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Unemployed office workers are having a harder time finding new jobs
- ggm 2y agohttps://archive.is/fF7fq https://archive.is/fF7fq
- CursedSilicon 2y agoI 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
- autobodie 2y agoHow can what you're saying be true if Elon Musk says we need more H1Bs because there is a labor shortage?
- IntelMiner 2y agoThere's a lack of dirt cheap highly educated labor. It dovetails nicely into their desire to slash education for Americans Once we deport all the "illegal" immigrants, the MAGA folk can pick fruit in Florida while the H1B's work at Amazon for pennies on the dollar I suppose
- likeabatterycar 2y ago[flagged]
- nrr 2y agoGeorgia HB 87 (2011) and its unintended consequences say otherwise. While the H-2A is indeed popular, there are still a staggering number of people working these jobs who are here illegally. https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-unintended-consequences-georgias-immigration-law-backfires/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-... https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/05/27/136718112/georgia-farmers-say-immigration-law-keeps-workers-away https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/05/27/136718112... https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/georgias-harsh-immigration-law-costs-millions-in-unharvested-crops/240774/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/georgia... https://www.politico.com/story/2011/06/ga-immigrant-crackdown-backfires-057551 https://www.politico.com/story/2011/06/ga-immigrant-crackdow... https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2013/jul/07/immigration-crackdown-2-years-later-georgia/ https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2013/jul/07/immigration-...
- orwin 2y agoIndeed, in my country, and despite scaremongering about boats, 95% of illegal immigrants are illegals because of visa overstay, and I'd bet the US numbers are around that.
- hipadev23 2y agoThere are a massive amount of overstays on H2A & H4 visas. They didn’t arrive here illegally, but their current status is very often illegal as they can’t switch jobs or extend beyond a season without a cumbersome renewal process, often which requires leaving the country for at least 3 months.
- exe34 2y agosounds like an early career Elon Musk.
- unsnap_biceps 2y agoTesla laid off 14,500 folks in April 2024 and then they received 2,405 H1Bs in 2024. "Tesla workers said that many employees let go were more senior engineers with higher compensation and they have been replaced with junior engineers from foreign countries at a lower pay." https://electrek.co/2024/12/30/tesla-replaced-laid-off-us-workers-with-foreign-workers-using-h-1b-visas-that-musk-want-to-increase/ https://electrek.co/2024/12/30/tesla-replaced-laid-off-us-wo... One of the biggest issues with H1Bs is the fact that it reduces the employee's ability to change jobs and thus reduces their bargaining power for wages and thus depresses the wages across the board over time. That seems to be the main driving force for Musk behind the bluster around labor shortages. I've worked with a few folks on H1Bs and they've all been paid significantly less than I have in the exact same role. Less base and less RSUs.
- UncleOxidant 2y agodid you forget to put a /s at the end of that?
- quantified 2y agoMaybe because Musk mixes a lot of BS into his sayings?
- dietr1ch 2y agowasn't this implied by him already? (/s)
- JeremyNT 2y agoI think we (tech workers) have seen this for a while. The tech bubble was real - surely we all noticed this at the time - and it stands to reason that a correction is well past due. But now, there are anecdotes of other sectors being hit as well. Note that all of this is "working as intended." The way the fed manages inflation generates unemployment to knock out high salary workers and keep wages down. The target unemployment rate is not zero.
- klipklop 2y agoIt’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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- echelon 2y agoIt feels like FAANG needs to employ lots of people so they don't all go out and build competing services. If skilled people are without work and their savings and lifestyle supports it, they should consider building startups.
- vineyardmike 2y agoThat’s what they did for years. I suspect there are some “nice” macroeconomic trends helping them avoid this. Like regulatory capture and the general regulatory fragmentation of the global tech sector. And that new AI tech is prohibitively expensive.
- klipklop 2y agoI agree, something has changed. Also good look any small business trying to buy Nvidia hardware to compete in the AI space. Best they can do is get gouged renting compute time.
- UncleOxidant 2y agoTrying to do more with less would be one strategy - coming up with more efficient inference that takes less compute and energy. This seems to be what's driving companies in China like Deepseek. Whether one could be profitable with this strategy is another story, probably the best to hope for would be getting bought by one of the FAANGs (if you were able to show good results).
- Mountain_Skies 2y agoGhost 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.
- j45 2y agoThat has some merit. At the same time falsifying skills or misrepresenting them should be just as bad.
- HighGoldstein 2y agoHow do you quantify skill falsification?
- j45 2y agoExaggeration A level of competency, recency or familiarity that is not accurate to what’s needed or communicated. As much as many job posts can be wish lists (no hire is perfect, every hire can be a compromise of how much of each skill a candidate has), understanding what you bring, what is needed, and where you can grow relative to the position and the work ahead can mean a lot. In some cases, a perfect candidate might mean limited time there or maybe three candidate gets bored.
- tjpnz 2y agoWithout the ghost job they're unable to prove due diligence locally. That's not just thievery but fraud.
- franktankbank 2y agoDue diligence is so fucking dumb though. Here's my understanding of how getting a GC works: 1) Company applies on behalf of employee. 2) Company advertises for employees job. 3) Company interviews local suitors 3a) If local suitor aces it do they get the would be immigrants job? No and also no GC for immigrant. 3b) No local suitor found then immigrant gets GC. Finding a local suitor is bad for everyone involved! H1B should die. Exceptional immigrants can come here and be an American after some determinant amount of time (not in a hundred plus year backlog or some nonsense). My problem is that I can't work with an underclass, their is no joining the cultures because we are pitted against each other.
- OutOfHere 2y agoIn 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.
- lumost 2y agoThis was great advice 15 years ago. Something has changed in the last two years. I can’t put my finger on it, but I’ve observed a trend where new hires have massively fraudulent experience on their resumes. Likewise an engineer who passed leetcode rounds suddenly doesn’t know what a variable is. At the very least, we have a problem with people using AI to game the job interview process.
- riskyingo 2y agoI currently work remotely and was talking to my wife that if I loose this job we will have to relocate, no more remote jobs, I don't want to play the rat race. I participated in hiring (reviewing people's exercices) and all are gaming the system, none could explain simple things in the tech challenge they put together, some are prepared to answer some questions but it takes minutes to realize this person didn't do any of that.
- bagels 2y agoI don't think most people are getting meaningful job offers by simply having an open profile on LinkedIn right now. This isn't 2021.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- thw09j9m 2y agoTech 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.
- normie3000 2y ago> HEAVILY leveraging LLMs (via Cursor) to keep engineer count and burn rate low Does this strategy work?
- csomar 2y agoI think it's going to blow up given the number of broken libraries and products out there. Management does not care until things really break. In 3-4 years, there will be a serious shortage of software developers and maintenance of the stack will be as expensive as ever.
- kmac_ 2y agoThis, plus in several years we will observe many MVPs generated (partially) by LLMs that will require fixing and further development. LLMs barely produce 1k lines of coherent code, riddled with bugs. Benchmarks are improving, but there is no breakthrough in handling real, large codebases. I have no idea about the future job market, but the quality of the "material" we work with will be quite poor.
- aurareturn 2y agoI don't think these companies are generating MVPs using LLMs. They're just using LLMs to assist in coding. A human reviewers is there. And in a few years, LLMs might be so good that they can fix mistakes by 2024 LLMs.
- kmac_ 2y agoTo clarify, LLMs will lower the entry barrier for non-programmers to test new ideas (which is good). Later, those successful projects will require development by professional developers. I suspect that many of these projects will have lower quality than regular proof-of-concept projects today.
- plutomeetsyou 2y agoI'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/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/gavinqu/
- uptownfunk 2y agoMy 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.
- j45 2y agoIt might be a lasting trend for employers to hold off as long as they can until the right candidate comes along to not affect the culture or other things. The cost and impact of a bad hire can be really bad.
- afpx 2y agoThe change was quite shocking. For 25 years, to get a new job I’d send out 5 resumes, get 4 interviews, and 3 offers. This time around, I sent 200+ resumes, got 2 interviews, and ghosted on both.
- franktankbank 2y agoI think employers are bracing for another employee sided market and trying to juice their hand as long as they have it. My belief is a lot of F500 companies are running on skeleton crew H1B which might be a crumbly foundation. They will neg-neg-neg until the clock runs out.
- klipklop 2y agoThey will just expand immigration visa programs (something Musk, who is in favor of such programs, says he will go to “war” over) or outsource. I don’t see any evidence for an employee favored job market. This is not 2020/21 anymore. The large corporations are firmly in power in tech.
- lmaoguy 2y agoThe answer is obviously more H1B’s.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- j45 2y agoH1B's are guaranteed workforce for a number of years with low turnover. I was thinking about it the other day, but it may be it's own form of japanese salaryman, except its for positions not many would work in that arrangement. Maybe it helps companies that couldn't be sustainable, be that way (artificially).
- geor9e 2y agoIt'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.
- linotype 2y agoIt’s because they’re working those people to death and don’t want them to leave. Better to pay one person $225k per year than two people $150k per year.
- jerlam 2y agoAlternatively, employees aren't fungible cogs, and experience in the specific company, with their specific technologies and management culture, counts more than new hires who need guidance. It could be an extreme reaction to the large number of new hires in the 2022 era.
- justinator 2y agoIt'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.
- sakopov 2y agoI 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.
- jiveturkey 2y agoThe 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.
- jhot 2y agoThe startup I was at previously laid most people off in early 2021. I spent 2 days applying to a bunch of jobs that seemed interesting and spent the following 3 weeks with a pretty full schedule of interviews. Received several offers and was able to pick my favorite. I have been feeling out the market the last couple months, applying mainly for jobs that match my exact experience, and have had exactly 1 phone screen. In the past I have been told I interview very well and haven't received many rejections after getting to talk to a person. But things are definitely different now. If current job has to do big layoffs, which feels like it could happen in the next year or two, it's going to be rough.
- anal_reactor 2y ago1. 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.
- franktankbank 2y ago> 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. They had to be brain-dead to only consider that as an option now. What was keeping them from figuring it out sometime post-Reagan?
- nh23423fefe 2y agoFalse moralizing arguments only have to feel true for a split second until you discard the stream of thought.
- whatever1 2y agoThere 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.
- bsder 2y agoSet up a job fair so applicants can show up face to face? Take physical resumes at your physical office? Sponsor your local meetups and user groups?
- whatever1 2y agoAll of these are useful, but equally time consuming. So the candidate experience will still be degraded (spending 1 year interviewing while unemployed)
- bsder 2y agoI don't concur that the experience would be degraded for either side. The pool is going to be much smaller and faster to wade through for both sides. And, once you wade through it, you actually have a match that is much more likely for both sides. Look, this is the exact same problem as online dating and has all the same failure modes. You break the failure modes in exactly the same ways. People have forgotten that in person was the way we used to do it. We had job fairs, companies would come to colleges in person, etc. It did work. It was just expensive from the point of view of the company. Companies gave in person up because online was cheaper. Well, it isn't cheaper anymore now that both employers and employees have pissed in the online well. Whoops.
- frenchman_in_ny 2y agoI'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.
- carlpeterson359 2y ago[dead]