from Hacker News

Unemployed office workers are having a harder time finding new jobs

by squirrel6 on 1/6/25, 3:46 AM with 89 comments

  • by ggm on 1/6/25, 4:26 AM

  • by klipklop on 1/6/25, 5:11 AM

    It’s been this way for at least 2 years.

    I suspect that WSJ held back such topics until after the election…

    The people I know that lose their job spend at least 1 year looking for a job. Usually at a significantly lower salary. With the current rate of inflation it’s a 1-2 punch that requires a big step down in lifestyle.

    I don’t really see these conditions changing until there is a AI bubble pop or something. Facebook is no longer trying to poach FANG general SWE’s so there is no more pricing pressure in the market. Their recruiting departments have gone dark and their staff was eliminated.

  • by CursedSilicon on 1/6/25, 4:57 AM

    I can definitely attest to this statistic. Got thrown overboard at my last job for not wanting to sign my name to things we weren't doing (no I'm not telling the IRS we encrypt our data at rest when we don't!)

    Finally got brought on a week ago at a PC repair shop of all things. It's not glamorous but it's the only "IT related" thing I could find. In Seattle of all places!

    The FAANG's doing their massive layoffs caused an absolute knock-on effect downstream across the entire corporate world ("well if Amazon thinks they should, we should too!") and everything I apply for now LinkedIn gleefully tells me there were "over 500 applicants" already

    Even the public sector seems to be impossible to get into. Despite the requirement of US citizenship and the incoming administration (along with Elon's threats) even getting an interview in that sector is a challenge now

  • by uptownfunk on 1/6/25, 6:01 AM

    My observations for the last two years:

    Employers are hyper hyper selective

    There are a lot a lot of fake job postings

    The bar has gone way way up

    It is in general very difficult and gruelling to get a job

    If engineering roles are hard to find, product is 10-100x worse

    If you have a job, be thankful, don't rock the ship

    OBVIOUSLY there will be statements to the contrary, but this is really more in the spirit of - if you're having a hard time out there, you are not alone, and at least one person out there (who has been working for the last 10 years or so) finds it much much harder. I would say reminscent closer to 2014-2015 than anything like 2020-2021.

  • by justinator on 1/6/25, 6:43 AM

    It's just a whole lot harder to find good employment now. And if you are employed, it's just difficult to understand the pain it is to get re-employed.

    Read the story about the guy who used to sell a bag of dicks and made $100k in like 10 days for years ago. That wasn't just a lightning in a bottle idea, that's because normal people had $20 to send anonymous bags of dicks to each other for funsies. I see those people at the food bank, now.

  • by jiveturkey on 1/6/25, 7:13 AM

    The high end of tech work certainly feels more extreme than what this news report is discussing, which says it's now 6 months from 5 months during the most recent boom. To add only 1 month from the boom time doesn't jive with my own experience.

    Prior to 2022 I was advance quitting if a job wasn't good enough, didn't treat me (workers in general) right, etc. Now, I expect a year long search if I am forced out.

  • by thw09j9m on 1/6/25, 5:56 AM

    Tech market is rough. I think BigTech currently thinks that there's a better ROI spending $300k on compute (training an LLM) than $300k on an employee. All the startups I've interviewed with are HEAVILY leveraging LLMs (via Cursor) to keep engineer count and burn rate low.

  • by sakopov on 1/6/25, 7:08 AM

    I got my first programming job in 2008, seemingly right before the wave of hiring freezes. I dodged the bullet back then, but I wish I could compare that time to the past two years. That said, it feels very rough out there. Just last week, one of my LinkedIn connections shared a Venmo link, asking for help to pay bills after being laid off, struggling to find another job, and running out of savings. Be thankful if you have a job.

  • by plutomeetsyou on 1/6/25, 5:57 AM

    I've been in the same boat for the past 4 months since graduating from a master's program and I have friends that has been laid off for almost 10 months. WSJ hits close to home today: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gavinqu/

  • by geor9e on 1/6/25, 6:38 AM

    It's kind of odd that the tech sector has so many talented people desperate for any job, yet companies aren't taking them on. Those same companies continue to pay their existing staff such exorbitantly high compensation. You'd think things would equalize out a bit as companies take advantage of this situation to get cheaper talent.

  • by Mountain_Skies on 1/6/25, 5:25 AM

    Ghost jobs doesn't help things any. Posting fake jobs should be considered wage theft. Multiply the number of applications for a fake job by the average time to apply and then by the hourly rate (or salaried rate calculated down to the hour). Charge those responsible for theft of that figure, which easily will push it into felony territory. Bet the ghost job phenomenon disappears overnight.

  • by frenchman_in_ny on 1/6/25, 4:31 PM

    I've been unemployed from the finance world for ~18 months now. I've applied to over 1000 jobs (per my LinkedIn), though lots of those jobs just seem to be evergreen reposts on LinkedIn & not actual jobs. It's absolutely demoralizing.

  • by lmaoguy on 1/6/25, 6:21 AM

    The answer is obviously more H1B’s.

  • by anal_reactor on 1/6/25, 9:02 AM

    1. The field got oversaturated. Everyone signed up for coding classes, not everyone has graduated from coding classes.

    2. Lack of information transparency: everyone involved has huge incentives to lie, so it's extremely difficult for a company to say "we are a good company wanting to hire a good dev" and someone to respond "I am a good dev looking for a good job". Same problem as dating.

    3. Moving jobs to cheaper countries: the flipside of work-from-home is having companies realize that they don't need to have butts in chairs is San Francisco, they can have butts in chairs in India, 75% of performance for half the price.

    This is probably going to be the new normal until:

    1. The IT education scales down and juniors give up, so that there's less competition.

    2. Someone comes up with a interviewing process that is significantly more difficult to game.

    3. The society at large switches back from "just essentials only" to "one bag of glitter poop please" so that lots of silly businesses can stay afloat, at least for some time.

  • by whatever1 on 1/6/25, 12:01 PM

    There is much more noise in the market.

    Positions that we typically could close in 1-3 months now take 3-6 if we do not lower our hiring bar.

    We literally are using the same interview playbook as we did in the past. For some reason, the candidates in the pipeline have huge variance.

    It seems that a lot of people pivoted their career in Covid leading to this mess.

  • by OutOfHere on 1/6/25, 5:43 AM

    In our industry, they key to getting a job is simple:

    1. Work on two meaningful projects using the tech you want a job in. Update your resume with the work that was done, without embellishment.

    2. Open your profile on LinkedIn. Close it when you get five interviews. Learn from each failing interview.