Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHaDrM8EgYg

Because it's easy to find a job. It's much more hard to find a good job.

Also, how many of the unemployed are any good? I know people who are unemployed. I don't know any I would want on my team.

And while on paper a few are theoretically great (20+ years experience as a software engineer), they don't want to learn React or newer versions of Java.

> Also, how many of the unemployed are any good?

Do you understand what a layoff is? The market is flooded with great developers who got let go by CEO's and managers who are either incompetent or negligent.

The market is flooded with Product Managers and other tech-adjacent people who were the primary focus of the layoffs.

these type of comments are common until it happens to you

Total BS!

People are willing to learn anything and everything to land and keep a job. The problem is the HR/Recruiting process using buzzwords/jargons/fads to screen applicants in a all or nothing manner.

This... Especially recruits who don't understand what they're looking for... You have to sell through the recruiter, then the amount manager before anyone with a clue sees your resume.

And those first two states you pretty much need to be as arrogant as possible... If you're honest and say you're a 7 at something, they drop you for not being a 9... May as well lie.

And by 7 vs 9, to me a 9 or 10 is someone who literally someone who works on the language or platform... I've used JS since 1996 and know it far better than most, I still don't feel comfortable calling myself a 10 with it...

I've had similar experiences. One recruiter within the company said they had an offer ready for me and then asked about my React experience at the last second. I was completely honest that I was still getting up to speed on React but had used similar frameworks and done front-end since the late 90s. I got ghosted.

I condone cheating on interviews. Don’t lie on your resume, but check GlassDoor for interview reviews- more often than not you see exactly what they’re going to ask you about. One interview I saw they ask candidates about SOLID principles and the three dependency injection lifetimes in C#. I made sure I had those on lockdown (and by lockdown I mean up on my computer screen during the phone call).

It’s absurd that you’re expected to know things like SOLID like we say a pledge of allegiance every morning about it… I, like most, follow SOLID (more or less) without realizing it.

Solid as a religion bugs me... Not as much as "Clean Code" patterns in the .Net space. You usually don't need half the level of separation in practice especially for micro services. Write similar code. Have classes that represent the concern from a feature perspective instead of a technology perspective. Etc.

I'm looking right now with 20+ years of experience and recent with .Net/C# through v6 and React v16.

That said I'm trying to stay less than a 15% pay cut. There are jobs... And I'm about to go ahead and take the 25% pay cut a lot of the jobs are at.

But it still sucks. I'm applying and seeing literally over a hundred others have applied to most things.

I'm also so sick of boilerplate rejection emails. If I haven't spoken to a human, I'd rather not get any email at this point.

It's probably easier to lay off people (and hire cheaper replacements if needed) than to cut their pay. The tech industry seems to have decided to do this.

10 YOE with C# and React being the bulk of it. My company canned most of the IT department/engineers in August after getting hacked a bunch the last couple of years. I haven’t seriously started looking until January, but wow.

I posted on that “who’s looking?” thread here on HN I’d say a month or so ago, had one guy reach out for a job working with WPF. I’m guessing if that weren’t enough to turn me off, the pay would’ve been.

I will say the best-paying SWE jobs are never going to be with C#.

I pulled out with one company before getting a final offer, but they said it’d be around $130-140k and it’s mundane C#/React/MSSQL which I’m actually trying to get away from. I don’t know if it’s still the case today, but 2 years ago there were many companies who’d hire you despite having 0 experience with their language (usually something newer like Go).

I’ll just keep on with house projects and reading and relaxing for a while longer. It’s been 5 months and I still don’t need the money. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up taking a pay cut.

I'd like to take more time, but medical bills, home and car repairs are into things a lot. Think I may have found a job today, starting in a few weeks though. It's been a rough 5 weeks though.

Many people I know, despite commanding six-figure salaries, are not able to really take a hiatus from work. Imagine if you had kids. If we were in just about any other first-world country, there would be a safety net for the unemployed. The system we have now is not a safety net- it's designed to be as difficult to apply for as possible, and in states like Florida, unemployment is $275/week, capped at around $3k. $275/week doesn't even pay my mortgage.

Fair enough on that... My youngest is 21 now. I tend to go on full burn a lot of the time. I've only hit a burn out twice in 28 years though, so not too bad.

The last time,.I started taking regular vacations. The COVID period limited that a lot. I like road trips, but given I was advised by my doctor and medical issues to not vaccinate at that matter it pretty difficult.

Unemployment rates are fake btw

Yup. Letting people "drop out of the workforce" is the perfect way to let you produce any number you want. Any measure other than number of people with jobs divided by US population is is suspect and likely corrupt.

I think this perspective is simplistic, but the U.S. government does produce basically this number (although I think they exclude children): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EMRATIO. Currently it's 60.2 percent, a value higher than immediately after the major COVID layoffs or the 2008 financial crisis but lower than peaks in the 80s, 90s, or 00s. Most of this drop is because of the U.S.'s aging population. Looking at the same ratio from people between 25 and 54 shows it's 80.6 percent, about as high as ever: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060.

This is interesting. I think 25 to 54 is the key working age range. I'm curious if homemaker or stay at home dad is represented

Yeah, economists sometimes call it "prime age."

I'm not sure what you mean by "represented"? Someone who doesn't have a job in order to be a caretaker or keep up a household would count as not employed, even though those people are still doing work. (The same would apply for people without jobs and spend their time in school or volunteering.)

They do ask why people aren't working in government surveys, so that information is available to analyze. I wasn't able to quickly find an overall recent figure, but there is a figure for people who are technically in the labor force but haven't looked for work in the last month: https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea38.htm. And I also found an older figure: https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-4/people-who-are-not-in-....

My mom and dad are retired. Should they impact the unemployment rate? They never plan on having a job ever again.

Just because you disagree with the definition of "unemployment" (U-3) doesn't mean it's "fake".

It is because it’s dependent on people signing up to a service successfully.*

What i was unemployed last year I experienced what I already had seen other friends experience: the whole unemployment system is designed to prevent you from using it and if you work remotely it’s even harder as you have to file twice and maybe they accept you.

* incorrect i was working on bad information

> It is because it’s dependent on people signing up to a service successfully.

That's false. From the BLS:

>Classification as unemployed in no way depends upon a person's eligibility for, or receipt of, unemployment insurance benefits.

>There is no requirement or question relating to unemployment insurance benefits in the monthly Current Population Survey.

https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#unemployed

Fair. I’ll update my info

The meaning of the word and the ever changing definition are two different things causing the idea that they are fake and real.

By the definition they are correct. The definition is fake as in the formula is changed to suit political goals and doesn't reflect what an unemployed person is.

If a period of time passes where you still can't find a job you get excluded. You are no longer unemployed. Tell that to your parents/wife. That alone makes the entire definition more than suspect. Onr might even say fake.

> The meaning of the word and the ever changing definition are two different things causing the idea that they are fake and real.

What do you mean by "ever changing definition"? The U-3 definition has been used for decades. At some point you've just got to admit you had the wrong definition rather than blaming other people for using "fake" numbers.

>If a period of time passes where you still can't find a job you get excluded. You are no longer unemployed. Tell that to your parents/wife. That alone makes the entire definition more than suspect. Onr might even say fake.

I'm not sure what you got that from, but this contradicts the definition from the BLS:

>In the Current Population Survey, people are classified as unemployed if they meet all of the following criteria:

> They were not employed during the survey reference week.

> They were available for work during the survey reference week, except for temporary illness.

> They made at least one specific, active effort to find a job during the 4-week period ending with the survey reference week (see active job search methods) OR they were temporarily laid off and expecting to be recalled to their job.

https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#unemployed

I think that last point is what they are referring to with the unemployment rate not counting you after some period of time, and it’s true- if you are “discouraged”, you aren’t counted in that unemployment rate figure that people like to refer to (U-3 I guess?).

That's directly contradicted by the definitions on the BLS site. If don't have a job, want a job, and tried to look for a job in the last 4 weeks, you're counted towards the U3 number. Aside from the "tried to look for a job in the past 4 weeks", how long you've been unemployed doesn't factor into it.

Yeah what I'm saying is if I didn't try looking for a job in the last four weeks, I am not counted in that figure. So even though I have been unemployed for the last 6 months, I've apparently only been counted in U-3 as of January because that's when I started looking and applying.

If you aren't even trying, that's why should you be counted towards unemployment? The only reason I can think of is the naive thinking that "unemployment = 100% - employment", which anyone who does a cursory search will find out is wrong. Accusing the statistic as "fake", implying that there's some sort of deception going on when the explanation is readily available makes as much sense as accusing 2x4s as being "fake" because they don't measure 2 inches by 4 inches.

I don't really have a dog in the fight, I'm just trying to bridge the communication gap between you and the other guy.

Its fake to call it the "unemployment rate" with such authority, inflation (CPI) is similar.

Is your objection that the government didn't go out and ask everyone single person about their employment status, and so the unemployment rate is just an estimate and therefore "fake"? If so, do you get worked up about other statistics like the US population which are also estimates?

It's either newspeak or deceiving at the very least.

> Siu, who's trying to use his pharmacy degree to work in other parts of healthcare, is finding it harder to land interviews than in a prior job search.

HR is using AI application tracking systems to screen applicants, and it's doing as good a job as AI and software does. Don't have $EXACT_KEYWORD1 and $BUZZWORD2? Your application will never get seen by a human.

One reason could be that the current unemployment rate used is not that useful.

A better metric would be total employment: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employed-persons

It has increased since the pandemic, but so did the US population. If the linear trend (pre-pandemic) carried on, the US should be at 165 million total employed. However, currently it is sitting at 161 million. So there is 3-4 million jobs missing.