websites for others. Learning some art can help you sell games. embrace the generalization and be able to take small products from start to finih by youself. If you don't want to get completely out, you may want to start shaping your career around being your own boss instead of relying on others to employ you.
4. take care of your physical health. I don't know your body, and you may already be doing this. But it's always important to remind people (especially in a field like tech) that sometimes a breath of fresh air and 10 minutes of walking can make all the difference. Don't let yourself get cooped up.
Best of luck out there.
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.
At some point you are going to have to grow up and take matters into your own hands instead of blaming everyone for your situation.
I’m not old. Just wise.
I appreciate the point you're trying to make, and I agree taking responsibility for one's own life circumstances is the only way to improve them, but surely you understand that 'save and invest' is wholly unsuitable advice for someone with no disposable income or no income at all.
Who else is responsible for you?
You have two options. Continue to point fingers and complain and be broke, or start putting $100/mo in VOO and save what little money you have for your future?
I know it sucks. I know income inequality is huge. I know the only way out of this is to put in sweat equity. I know the only way to put food on the table is to have a second job at a gas station. I’ve been there. However, as much as you DON’T want to hear it - the only way out of your mess is by you working your way out of your mess.
As I said, I agree with taking personal responsibility - I'm not sure why you're still trying to fight me on that.
> You have two options. Continue to point fingers and complain and be broke, or start putting $100/mo in VOO and save what little money you have for your future?
The imaginary person you're trying to give this advice to graduated from university eighteen months ago and has been living in their parents' house ever since, applying for jobs non-stop. Their income is $0 per month. They are entirely unable to apply your advice; applying your advice is something they aspire to.
$100/month in VOO isn’t going to do anything (except help people like me who already own a lot).
> the only way out of your mess is by you working your way out of your mess.
Third option is revolution. Could be violent, could be passive like not starting families, complaining on the internet, scrolling tiktok as long as the benefits and body allow, and suicide if necessary.
It is possible for too much of the benefits of working having too high of a likelihood of being captured by rent seekers to not make the work worth it. In old times, the lack of birth control made people have to work more due to needing to support kids, but if I didn’t have kids, I could get by with a much lower standard of living.
They cant fix the economy singlehandly. Blaming individuals for systemic problems is just avoidance.
The only thing they can control is themselves and their habits though.
I’m not avoiding the fact that the economy is fucked. I’m fully aware. It’s up to you how much you’re willing to continue to pay or what you’re willing to sacrifice. It sucks, but the only thing you can control is yourself.
It’s just generic advice that doesn’t even really apply to the fresh grads, their issue is not having any entry point to a career anymore.
I graduated 10 years ago and it’s a day and night difference. Whatever worked for me in 2015 will not work for a fresh grad today, the game is completely different.
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.
FI is more valuable than RE. After three years or so I got the itch again and decided to self fund my own thing. Also looking back on around 10 years ago more fondly..
Yeah; I've heard a few people say versions of you get bored if you retire early, and I've soon to be retirees talk about how the people they know who retired to go do nothing just wasted away.
I like tech; my challenge now is finding a gig with interesting work and a good work-life balance and p75 pay. That, and knowing when I actually have enough net worth to have more freedom. The problem is you never think it's enough, but not because of greed, but because of fear.
Boredom is a personality trait IMHO. Some of us never get bored, there's only lack of time and funds for hobbies and exploring.
> Also looking back on around 10 years ago more fondly
When the work didn't suck and the product didn't suck.
Being FI helped me out greatly in December 2020 when My company laid off half of my team and expected me to take on double the load, including lots of extra after hours on-call support. I had a pretty great time not working for ~3 years during Covid. However, I am back to work after an old friend and boss offered me a WFH job that I couldn't refuse. He has since retired so I will stick around until current management pisses me off again, they downsize me or I just get sick of logging into teams/outlook at 7AM every morning.
> 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.
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.
As an "Old" who was a kid in the late 70s to early 90s, I'm telling young folks that there is no first world poverty like there was then. Not just because "we" were poor, but because you couldn't get "stuff" anyway. Like, the biggest TV I ever saw back them was 25". Nobody had a computer. Unemployment across the board was high. I saw my first kiwi fruit or avocado when I was 10. Clothes were expensive (even thrift / store brand). "Stuff" of any kind was expensive or non existent.
Yesterday my BIL threw a perfectly working tower PC in the recycling because he couldn't find anyone (not even a charity shop) to take it. Last time I was at e-waste I saw half a dozen 42 inch TVs that I'm willing to bet we're working.
However we were wealthy in one way: we had a stable home, and optimism. I may have had old clothes, one pair of worn shoes and a 4th-hand uncool bicycle, but there was no question of ever losing the roof over my head. And there was a future that looked like it was full of possibilities. "Stuff" was getting cheaper and more available. I remember our family being able to afford our first microwave oven. Our first VCR (1991). We didn't get rich, things got cheaper.
Today, it's like we're looking at the future as if we're already post-peak, and it's all downhill from here. There's tons of stuff around but nobody wants it. People have also lost the positive attitude, optimism. It'll get you through a lot of bad times. Years and years of shit. Lose optimism, and it's all bleak no matter how big your TV is.
If I could choose a safe to be reborn in, I'd take "our" poverty of the past over this.
>the reality is that people usually spend more and save less than they could.
You can't save your way out of rent being 70, 80+% of your paycheck. For my area, minimum wage is $18 and your best hope for rent is sharing a $3k 2 bedroom apartment. quick napkin math suggests $2400 take home pay and ~$1800 eaten up between the rent split, utilities, gas, and the most basic rice and beans diet of "groceries". Not even including potential health insurance or car notes or student loans.
If you don't have the fortune of a family who'd house you for free/dirt cheap then you don't have much to save. You're already sacrificing for the present.
I pray you are right and I'm wrong. But I do have reasons to believe that this time is a bit different.
In all the previous job market contractions the root cause has been money - increasing costs, less investment capital, etc. This is the first time the root cause appears to be tech (if you believe the announcements about layoffs). That makes it different.
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...
Its just so weird how demonstrably insane the hype cycle this time around is. Everytime I think ChatGPT and Gemini are improving, it hits me with some monstrously stupid hallucinations. Here's how my conversation with GPT 5.1 went this afternoon:
>Can you please provide a reference for the assertion you just made
>Sure, here it is: <link>
> 404, please double check
> I apologize for the mistake, I have double checked, here is the corrected link: <link>
> Still 404, please always double check a link by actually visiting and reading it
x5 before I gave up.
> 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.
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.
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.
On the long term, we're all dead.
I doubt things will recover to 2018 levels. Too many new software devs coming out each year, too much AI, too little big company growth once everyone already has an internet computer in their hands. The Wild West is over and now the digital economy has entered the boring phase.
> 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)
Most deindustrialized regions in the West haven't recovered to full prosperity and are quite depressing to live in, sometimes even 30-40 years later: US Rust Belt, Wallonia in Belgium, the French North East, etc.
At a large enough scale, most people don't really move on, their lives are wrecked and they just suffer through them.
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.
Part of being a developer is innovating as rapidly as possible. We obsolete our own practices in a regular basis.
We should be the last occupation to be replaced by machines.
Maybe I’m stupid, but I’m stupidly optimistic.
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.
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.
I’ve been told for 20 years that in 5 years my job is going to be offshored. If they could have they would have long ago.
My theory: We had a crazy bubble of hiring during zero rate interest. We are living through a nasty correction. AI is moving the needle too, but it’s mostly being used as a scapegoat to save face and explain away cleaning up failed ZRIP yolo plans that didn’t pan out.
We’ve also haven’t had a serious recession since 2009. It feels like it’s only a matter of time :(
You're zooming out and considering this negative sentiment with similar times in the past. I think that's wise. I think we should keep zooming out to other industries. Imagine you're an engineer for GM in Detroit in the 70s - would you consider the mean to be your contemporary middle-class lifestyle, or what it is in 2025? Similar for steel and semiconductors.
It goes for other places, too. Is the US's financial strength of today its mean, or is it where the UK was pre-Suez Crisis? Where Japan was in the 80s?
I got my first programming job in ~98 while still in college. I had family members telling me then that programming was a dead end and was all going to be outsourced. I lived through .com, GFC, etc... This does feel more like a reversion to the mean at this moment rather than some crash...yet. I feel for the people who only have known a job market that was easy to step into and paid great salaries because they don't know anything else. It's a lot like the people who think they are great stock pickers because they've only been investing in the greatest bull market we've ever seen.
When I came into the job market the rule of thumb was it would take 1 month/10k of salary to find a new job. Over time that moved to 1 month/20k of salary or so. Even then, someone making a FAANG type salary should be prepared to look for a ~year for a new job matching that salary. Being able to bounce from job to job while getting big raises along the way was the exception, and ZIRP only exacerbated it.
Adding my voice to sibling comments, this is from European experience, I have had several times been dumped from consulting projects, and having to do competence transfer to the offshoring team that would take over our team roles.
Around five times since 2007.
I've had my job offshored in the past, in case a personal anecdote is relevant here.
Sorry that happened to you :(
> I’ve been told for 20 years that in 5 years my job is going to be offshored. If they could have they would have long ago.
"This time it's different."
20 years ago China and India had a nascent tech industry. Now they're booming.
Talented folks all over the world - Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere - are working on hard problems.
> We had a crazy bubble of hiring during zero rate interest.
We did. This has had a tremendous impact, no doubt. But by the same coin, ZIRP has had half a decade to unwind at this point. There's other stuff going on. Tariffs, continued inflation, etc.
We're not the only industry offshoring. Hollywood has moved a lionshare of production overseas in the last 4 years. Graphics design and marketing... It's being shipped out at volume.
My personal experience, YMMV:
I was told that once video conferencing got good and internet and infrastructure became better in other places, "this time it will be different."
I was told once universities in other countries started pumping out a pool of great candidates, expats who worked for FAANGs in the US would go home to found their own companies using that pool, and those companies would take over the world. "this time it's different."
I was told during covid once everyone was remote, why would people not just hire the cheapest remote workers going forward? "This time it's different."
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely have seen more and more offshoring over time, but there's a huge inertia behind the US tech industry that's hard to change. The VC / startup ecosystem and all of it's resources have huge Bay Area inertia - it mostly hasn't even spread to the rest of the US, let alone the rest of the world, despite the cost of living and constrained talent pool in the Bay Area. There's something about getting a bunch of people with the same mindset in one spot and having them know each other, socialize with each other, make friends and networks with each other that still matters. Founders tend to build off the people and connections they know and are connected with personally.
I'm hoping it will take long enough to change for me to finish my career. We'll see. This time really may be different :).
EDIT: p.s. Agree totally it's way to complex to tell what's actually happening. The _impact_ of the end of ZRIP, the rise of AI, major tax changes on R&D amortization, and US tariffs pretty much landed at the same time, so who knows?
The difference is, offshoring in the 2000s was largely private sector driven with minimal subsidizes and investment promotion programs lead by countries and their local governments.
On the other hand, in the 2020s, India, Israel, most Eastern European states, Ireland, Costa Rica, and a couple others have launched industrial promotion subsidizes for software offshoring - often providing US$10k-30k per head in federal and local subsidizes along with subsidized office space and real estate and tax windows.
That along with the internal frictions of async work largely being ironed out due to the COVID remote work period along with an exodus of mid-level managers on work visas during the early pandemic layoffs which had an outsized impact on Indian, Chinese, and Eastern European techies in the US made offshoring much more cost competitive and effective than it was 25 years ago.
Putting your head in the sand saying it's no big deal is honestly very stupid if you are hoping to maintain your career for the next 5-10 years in any white collar job.
And it's only going to get even more competitive now that the Indian government is enacting labor reform laws to align Indian labor laws with China's [0], making it even more cost effective for businesses to offshore by reducing regulatory overhead [1].
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-21/india-imp...
[1] - https://www.fortuneindia.com/business-news/tech-sector-expec...
This is not the picture I'm seeing on the ground. AI is eliminating certain classes of junior software positions. (Roughly: jobs where explaining a task to junior engineer is more work than asking Cursor/Claude Code/Codex to do it.) Junior engineers can fight back against this by
a) getting really good at clarifying requirements
b) learning quickly, so their work quality is eventually higher than Cursor can work out in one shot.
This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas: when the bottleneck is communication + taste, not raw implementation cycles, you'd rather have a small local team. And it's a pressure for high TC, because individuals now have much more leverage, although they need to master more skills to take advantage.
>Junior engineers can fight back against this by
Many juniors can't even meet with a human interviewer. There's no point maximizing for interviews that never come. That's the issue.
>This is also a pressure against hiring teams overseas:
This seems to agree with the issue. a team of 100 becomes a team of 5 locals and 95 outsourced work. Maybe those 5 managers are better off, but we're still reducing the local workforce by 95%.
And I doubt the conditions of the remaining 5 are better than pre-outsourcing. You can't out-compensate burnout and QoL. Gen Z in particular seems to really be pushing against this mentality, so this strategy is limited in time even if it's working on Gen X/Millenials.
Surely people who can't get a job aren't "junior engineers" - they're just graduates.
Junior engineers, i.e. people who have already been hired, can indeed fight back by getting really good at their jobs.
But you're right, it doesn't help you get hired if you can't even get an interview.
> learning quickly, so their work quality is eventually higher than Cursor can work out in one shot.
This sounds almost word for word like The Onion’s classic: Secretary Of Labor Assures Nation There Still Plenty Of Jobs For Americans Willing To Outwork Robots
[0] https://theonion.com/secretary-of-labor-assures-nation-there...
Wow. That is ... too painful and true to life to really be funny at this point. But, ok, still funny.
To be fair, I meant something a little different -- something like -- learn how to be a robot priest who can get it to follow the desperate prayers of humans. And, like, how to unstick the robot arm when it accidentally punches through a wall. Etc.
Not that that is particularly comforting, in an existential sense. Maybe buys you a couple years till you have to pivot again.
> when the bottleneck is communication + taste
That was the bottleneck in the industry when it was in growth phase, it's a mature sector now and it's all about efficiency and profit now. Speed to market and product iteration speed isn't the most important thing anymore, there's not a lot of innovation taking place. Outside the actual novel AI specific companies out there, of course, there are a few other spots of growth and exceptional companies but largely the kings have been crowned.
Show of hands for anyone seeing AI replacing juniors (and I assume also backfilling employees).
I'm genuinely curious.
I've heard this argued the other way too. Seen it firsthand.
Fwiw, we've had good engineers switch to vibe coding and it's ruined their output.
From really solid systems to unmaintainable flocks of seagulls - nested if statements ten levels deep with no thought or care. From good engineers that are just dialing it in now.
We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products.
I lead cloud consulting projects as a staff consultant specializing in application development.
I use to need myself to lead the project, customer management, design work and some development. I would add usually another developer to do some of the grunt work coding and usually a cloud architect to take care of infrastructure as code, security, etc.
Not that I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to do it all myself, I just didn’t have time. GenAI can definitely do CloudFormation, Terraform or the AWS CDK (ie using a high level language like Typescript instead of Yaml) and can do the code where I really don’t need two other resources or deal with the detailed requirements and coordination.
Before the pearl clutching starts about my not knowing how to code without AI. I’ve been coding consistently since 1986 when I was a hobbyist assembly language coder.
> We've had good engineers use vibe coding to save to time to work on their side hustles. Then go on to try to raise money for AI products.
It seems to be working…
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2E...
> GenAI can definitely do CloudFormation, Terraform or the AWS CDK
GenAI does not exist yet.
Generative, not general
> If you lose your job, you won't get the same comp again. The days of $500K TC are long behind us.
I wouldn't be so sure about that, unless you mean $500K TC in 2019 dollars.
ZIRP might just come back, but it'll come with a higher price tag than the one from 2008.
Yeah pretty much. Engineers are going to be at a crossroad where they either turn to the government to finally build in some proper labor laws and other obvious controls (how about re-banning stock buybacks?) or go out to the Wild West and hope they idea can sustain their livelihood.
Given the vibes of the community here: I guess I'll look for a Mad Max mask (I'll ofc keep performing my civic duties, though).
> how about re-banning stock buybacks?
This is pretend boogie man. Banning buybacks will not automatically make that money flow into hiring or salaries. Companies are not charities, they exist to make a return. If hiring people and/or paying more will generate a larger return than giving the money back to shareholders either through buybacks or dividends, then companies will do that.
AI is now giving companies something to do with excess cash that could generate better returns (shareholders believe so) and buybacks are being pushed out as money goes elsewhere[1].
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/move-over-stock-buybacks-ai-1...
>Banning buybacks will not automatically make that money flow into hiring or salaries.
Nope, but that's what trends show us from the decades between its ban and bans being lifted. All I know is that companies flowing money back into itself and having executives shift in and out every few years clearly hasn't worked.
It's just one stepping stone to make sure companies have skin in the game again.
You can argue dividends but that means the money gets taxed quicker, so that also helps the people.
>AI is now giving companies something to do with excess cash that could generate better returns
Sure, for now. I think that problem will fix itself sooner than later, so I'm not too concerned about that. Trends come and go.
> turn to the government to finally build in some proper labor laws and other obvious controls (how about re-banning stock buybacks?)
What would banning stock buybacks accomplish? Companies can still return capital to shareholders in the form of dividends.
Dividends don't grow the stock as quickly. They can and will do that, but the goal is to change the incentive structure back to long term growth and not "stock buyback and dip from company in a year".
There is no evidence to indicate buybacks reduce long term incentives for executives compared to dividends.
If anything, all the businesses with the most long term growth have done the most buybacks because they are paying the employees in stock, which employees gladly accept because they bet the business will have long term growth.
And executive compensation is not vested until business targets are met a few years in the future.
Dividends are immediately taxable.
Stock buybacks are designed to let the shareholder see the same upside, but decide when to take the taxable event. Long term gains are also preferable to non-qualified dividends.
Even worse for non-American stockholders of American companies - the IRS charges a 30% foreign withholding tax on dividends. If you ban stock buybacks in favour of dividends, it’s a big tax increase on foreigners, so US stocks lose a whole pile of value for American stockholders when foreigners dump American equities until the ROI equalizes. (Roughly 20% of US equities are foreign-owned.)
They’ll funnel it through a US based shell company. C’mon now.
A big tech breakup needn't be anti-capitalist. In fact, it might be the most pro-capitalist move.
If you're an entrepreneur or VC, you want big tech broken up because they can put serious price pressure on your exit.
Trillion dollar companies can easily spin up a team to copy you, with no incentive to stay alive. They can threaten you with all kinds of leverage - access to customers, patents, legislators. They can give you an ultimatum to sell for cheap, go to your competitor, etc.
Their scale and reach is additional unexpected gravity on your delta V.
Capitalism is supposed to be hard. It isn't supposed to support invasive species that can graze anywhere they please and kill ecosystems of diversity and innovation. These mega conglomerates can just throw themselves into markets using unrelated business unit profit and suffocate real companies.
Breaking up Google and Amazon would be good for everyone, perhaps even shareholders and ICs at those companies themselves if value is unlocked. Let alone all of the other companies and entrepreneurs in the market.
I think it depends on which kind of entrepreneur you're aiming to be. VC breakups are amazing if your goal is to box in and become a market competitor. But as of the last decade or so there's been plenty of "incubators" to take into account. startups whose goal is instead to be sold off to some major company and get their payday that way. Those kinds of models would deteriorate, and are likely what want to prop Big Tech up.
I do hope we have more genuine competitors fighting out there for breakupps. But it's hard to say these days.
> New folks will never be hired. RIP to the CS degree.
We've just hired a couple of graduates, with the expectation that they are going to take some time to grow.
What I'm seeing right now is a huge influx of candidates from large companies that have zero skill. I'm not exaggerating, they can't code anything. And it's not just AI, they started working before ChatGPT came out.
Others in the industry are seeing the same and it's quite likely that your resume is getting lost.
One practical advice for resume writers from me. PLEASE, just don't put stuff like "Improved the API responsiveness by 23.123897%". Unless it's a crazy number like 100x.
We posted a job a year ago for a dev. We received terrible candidates, but still tried to fill it from the pool. 2/3 ghosted the interview and the other I'm not sure had ever done anything in iOS. I just pulled the job instead of wasting more time. I'm planning to post another job in the new year and I'm not looking forward to wading through the garbage.
> 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.
What makes you think people in Asia wouldn’t benefit from more competition in the market as well?
That said - I feel that advertisement based markets will always consolidate. There is too much of a benefit to having a single network which has the largest reach in terms of audience to show ads. This will always create incentives to consolidate over time.
Then again, why make the perfect the enemy of the good. Getting to more competition is a good step.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is very much tech bubble thinking.
Most developers in the US don’t work for tech companies and will never make ovdd $200K inflation adjusted. Developer salary is very much bimodal
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal
If you are working for boring old enterprise companies like banks, airlines, insurance companies or even most YC funded companies, “senior” developers will top out at around $160K-$170K inflation adjusted in tier 2 cities.
I spent my pure developer career [1] in Atlanta GA. Well known companies based there like Home Depot, Delta, Coke, and GE Transportation are paying their top developers around what entry level developers getting in BigTech.
But choose your non west coast city and you will see the same.
Okay, assuming you could invest 100k out of your 170k per year into companies you know were doing well on tech from 2015, how much would you have ?
(say: AMD, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Facebook)
The answer is about 10M, which is not that far from what I estimated, even without including Nvidia. Now add in house price appreciation.
There are plenty of people who have managed to do this, from fairly normal tech jobs.
Sure, just save 100k out of your 170k comp, that's totally how normal people operate. And not only that, also pick the right stocks rather than just sticking everything in an index!
Just magically turn 10x 100k into 10M!
I haven't got to 10m yet, but I saved 70-80% of my take home pay since ~2008 and I have enough to quit at any time and live the rest of my life without working. That is just by investing in the 3-fund portfolio and without the crazy SF salaries.
You do not understand compounding growth.
You could have looked up the numbers for indices yourself, but here you go -
S&P500 -> ~4 million
NDXT (top 100 tech) -> ~14 million.
> just save 100k out of your 170k comp
Yes, that was my starting salary, and that's almost exactly what I saved.
This calculation assumes your salary is somewhat constant and maxed out as the person I was responding to claimed, but in my experience you can expect your tech salary to double every ~5-6 years.
Shit, dump that $100k into bitcoin at the low point of 2015, and you'd have $37 million today. Easy!
> There are plenty of people who have managed to do this, from fairly normal tech jobs.
Yeah, but there also isn’t enough wealth in the system for everyone to do this.
Like suppose that a) we’re now at a reasonably correct valuation for Nvidia b) assume a hypothetical where everyone in the US had plowed all of their savings into Nvidia in 2015. Result: The market cap of Nvidia is still $6 trillion, and the median American owns less than $10k in Nvidia stock.
I meant everyone with a good tech job, not everyone in the country.
About a 1:1000 ratio I'd guess.
Sure, but there was nothing stopping people with $10k in savings in 2015 from buying Nvidia. If someone with $10k in savings had bought Nvidia in 2015, they’d have $2.5m today. But that only works for a relatively small number of people before the $2.5m is no longer $2.5m - they’re all drawing from the same $6 trillion pot. “Everyone with a good tech job” is accurate, but besides the point, it would work exactly the same if you limited it to “everyone who’s a plumber” or “everyone who’s a fedex driver”, but literally cannot work for everyone at the same time.
> it would work exactly the same if you limited it to “everyone who’s a plumber” or “everyone who’s a fedex driver”
Yes, "Everyone with a good tech job" has a significantly higher chance of keeping or holding tech RSUs, and have conviction that investing in tech is going to pay off.
> but literally cannot work for everyone at the same time
Yes, that is how the world works. Anything that makes you successful would not work for everyone at the same time.
> Yes, that is how the world works. Anything that makes you successful would not work for everyone at the same time.
To me this reads as a particularly misanthropic view of the world that only considers zero-sum (or less than zero sum) actions.
Any investments in yourself that aren’t at the expense of others (education, exercise, diet, therapy, living space improvements, etc., etc.) or investments in family and community, benefit both you and others and would work for everybody; indeed, many such investments would work better the more people undertook them, rather than the fewer.
Do you see the difference between
> more
and
> everyone
?
If more people bought Nvidia stocks, the value would be higher. If everyone bought, something would give (and that is exactly what we are starting to see).
In GA, after taxes your take home would be ~125k. So you think someone can live in a big city like ATL for 25k/year? What if they have a family? Ok, are you assuming their spouse is also in tech and making at least similar? The 125k also doesn't have healthcare deducted yet.
Some of the comments on this thread highlight just how disconnected many people were/are from everything outside of the FAANG bubble.
If you live in an expensive city and do not have a proportional salary, obviously you are going to save less.
> Ok, are you assuming their spouse is also in tech and making at least similar?
Yes, suppose spouse contributes to household expenses, but assume separate savings and investments for this calculation. Do you see you'd easily get to 100k saved?
The difference between having a large fraction of your savings in your bank account versus invested for the last 10 years can be quite a few millions, which is what most commenters here are failing to see. I'm sure the story was different between 2002 and 2012, but that was not what I talking about.
Ok, so you need 2 people working in tech making near top end salaries for the area? You do see how this simple idea of saving 100k/year isn't so simple for anyone outside of FAANG?
What's a realistic number in your opinion?
I managed to save about 100k per year in Denver and Salt Lake City with mid tier tech and govt lab jobs. I'm suspicious of the claim that Atlanta is significantly different. From what I have seen, it's usually bad financial decisions.
And for context, saving about double that during and post COVID by obtaining a remote job where the employer does not discriminate by location too much other than for maybe career growth.
>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.
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.
You're mistaken thinking those engineers aren't facing the same market downturn. AFAICT, it's exactly the same in Europe. The only difference is that in Europe folks weren't paid exorbitant salaries like their US colleagues were.
H1Bs don’t work for “half your wage”. This is a myth. H1Bs have a higher average salary.
“The rest of my life” is a very long horizon for making predictions. I don’t think I could predict much about politics or the economy two years out.
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.
BTC would agree with you. It’s nose diving.
Since its a Sunday night during a holiday weekend without any big breaking news, I would suspect that's probably just a bunch of people that had automated sales at $90k, or something similar.
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.
I have zero optimism for BTC, hold zero, and can't imagine a circumstance where I'd ever buy some. (Though perhaps a few more years of current US policy and USD will be so terrible that BTC starts to be more attractive...)
I see that Tokyo stock markets are way down today, that's probably what's driving lower BTC?
For a look at the shopping economics, this year's bfcm at stripe is pretty fun! http://bfcm.stripe.com people are selling off Bitcoin to have money to buy stuff, and that link is an inside baseball look at how much stuff is being bought.
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.
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.
I've been lead to believe that, in lieu of startup founding cash in the bank, there's a better social safety net, for use in cases like these. Is that not the case?
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 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.
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.
also, there is the case of the mismatched quantities for shopping, ie, the old hot dogs come in 10 packs, and rolls in 8 backs, etc.
Good grief .. you're serious?
Flour comes in sacks, meat comes in cuts - we've a quarter lamb in the freezer, part of that in the fridge, and yeast and flour enough for bread for the next six months.
We shop cheap, like the family has done for the past 100+ years, much of our food comes from the garden - our excess gets swapped with others excess (we have a lot of fruit, we never buy eggs, they come from people that can be bothered to run chickens).
It's a bit of work, we save money by not going to a gym and our life expectancy and cancer survival rates are much better than, say, middle north America.
To cut mbfg a bit of slack here, your approach doesn't work in all situations. I admire your functioning community and supportive family and the fact that you've got time and space for things like gardening.
If people can't live like you do, it's probably because they've been placed on some kind of economic hamster wheel, and rather than figure out how to get a quarter of a lamb their better bet is to emigrate or to disrupt the system that's making McDonalds feel like a relevant factor in a survival equation by building the kind of community that you're describing. That's a big ask if you've never been part of such a thing (I know I haven't).
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.
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.
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"
45 minutes is crazy. I have a chicken and rice dish I can make in 20 minutes (yes, I've timed myself because I'm weirdo and enjoy those chef shows). It takes 20 minutes because that's how long the rice takes. It can be faster if I use shrimp instead of chicken (more expensive though) and noodles instead of rice. It also makes ~3 servings.
Wow, i got downvoted for complaining about my cooking times on HackerNews, this is a real innovation:
so: - 5 min walk to supermarket - 10 min in there - 5 min walk back home - washing & cutting wedgetables 7 - 10 min - maybe cutting some meat: 5 min on top - eating 5 - 10 min - cleaning up the kitchen 5 min
That's why when it's just me I don't really do much cooking. I'll eat ultra-low prep stuff like toast (w/beans, hummus or avocado), bagged salad, frozen food, or grilled tofu.
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?
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.
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.
>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 commenter you’re replying to is from Australia and things are likely different here
Jobless are probably a vocal minority.
Nothing paints a picture of recession in reality right now.
Clearly: You are not in one of the major EU-countries :-)
Well for one, the concept of a recession is entirely unrelated to employment rates
>...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
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.
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.
I find that social media just trends more negative generally. People engage with the negative.
> 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.
Actually having trouble finding candidates...
What are you looking for?
Tech is more affected than the rest which is over-represented in discussions. Also people who can’t find a job tend to be more vocal than the rest.
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.
Are they perhaps more vocal because they have a lot of time on their hands?
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?
> ... 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.
> Is this saying something more about the relative expectation of compensation bands?
I just want to survive and I can do barely that. If you want a reference: I'm a single male who went from 160k salary to nothing in the last half of 2023. My necessary expenses were 3k a month (70% of that being rent).
Since then I lived in 2024 off of 50/hr freelance @ 15 hours a week. or... 3000/month. You see the issue here. Savings got obliterated, credit built up. But I figured I'd pay it off quickly if I just got any job to supplement the freelance work. not a 160k job per se. I could have found some local 60k IT role and been just fine (if a bit overworked with two different jobs).
In 2025, after a year of circuses in the job market I settled on a 20/hr 20 hour role to supplement the freelance work. So things are "stable" now... as long as I don't get sick, or the car doesn't break down, or a variety of other life factors (spoilers: I did in fact get sick. Which lead to me finding the 2nd part time work).
Like I said, I just want to survive. As is, I'm working for a third or so of my old salary with zero benefits and much more stress.
I understand how that goes. In 2009 I lost my job making $85k (it would now be $130k in 2025 dollars)... and I was unemployed for a little under a year. I got a job where I made $25 an hour (40h a week with time and a half overtime) as a software developer (in a city where the median per capita income was $36k/year - and yes, I verified that with the federal reserve stats - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/categories/3008 ). In 2015, with no meaningful raises and a bit of burnout I got a job in the public sector for $80k and have since been promoted and am making a little bit over $100k (different city, median per capita income is $75k/year).
Salary-wise, I'm making less than I did when I lived in California in '09 (and that's salary - stocks were a nice bit more and public sector doesn't exactly have an ESPP).
It may be necessary to move to get a job that pays $80k a year with 100% in the office expectations. Yes, it sucks. It's hard. Finding a job in '09 was not fun and I expect that similar conditions are to be found today. However, there are jobs out there when one considers what would be D tier companies and presents themself as someone isn't going to leave in a year for a higher salary somewhere else (before the implicit ROI of onboarding has been paid off). With the prevalence of job hopping and the "this resume does not match the applicant" issues, companies have become very risk adverse.
This is the comment chain to which I was responding:
csomar: Also people who can’t find a job tend to be more vocal than the rest.
fragmede: Are they perhaps more vocal because they have *a lot of time on their hands?* (emphasis mine)
me: 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?
--
So, what I was responding to was the implication that unemployed or under-employed means that you've got a whole lot of free time, which can absolutely, positively be the opposite of true.
If one had a job that previously made end's meet and now all they've got is gig work, they're probably filling ALL of their time just to survive, and are probably still coming up short. That's what I meant.
From my experience, it's grim at the moment for software developer jobs. I got laid off in August and it's been rough. I'm in my early 30s so I can't compare it to 2008, but I've been laid off before and I've never seen it this bad.
It's grim everywhere, for everything, all at once. I haven't been able to find work as a graphic designer, motion designer, web designer, web developer, software developer, and a large variety of retail jobs. Been on the job hunt since May, all I've been able to find is a part time position at The Home Depot.
I gotta tell you man, if you can find someone in charge at the backend of the Home Depot and let them hire you as a systems uptime troubleshooter you would easily make any salary you could name for them tenfold.
I at at a Home Depot like 10 times a week and let me tell you, they have a major systems problem that is making their operations look like a joke
Funny you mention, I'm actually working on that, too. There's an internal career portal with a large variety of backend jobs. No interviews, follow-ups, or anything yet.
>you would easily make any salary you could name for them tenfold.
>I at at a Home Depot like 10 times a week
And yet you still go to Home Depot, so from their perspective it's not an existential issue. Probably the biggest thing companies have learned recently is that they don't need 99.99% uptime, people will accept degraded performance because "that's just how technology works".
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.
Home Depot is a chain, so the backend is probably being handled from some R&D center somewhere. Your maneuvering area at the local home depot is probably pretty slim.
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.
These things tend to corellate :)
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.
~~~Problems on purpose because they don't spend the time to fix it IE not going to hire anyone to fix shit because they still make billions this broken way~~~~
I wonder if it has anything to do with all of the 10-200% taxes we've levied on random things.
I don't know if it's as bad, but it's bad in Canada and Germany too. The whole world is doing pretty bad, it seems.
Offshoring (India + LATAM) with a side of h1b.
Offshoring is by far the biggest culprit. Plenty of Jr/Mid roles hiring…but not US based.
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.
>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.
Yes. But sadly, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
And I feel there's going to be a huge storm to survive first. I imagine many may not even make it to the next shift.
It’s been a thing, but Covid and remote work took away any possible argument to no offshore everything ASAP.
As always, free markets are a chaotic system of creative destruction.
> Then Musk bought Twitter, laid off a bunch of folks, and things kept running.
I'm not sure you can give credit to Musk here. Buying a company and cutting all R&D to "juice" profits isn't his invention. Twitter is really around still in spite of his efforts as opposed to because of them; other CEOs might be doing layoffs but they're also not going out doing sieg heils. As well as he really fired them for fealty reasons and not economic ones.
It should be very telling that Grok came out of X.ai and not X. Ultimately, Musk did have to reverse some of the layoffs although with a bit of slight of hand so that Twitter could release any sort of new products.
It's not "his" thing, but he and a few early layoffs certainly made it trendy to do so. It's a small club, so seeing any "members" take any action is a sign they should follow suit.
This started before the tariffs, so no direct link. Interest rates are more to blame.
Construction, trades, and basically physical-world stuff that AI cannot do are still hiring.
People will roll out the trades whenever employment is mentioned, but do you have tradies in your family? Do you have friends who are tradies? It's not easy to get in, it takes a long time to make journeyman, and work can have seriously spotty periods no matter who you are. Fact of the matter is, it's not really an alternative to anything except other types of bluecollar work.
Construction, trades e. t. c. will have not many customers with other professions facing unemployment so it's not a safe bet either.
Believe it or not, I've been in construction/remodeling for 35 years. We currently have 3 home remodels going on at the moment with more down the road. I've never experienced a slow down. Even during COVID.
I'm not your typical HN member I don't think. I've been a computer nerd since I was 14 years old. I come here to stimulate my inner nerd.
> I've never experienced a slow down
You didn’t experience a slowdown at the height of the recession circa 2008?
being in construction for 35 years must mean they're already in the place that does the layoffs (instead of being laid off) by the time things get bad. You can easily say things don't slow down when you're divorced from the increasingly strained workers with less hours and benefits doing the construction.
Homeowners are often rich and older and isolated from recessions.
Nope. Things still break and need repaired no matter how the housing market is.
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.
When I was a sophomore in high school, I worked part time for my neighbor who was a master electrician. I learned the basics with him. My parents divorced when I was 17 and we were forced to move away. My mother was an assistant manager at the apartments we lived at. I turned 18 and just so happened the complex she worked at was hiring someone to do make readies, (painting and repairs on vacant units before new move-ins).
The management company my mother and I worked for sent me to various classes over the next several years (electrical, plumbing, HVAC and pool maintenance) and my supervisor was an old HVAC tech. I learned a ton from him. By the time I was 22 or so, I was promoted to maintenance director.
I got bored with apartments and wanted more. I started doing side work and met a lady that owned lots of rental property. That opened doors and she introduced me to other investors. Eventually, I was able to leave the apartment industry and do my own thing. It just kind of blew up from there.
As far as your construction related ideas, just put yourself out there. Meet people in the industry. Go to local industry related events. See if the city you live in has real estate investor clubs. DFW has a few and it's a great opportunity to meet people. This is also a great way to pick up work. Rent houses are always needing things repaired or replaced.
I know Mueller metal buildings is always looking for sales people. They were even looking for an IT person not too long ago too. In the rural area of Texas I'm in, we finish out lots of them and seem to becoming more and more popular in recent years.
The problem is, for construction, trades and what remains of agriculture the competition is brutal. It's a low-skill job in terms of prior required education which means there is a looooot of people without degrees flooding into that market already, and then comes immigration that's further driving the wages down because (again) it's work that doesn't require much education or language skills.
I've done a stint in construction (I think y'all call it "civil engineering", aka digging trenches and moving soil) myself, it was rare to find Germans - most of my colleagues came from Eastern Europe.
Yea! Start over my career, work way longer and harder hours, and make 1/3 of what I currently do! Sounds great!
Same story here. I work in games so it's always been boom or bust. It's real bad now.
- out of college it took 3 months to find work. It sucked, took over 100 apps, but I found a nice project.
- after that project ended, 3 more months (but less stressful because I had more than one role I was interviewing with).
- Then layoffs, another 3 months in 2022 where it was very competitive (I was in at least 4-5 interview pipelines before my first choice accepted my offer).
- Then that studio quickly shuttered and I haven't found anything full time in 2.5 years. Freelancing kept me up until that wasn't enough, and then I found some non-tech part time work.
working harder than ever with 2 jobs + more portfolio work to prepare for interviews despite having 9 years of experience now. This feels worse than the horror stories I'd hear when finding my first job.
Game dev acquaintances here in Belgium and back in Turkey say it's never been so bad. Studios aren't shutting down but also not hiring over here. Your industry is not having a good time…
I can hire you if you decent and don’t expect high salary ports-spatial5c@icloud.com
I became a USPS mail carrier instead.
Certainly less pay but I love being outside and walking.
And no Jira, changing the color of that button, or steeping myself in Frank’s eldritch horror code.
>No Jira
If I was trying to attract intelligent applicants looking for work outside of software engineering, that would be in the headline.
Tried that here in EU - no chance so far: Even things I could do easily like office administration/management or whatever projectmanagement - no luck.
As someone who is currently delivering Amazon packages with their own vehicle (Amazon Flex), what’s the process like to become a mail carrier? The miles are starting to take a toll on my car, so delivering for USPS is tempting for me…
> And no Jira
Not officially, but once you remove the skills required for the tasks, it's not all that different.
My wife and I have a running joke about her giving up accounting and working for USPS instead. Some days I think she’s serious.
Are they even hiring?
I would definitely try this if the vehicles in Phoenix ran cleaner. The old ones have such bad smelling exhaust and you are always breathing it because of the semi-open cab.
electric vehicles are on the way! no clue when Phoenix will get them though
Yeah but isn't the pay shit? like making 1/3th is not a win in my books.
I have hella money.
It is all due to outsourcing. AI/H1B isn't taking that much job. Unless government put penalties on outsourcing market isn't going to improve.
I'm seeing like 80% of software dev applications at my company are H1B/OPT, like thousands of candidates - and they're getting hired just because of the sheer numbers they drown everyone else out. So yes, they are 100% taking jobs. A lot of them. I can't comprehend how there are so many.
Maybe there is some pool of candidates that applies to all jobs due to automation making the numbers scewed?
The market is K shaped.
The peope will wealth are doing well, the rest of the market is not.
There are only so many apps and goods that can be made for rich people/small subset of consumers.
I bet you will find that people working on investment ideas and finance tools which focus on wealth accumulation will be hiring.
yep. Trump added tariffs on physical goods, but there are no taxes on service imports.
Section 174's 15 years amortization rule on foreign R&D is kind of an indirect tax.
Overseas labor spend their salary overseas and pay no US taxes. still not the samething.
There was talk of it. I believe the H.I.R.E. Act that’s been proposed is supposed to add a 25% fee to outsourcing overseas.
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.
Wait until you hear what he did to h1b program!
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.
My pet theory is that we are experiencing stagflation, but only people >70 years old have ever really experienced it before, so most people are just scratching their heads wondering how it’s possible that stocks keep going up (inflation) while jobs are disappearing (stagnation). I am most definitely not an economist, nor am I qualified to play one on tv.
> My pet theory is that we are experiencing stagflation, but only people >70 years old have ever really experienced it before, so most people are just scratching their heads wondering how it’s possible that stocks keep going up (inflation) while jobs are disappearing (stagnation).
We do not seem to be technically experiencing stagflation,ir really either half of it, on a national scale, as we appear to still be in a weak aggregate economic expansion and inflation, while higher than the 2% target, is fairly mild at around a 3% annualized rate [0], and, in any case, stocks going up is not inflation (unqualified inflation, which is the inflation part of stagflation, in consumer price inflation, not asset value inflation.)
OTOH, we are in a very weak economy especially outside of the leading AI firms, and there are quite likely both wide regions and wide sectors of the economy which, considered alone, would be in recession, and while inflation is fairly mild, it is high for the last couple decades and being in near-recession conditions. So, for a lot of people, the experience is a something like stagflation (and there are lots of signs that the economic slowdown will continue alongside rising inflation.)
[0] though as economic statistics are only available after the fact, either of these could have changed, but the real defining period for “stagflation” in the US is the 1973-1975 recession, years which saw a minimum of 6.2% inflation (the term was actually coined in the UK for conditions which saw a massive drop in GDP growth rate, fron 5.7% annually to 2.1% in successive years, but not an actual recession, alongside 4.8% inflation.)
>we are in a very weak economy especially outside of the leading AI firms
Isn't that part of the cause? It sucks up so much investment, there's nothing left for anything else. Or at least nothing without such perceived upside.
Either they pull it off and you're replaced by AGI, or they fail to pull it off and you lose your job to the resulting economic implosion.
My theory is that all money which could have been invested else where went to AI. It can end up either in investments paying off which will result in AI investors becoming even more rich (poor don't invest in the 1st place) and the rest of society poor or investments will have no returns and it will be wealth destruction on a grand scale and everyone will come poorer afterwards.
>only people >70 years old have ever really experienced it before,
Part of the observations from the HN reader on the current situation in Finland (believe everything he says, "canary" of Europe?):
>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.
In the USA this was one of the exact "unexpected" developments in the Nixon Recession that was like no-one had seen since the Great Depression. Except that depression there were not yet enough college grads in existence to contribute as a major statistic.
By the mid-70's I'll never forget the crowds vying for a single job opening at a gas station. Pumping gas and cleaning windshields when most stations had only converted half their pumps to self-service. Some with advanced degrees, it was not pretty. These were always minimum-wage jobs too, like supermarkets and fast-food.
When I started working there was a chemical plant within 25 miles where I could have gotten a job easily if I had graduated a few years earlier. Founded in the 1950's by one of my professors, it was actually pretty advanced. The placement office said they hadn't seen an opening in over a year. I was lucky to get a job at an appliance dealer because he liked my ability to program, but he never got a computer the whole time. Otherwise I wouldn't have got noticed, but the job was to prep merchandise for delivery so I was in the warehouse installing a lot of icemakers and doing minor repairs, plus rode along with a service operator one or two days a week to help when it was commercial refrigeration. Which I was learning, but also learned that I was kind of replacing an experienced repairman because they had let too many people go when things first got bad.
About a year later things got worse and he had to kick out the new people and we were gone.
I then began to get unemployment and the need had gotten so great that it must have been the first computerized institutional job boards for that reason. Slim pickings doesn't describe it. But you had to check in every week and apply to whatever you may be qualified for. I had gotten a cheap car (was riding bike to the appliance co) and was selling fruits and vegetables when a job came up at the plant. Not in a lab but out on the large reactor areas working with chemicals and taking readings. The posting had been badly mangled by the typist and it was not obvious it was a chemical job. You could still tell it was technical though. There were over a hundred applicants anyway, and not a realistic chance at all.
Months later I got a lead from my uncle that a lumber company near him needed somebody full time. This was about 35 miles away. All they would do is take my application without getting to talk to anybody, so it took longer to drive there. Still there were about a dozen people applying while I was there so it must have been hundreds of applications overall too.
Now I was already wearing a tie so I went back to the chemical plant and what really made the difference was that there were no new job openings so that time I was the only one showing up in a while. There was only one office building outside the gate, the manager was in and came up to see me but said right away they had no openings. He invited me for a quick tour of the labs and plant anyway, it was good getting inside the gate but like everybody else it was just optimism in the face of declining prosperity.
Surprisingly, he called me back a few days later and offered a part-time job, 4 days a week. He had talked to my professor, and I was a good student. I started out doing a lot of different things for different people, mainly for the analytical lab. In less than a year, they had me come in 5 days a few times when it got heavy and months later I was full-time.
I still wasn't getting twice the minimum wage, but I was so lucky.
After that I only sold produce on the weekends, and only seasonal things I picked myself like avocados and blueberries.
We’re hiring software engineers, full stack (frontend leaning). Email me at gyani at tabtabtab dot ai if you are in London and looking for onsite roles.
I don’t know, I’m hiring and the candidates so far have not been impressive.
Maybe that is restricted to my area / region but I got one am confused.
That signifies that your company is not appealing to impressive candidates for some reason or another. Companies that offer good pay, some other great benefits in the place of good pay, or kind of okay pay but very interesting work have no trouble getting people, especially in today's market.
That goes against the idea that impressive candidates have a difficulty finding a job.
If you're a stellar applicant, you can still get ghosted by simply having your CV at the bottom on the pile.
996 - it's a global marketplace of talent and very few in America are willing to work 996. If you are, you either are the founder type or young and unshackled.
I worked with what are effectively 996ers in software, they largely drag on projects because they value neither their own time nor anyone else's.
Ftfa (the part I could read) “ growth is buoyed by an exuberant stockmarket and artificial-intelligence investment, while ordinary Americans languish”
Black Friday sales set records and it not even cyber Monday. If Americans are languishing then shouldn’t holiday spending be down?
I postponed all of my CPG and miscellaneous purchases (think AA batteries, socks, winter pants, skin lotion, body wash, etc.) until Black Friday "sales". I also stocked up on stuff like Ramen. I did NOT buy anything special for myself (e.g., I really wanted Switch 2, but I think it's too overpriced and decided not to pull the trigger).
I'd not be surprised if a good number of people did the same. PLUS, the prices rose by quite a bit between the start of the year and now. So we need to see if this increase is sales match up to inflation (which, unfortunately, would be more difficult to rely on knowing that that metric has become politicized.)
Same here. My big purchase for Black Friday last year was an OLED TV.
This year was prescription glasses.
bf related, I bought: 1) trail mix 2) licorice 3) books on diy house / carpentry
not bf related but happened this week: 1) cv axles for my car ~500 and will install myself
i am employed and just make it into 6 figures $110k, which apparently is poverty level now if you have a few dependents. i consider myself fortunate.
fwiw the Tokyo noodle packs' price actually dropped, if instant noodles is one of your staples.
Black Friday did not set records. Bloomberg stated that it was up 4.1%, but that was not inflation adjusted. So it was just slightly higher than flat.
Not necessarily a bad thing…but not great either.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-29/black-fri...
“Slightly higher than flat” is still a new record.
"The best iphone launched yet" feelings
Haha, Black Friday sets record by being the worst discounts ever.
You also have to adjust such things for population, which was up about .6% in August vs. last August, the latest data we have.
Last report I saw said US population was set to drop this year - first time in 250 years. With our demographic boomer bubble, continually dropping fertility, and anti-immigration stance, the trend is likely to continue.
With the growth we already had in 2025 you'd have to nuke LA to end the year with a decline.
https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2025/0...
Most population growth was due to immigration for a while, and immigration (for obvious reasons in 2025) is way, way down.
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-us-population-could-shri...
what's your report?
>you'd have to nuke LA
Let's not give this administration ideas, please.
Do you normally get your demographic statistics from Brookings and AEI? My reference is to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/POPTHM its source being https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2025-09/pi0825.pdf
Doesn't black Friday kind of suck now and for the last few years? There's sales all of the time, and there's all those open secrets about black Friday skus now.
Consumers in the top 10% of the income distribution accounted for 49.2% of total spending, per Bloomberg. If anything, in my opinion, this strengthens the k-shaped economic growth stat that the article mentions.
Yup, only the rich are powering this economy now. That bodes poorly for the country’s stability long term.
Top 10% is a household making more than $191k so a couple making $95k each.
Rich indeed!
Generally speaking, the rich is anyone who makes slightly more than you.
It's like the saying about alcoholics - "an alcoholic is anyone who drinks 1 more drink than you".
can also look at it as an opportunity to gather friends and start a small drywall company. Those are in demand, for example. The rich are building more buildings than ever. If you live in the bay area, you can very well see 300k / year if you keep yourself busy.
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!
>Consumers in the top 10% of the income distribution accounted for 49.2% of total spending, per Bloomberg.
What was the historical trend? Otherwise you can't draw much from just "49.2%" alone, aside from a vague sense that stuff should be fairer.
> What was the historical trend?
No, it is not normal for 10% of the coountry to power half the spending. Just think about that statistic for a second. Spending includes groceries, services, and other continual needs. A few private jets can't outspend millions of people buying food.
But here's your chart: https://preview.redd.it/2pcvmm0u3jpf1.png?width=798&auto=web...
Black friday is a datapoint. But maybe people are deferring purchases to these sale periods. What proportion of goods were luxury vs. not.
Also poor people can get into debt they are still poor. Maybe they can afford a nintendo switch but not afford to raise a family.
The only things I bought on Black Friday were things I would normally have bought but just waited a few weeks/months to get.
Same among people I know. My MIL needed to replace some kitchen appliances and waited for BF sales.
Deferring sales is one datapoint. But setting records is another datapoint and counter to deferring IMO.
Edit there is talk below of inflation adjusted numbers being high but meh
K shaped economy with increasing expenditure means the wealthier increase their spending as a portion of the economy and at an absolute level. It is not interpreted as the polity doing well - if anything, it is cause for concern.
The wealthy don't buy more crap on black Friday.
Inequality is very visible in terms of what sort of consumption occurs. Gotta look at the qualitatives.
Sure they do. And during the holiday season too.
Wealthy people love feeling like they are getting a deal.
I don't know if it is just the wealthy either.
The retired middle class boomers I know are completely outside the business cycle.
While I don't think they have enough to really be considered wealthy, they have no mortgage payment, a social security check, a pension and most have a 401k.
The business cycle will not change their spending one bit.
It may, a bit. If the 401k is in the stock market, and the stock market is down, their total visible money is down. That tends to decrease enthusiasm for spending.
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.
That's not a plan, it's a suicide note with extra steps.
> That's not a plan, it's a suicide note with extra steps.
Being an aging human is a suicide note. The extra steps are the entire point of retirement.
Shouldn’t every year be a record considering population growth and inflation?
You could look at inflation adjusted per-capita sales, of course.
Ya, when I ask Gemini:
While there isn't a definitive inflation-adjusted per-capita number for 2025, recent data indicates that overall sales growth was outpaced by inflation, meaning consumers likely bought fewer items. Total Black Friday spending was up, but the average number of items purchased declined. For instance, Salesforce reported total spending was up 3% but order volume was down 2%, with average selling prices climbing 7%.
...
Per-capita sales: The increase in spending is largely driven by higher prices, meaning the actual volume of goods purchased per person likely decreased compared to the previous year, even with higher total spending, says The New York Times.
The rise in Black Friday sales is misleading because the sales reflect inflation rather than increased consumer demand.
I think it is more that a greater number of products were heavily marketed by a greater number of companies. My social feeds were flooded with single-product companies and online-only companies aggressively selling all kinds of gear and gadgets. Travel pillows (like 5 different brands), ski socks, luggage, exercise equipment, etc etc. Not gonna lie, I bought some stuff I likely would not have otherwise!
the country is growing so it will commonly "set records". We need to look at it in the context of previous years. Before I went and checked the stats I expected to see instore shopping to be down since americans are poorer than previous years and online shopping to be up since demand is growing and online caters to a worldwide audience.
Checking the stats online growth is up and on par with previous years creating that record breaking stat. Instore numbers arent out yet but some figures are claiming less foot traffic in stores compared with previous years. So i'd say to early to really call if spending was down(compared with expectations)
> Ftfa (the part I could read) [...]
A few observations:
1. I saw the same headline - the article stated that there were record SEASON sales, not Black Friday sales. The headline did not match the content of the article. 2. Record revenue, not necessarily record units sold. To be expected with inflation. 3. Savvy online shoppers may be bundling purchases to reduce shipping costs. Waiting for a seasonal sale to buy holiday gifts as well as detergent, snacks and underwear may be quite prudent.
Finally, increased sales revenue does not necessarily equate to more jobs. It can, but by no means does it have to.
Others have pointed out the brackets really buying, but I'd also argue that people deferring their purchases to a period of sales is generally not a good thing.
Not necessarily. Average income can be up substantially at the same time that median income remains flat or even declines. This means that it is possible for spending by wealthier Americans to make up for sales lost from the unemployed middle class and poor.
>Ftfa (the part I could read)
You did in fact not rtfm?
>Black Friday sales set records and it not even cyber Monday.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/29/business/black-friday-us-econ...
I don't know where you're seeing "record numbers". 2024 wasn't a great year and you can argue spending was flat from that after inflation. I think the more relevant factor is "who" is spending the money in such a k-shaped economy. .
K-shaped economy is the buzz word these days
i remember when it was the buzzword in q3 2020 too....
Yes it’s been a thing for a while
The volume is down. What actually increased is the $$ value.
Black Friday has become Cyber Monday as well. Everyone has a phone, nobody is waiting to log on to their PC at work to do some online shopping.
The holiday season on the whole is a much better indicator, not just one single day. And even then, spending needs to be checked against debt incurred.
Black Friday started weeks before the actual day in order to increase the spending. It’s not an apples to apples comparison to prior years.
As a marketing term yes but the Bloomberg analysis is only looking at the actual single day following Thanksgiving.
I didn't buy shit on purpose this weekend, like every year and like most weekends. Some people do that. I wish more would.
Don’t underestimate credit cards and consumerism.
The market is diverging with people who are in the upper echelons having money to spend and everyone else having nothing.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/economy/2025/11/25/us-e...
The K shaped economy.
Pop growth of ca .5 pct and inflation delivered said record
Not necessarily. Lots of explanations:
(1) People wait for when they perceive they'll get the best deals to do their shopping. (2) K-shaped economy (data is already bearing this out btw): Spending from the wealthy is driving consumption figures vs. the bulk of the population (3) Anxiety about rising prices cause people to purchase now vs. later. See for example RAM prices.
One of the truly great things about American toxic individualism is that it need not be constrained by rationality; American capitalism finds ways around that. Need to Christmas shop for everyone in your family but don't have enough actual income? Simply go into massive credit card debt! You're probably pre-approved for several cards already; check for our flyer!
.
Also, shocking to see no mention of the investment thesis, let alone critique of it.
Thanks for the link.
What do you mean by the "investment thesis"? Would you clarify?
The investment thesis in AI is that the decline in consumer spending in the other sectors of the economy won't matter when the consumers cease to be a significant participant in the economy in the near term: that moving investment away from the activity in agriculture, transportation, goods and services, etc., is rational because those sectors are soon to be obsolete when their customers buying power and long term capacity to produce buying power is sucked away.
Think of the promise of AGI as a promise of billions of tireless immigrants with PhDs who outcompete the other ethnicities in the labor market. It's the same reason people stopped investing in Detroit-based things years ahead of the industry pullout.
I’m not sure I follow. So, are you saying that wealth will become completely concentrated at the top and the rest of us are obsolete, out of work and broke?
That seems unlikely. What is the point of an economy if there is no one who is actually able to consume?
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 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.
No, we need entertainment, potato chips, some drugs and the mandated degree of access to contraceptives. I'm sure OpenAI can calculate the optimal levels of each.
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
Investment thesis?
The author must have written the headline as a legitimate question to the audience because they certainly did not make much effort to answer it in the article.
Betteridge’s law!
> Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
It seems we are nearing the bottom of the business cycle. I lived through 2001 and 2008. Both were worse than now. It will get better.
How do we know this is the bottom?
You don’t know until unemployment and GDP numbers are released. Generally when the fed starts making successive rate cuts, the economy is doing poorly. Since 1953 10 out of 11 recessions happened when republicans held power. So maybe that is also why I think we have a little way to go before things get better. I’m not sure why that is and I don’t want to start a political debate. Things will get better. They always do.
Things do tend to get better, but the time scale can vary. It's hard to tell whether we're deep into a recession, or we're just starting to walk into a depression. You never really know which it is in the first year.
> Since 1953 10 out of 11 recessions happened when republicans held power
I used to think this was because the party that represents the ruling class didn't know what they were doing.
Now I think these economic collapses and ensuing fire sales are not accidents, they know exactly what they're doing.
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 ...
Just because recessions do happen, does not mean that its good to have recessions, not does it make them necessary. Popping bubbles can be contained and not blow up the entire system if we have proper regulations, for instance.
> 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.
This is honestly just horseshit. Both parties want to avoid recession, its just that one of them believes in established economic theories and is successful; while the other one is steeped in crackpot economics which have failed repeatedly.
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...
Yes if only the US still released those numbers...
it isn't, but the post-covid inflation and subsequent rates increase has caused something like a recession, just not everywhere at once - so you see sectors busting and coming back, but overall kinda-sorta chugging along economy.
now what happens if the rates won't go down much from here might just be everything slowing down all at once and then they'll drop the rates to 0 again, so it'll get better... two years later.
Until the bottom has passed, you can't know.
When AI finally crashes, the cycle will reset
No, because the only thing keeping the fed from lowering interest rates and juicing real estate and everything else is a strong labor market.
You have it backwards. Layoffs these days increase stock value because everyone is hedging that bad job numbers will force the feds to lower interest rates. Something Powell has hesitated to do in order to keep inflation in check.
It's a very screwed up incentive to be rewarded for breaking the system, but that's 2025 in a nutshell.
> Layoffs these days increase stock value because everyone is hedging that bad job numbers will force the feds to lower interest rates.
Layoffs generally cause stock prices to go up because of anticipated cost reduction/efficiency: https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwab046
If you have some source to make the case that layoff-stock price change is correlated for a different reason these days, it would be interesting to read it. But I doubt anything has changed
>If you have some source to make the case that layoff-stock price change is correlated for a different reason these days, it would be interesting to read it.
The phenomenon is pretty recent so there won't truly be any studies on it in a while. But look up "Jobless Boom". Here's a piece of what I'm talking about:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jobless-boom-ai-economy-labor-m...
>For much of 2025, the job market was described by economists as "no hire, no fire," meaning an environment where workers could count on job security even as hiring around the U.S. cooled. But conditions have changed, and the Federal Reserve cut its benchmark interest rate in both September and October, citing increasing risks to employment growth and with Fed Chair Jerome Powell noting that policymakers are closely watching layoff announcements by big employers.
personally, I think the AI efficiencies are a smokescreen, but the point of how this job contraction is forcing he fed's hands is hard to ignore after some 2 years of holding rates steady.
And the fact that everybody knows real inflation is still high.
How can inflation not be high in the US given increased tariffs, deportations and uncertainty
The fed has cut rates 5 times in the past 14 months
I hope so – how else am I going to find a great cofounder?!
Mostly kidding.
-Slides up to the bar-
Tell me more…
The Economist peddling doom n gloom IN THIS ECONOMY?
It’s interesting bc I still see mid level (7 yoe) developers getting jobs with no issues. Lots of dispersion of difficulty depending on speciality as well
Yes, smaller firms and startups are still hiring aggressively.
In which part of the world are you seeing this? In the bay area?
SF and NY
Could it be regional?
Its a little strange for the article to not mention how much of the "stock growth" and GDP growth is mostly due to unsustainable, large investments in Data centers. Its not clear if that will continue into 2026, and what will happen when it stops.
My personal prediction is that, barring some kind of insurrection/revolution, Congress will flip in 2026 and force POTUS to back down on tariff nonsense, which will finally un-paralyze businesses which will resume capital investments and hiring. 2026 itself might be really rough though, if the AI bubble pops.
There is still half an hour until the tank, plenty of time to sell..
This market is sick. =(
"We seem to have no clue, but we can get an article out of it anyway"--the Economist.
No.
Source: Betteridge's law of headlines
Bettridge’s Law of Bettridge’s Law: there will always be someone in the comments section mentioning Bettridge’s Law.
