When you leave, your manager loses 1/N of team productivity. When you get fired, you lose 100% of your income.
I bet the manager would be more upset if the entire team quit. But even then, they'd still have their job—for a while, at least.
I do understand that it can be challenging to save for young people with student debt starting out in a HCOL area. But I see older tech workers who ought to know better buying luxury cars and fancy gaming PCs and taking exotic vacations. Good luck to them when the next recession hits.
Yes, but the problems start in severe economic crises. Specifically, when those several months turn into years.
Many filters during the hiring process, prior to interview will discard those candidates who have gaps since last employment regardless of circumstance. They may use AI as a third-party company to review and obscure the fact that they aren't hiring anyone over 40, female, or otherwise protected classes but that is what is happening regularly, along with other elements such as degrees being weighted higher than experience algorithmically.
> I do understand ...
I can tell you from personal experience, this opinion of yours isn't reflective of the whole. I've been in Tech for a decade, I was unlucky and was laid off before the major lay offs (2022) as I was involved in workforce reduction for a buyout merger. I've been looking ever since, and I've had to find work elsewhere in the interim once my reserves were expended.
I was extremely frugal, cooking everything myself, nothing luxurious. Inflation destroyed my reserves, the lack of jobs forced me to look wider than my given profession since there are no jobs, and I had more saved than most (>50k in liquid reserves at the start).
This isn't some recession like before. This is a great depression, potentially a big debt crises like Germany pre-WW2.
70% of my professional network in IT/Tech right now, across the board, is out of work. I'll let that sink in. 70%.
We are at peak hiring for seasonal hiring and unemployment is 7.0% in August? Hiring freezes guarantee this will be double digits by the annual count. National unemployment is 1.5%. That's a 4.6x national distortion between the national average unemployment and one sector that impacts everything else as a labor multiplier, and that measurement only counts those currently getting unemployment, any long-term displacement outside 18 weeks isn't counted.
Its looking more like we're in the middle of an economic collapse, which makes sense if you know about ponzi's, economics of boom-bust cycles, and how we are entering a bust cycle related to the petrodollar agreement abandonment (by the Saudi's); all those dollars printed for abroad use are now flowing back to compete with the same goods despite high interest rates.
BRICS largely isn't about attacking the US economically, its about sheltering from the global economic fallout of fiat money printing, for more than half a century. The bankers are and have been doing this to us since before we were born, and this happens every time large fractions of global assets get concentrated into few hands. Its cyclical. Large market-share companies are funded by preferential loans made by those same bankers. This is how you sieve wealth and marketshare, then drive prices up, and eventually end in deflation or hyper-inflationary collapse, because unlike normal systems economics is both sticky psychologically, and mathematically chaotic (3-body-problem).
There is no beautiful deleveraging, the bill always comes due. If this worsens, and I don't see how it cannot, this will be known by the survivors as the folly of one big generation.
No, it's not even close. Unemployment in 1933 was 25%.
Unemployment calculations from data recorded during that time have since changed. The same unemployment numbers are not the same mathematical objects being compared.
At this point, we can never know the true scope of unemployment to make any comparison definitively, because the measurements no longer accurately collect the necessary information for such a comparison.
You don't see engineers turn sampling data into an average rate of change, and then use it for safety-critical applications that require instantaneous rates of change.
In my previous response, I said unemployment today isn't counted after 18 weeks, so you should be aware that these objects are not the same.
Just because you have no visibility on a problem doesn't mean there isn't a problem especially when objective measures indicate there is a problem.
No definitive comparison can be made objectively, claiming its not even close would involve delusion when no external objective comparison can be made, definitionally.
Even in IT circles, it's still better out there than it was during the GFC (2009, 10% US unemployment), and way better than it was after the dot-com bust (2000, <6% overall unemployment, but much, much higher in IT).
We can look at the number of people on payrolls and the number of people claiming unemployment.
You are in a deep tech bubble if you think we're in a recession let alone depression. (What we are in is a cost of living crisis.)
Depressions typically have stagnant growth, starting in one sector, and expanding; with no prospects and a duration that can last years (plural). You can have a depression where everyone says they are hiring, but no hiring actually occurs.
Cost of living crises naturally occur during the latter crises given the chaotic nature of deflationary and inflationary forces (money-printing). They are not mutually exclusive.
Payroll data collection has problems with accuracy, people claiming unemployment also have data collection problems. Its not uncommon for the government to withhold unemployment benefit approval until some arbitrary bureacratic requirement is met with no means to contact someone to resolve it timely. I know several people who received their 18 month unemployment effectively as a lump sum and they spent days of labor trying to overcome those hurdles.
This causes a delay of action, and bursts in time (temporally) which cannot be compared except as an average. Revisions are subject to problems too.
There absolutely is. A slowdown in growth is not a recession.
BRICs isn't even a real thing, it's a total joke. They've been talking about an alternative reserve currency for years but have made zero real progress.
Something uncommmon for Gen X and unthinkable for Boomers. But think about how modern America structured all these payment plans...
>This is why people working in volatile industries subject to boom/bust cycles
you just said everyone get fired. I think today it's harder to find a job that isn't on bust/boom. Especially a public company that will slash employees simply to make number go up, no even because they are struggling per se.
>several months of living expenses (including health insurance premiums) in low-risk, liquid investments.
Low risk invesements are talking 2% on a great day and 4% on an excellent day. There were people above talking about 8% interest rates from S&P to outrun inflation long term.
>But I see older tech workers who ought to know better buying luxury cars and fancy gaming PCs and taking exotic vacations.
odd we compare a 6 figure luxury car to what's at best some $5k gaming setup that can in fact be used for more work in this tech sector. my 2.5K laptop was probably a better investment pre-bust than my new bed (I guess we'll see in 20 years with my back, but the bed isn't making me money).
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
Current money market rates are above 4%. So I guess today is a really excellent day!
You should bring a chart on the average tenure at a single company.
That's why a budget is necessary, and you plan for emergency (of which a layoff is one). Saving up for an emergency fund means you don't spend on luxury until it is saved, which means no broadway or restaurants (unless you're super highly paid, in which case it'd be quite fast).
The restaurants and broadway shows are gone.
I’m all for spending on experiences btw. But you have it backwards financially.
And selling your house is a last resort. rent is still more than mortgageso you're losing both asset and liquid wealth with that move just to buy some time. You're better off taking out a second mortgage if needed than selling off entirely.
...not to mention that if you're losing your job and can't find a new one readily, chances are you're in an economic calamity and you'll be selling near the bottom.
I find it hard to believe you can flip enough burgers to pay that mortgage and still survive. Not many fast food places will pay over 30 hours a week to burger flippers. Managers yes. You would barely survive.
To keep a $1,400 within the 28/36 rule [1] you need to make $60,000 a year. That's around the median wage for a fast-food manager [2].
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/twenty-eight-thirty-six...
[2] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/fast-food-manager-salary-...
like it's not an amazingly complex job, but you can't just hire some rube off the street because he had a CS degree and knows a bunch of node.
Sadly it seems it's unlikely they'll hire you even though they might need the help that bad because they're afraid of paying to train you and then you leaving once something better, and in your line of work, comes along.
And no, 1k a month is under minimum wage in my state. It's not even covering my mortgage, which is much cheaper than rent.
The job market is doing just fine, unless you’re in very specific areas such as the automotive industry or certain types of manufacturing.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2024/10/04/nx-s1-5140039/labor-market-jo...
I believe they also count gigs. So I could run Doordash for under minimum and be "employed" technically.
The other dangerous thing is "averages". This is one of the special cases where you need to look at the lower quartiles. The average/median can look great, but if we have an entire quartile unable to pay rent we'd be in trouble as a whole.
You can click through to the BLS survey to read more about their methodology, but the job growth number of +254k jobs in September only includes payroll employees. And reading the report would tell you that they do, in fact, track underemployment (people who worked part time but would have preferred full time employment). And neither job growth nor the unemployment rate has anything to do with “averages.”
Can you provide any data to refute the numbers I shared? Because again, the job market is looking pretty good to me.
This is why everyone hates economists. They have zero insight into how lives are for ordinary people. I applied for a job at grocery stores and fast food restaurants. I did not get ONE call back from any of these places.
Also another thing -- they keep saying rate of inflation is now under control. Well guess what, the prices went up and have not come down. Wages did not keep pace with the high rate of inflation so unless you can have negative inflation somehow, there is still constant pain every day, every month. I mean it is so obvious and yet economists chase spherical cows...
I understand your frustration with your personal situation, but at least regarding unemployment, how else would you propose we measure it? Unless there's some flaw with the methodology or the data that was collected, your situation is very clearly not the norm. Until we identify any possible problems with the measuring process, the number that's released is the best view we have of the employment situation nationwide. Are you saying that "ordinary people" are somehow excluded from the data? Or what?
> Also another thing -- they keep saying rate of inflation is now under control. Well guess what, the prices went up and have not come down. Wages did not keep pace with the high rate of inflation so unless you can have negative inflation somehow, there is still constant pain every day, every month. I mean it is so obvious and yet economists chase spherical cows...
The rate of inflation is under control, and I realize you might know better and are just speaking for "the average person," but comments like this reflect a gross misunderstanding of the concept of inflation. This is a perfect reason why education is so important to an informed and effective electorate.
BTW, you can, in fact, have negative inflation, and it is widely considered to be bad, for a multitude of reasons. [0]
> The rate of inflation is under control
Stop saying that because that message is clearly not resonating with people. They don't understand and they don't want to understand. Don't shoot the messenger here but this is a spherical cow. It doesn't matter that a car that has you pinned against a wall is no longer accelerating but it is merely attempting to crush you at a steady, cruising speed.
Yes, this was a big achievement and clearly we failed to communicate this message because the next question is ok great but how do I stretch my paycheck to meet my expenses.
And that goes back to the original problem -- there are fewer jobs than there were before. I have ZERO data to back this up but just my own personal anecdotes but it feels like at least for web developers that companies are laying off people AND hiring people back at lower wages. If they are not actively laying off, they are taking any excuse they can get to end a contract or "return to office" to force people to quit and come back at a lower salary.
I’m not a politician running for office, so fortunately I don’t have to make it resonate with people. I will continue to say it because it’s true.
> And that goes back to the original problem -- there are fewer jobs than there were before. I have ZERO data to back this up but just my own personal anecdotes but it feels like at least for web developers that companies are laying off people AND hiring people back at lower wages.
I prefer to believe things that are based on data and evidence rather than feelings, even if it goes against whatever preconceived notions I may have.
Here’s an anecdote for you: I’m a developer and found a new job about 2 years ago, after the big tech layoffs started happening, and went from starting my search to offer signed in about 5 weeks, give or take. I still work for this same company and since the whole company is fully remote, there are going to be no RTO mandates, ever. I make more money than I have at any previous job in my prior 20 years in the profession. I have several close friends in similar positions as me. The job market is doing great!
What do we do now?
I am happy for you. I know people use this kind of as a backhanded way like "bless your soul" in Texas but I really mean it. I am happy for you.
I hope I can get there as well. T_T
How are housing prices in the neighbouring countries?
When you said 600K, did you mean NZ dollars or US dollars? If the former that would be about 360K USD.
On a median NZ income of NZ60K per year, that’s indeed rough.
Top 3 worst affordable according to claude.ai, behind Hong Kong and South Korea. The most affordable housing countries are USA, Germany and Ireland
Maybe Edmonton, and in not great parts. The parts that give it the reputation as "Stabmonton".
Rural is a different story -- seen some damn nice places for $300-400k CAD -- but rural Canada has its own challenges.
I'm guessing remote work, or a high position in the midwest or some other place?
In SF/Seattle/NYC, 250K is not enough for a studio apartment.
The term itself sounds absurd and oxymoronic to me, but also I know NYC housing is absurd and I can imagine that there are places that do nice interior finishes on studio apartments and call them luxury so maybe it's real?
The more fiscally conservative option is to only borrow money if you have capital which is earning income at a higher rate than the mortgage. This probably necessitates having more capital than the house costs.
Even in Seattle, $800k would get you a decent starter home.
(I chose $2.5k, bc 15 years ago out of college, that’s how much I saved living in GA on a $70k salary). I saved even more when I move to California in my mid 20s.
Also I think it's pretty rare for people to have the mental fortitude to save 2.5k a month for a house on top of living expenses, rent, and trying to build your retirement / savings / emergency fund.
It's definitely possible but I think it's out of reach for the average person.
No, it isn’t. You can invest your savings. If you had put $2,500.00 a month into SPY500 since October 2009 (15 years ago) you’d have $1,388,302.13 today.
https://dqydj.com/sp-500-periodic-reinvestment-calculator-di...
> Also I think it's pretty rare for people to have the mental fortitude to save 2.5k a month for a house on top of living expenses, rent, and trying to build your retirement / savings / emergency fund.
How is saving for a house “on top of” literally “saving”? If you can save for retirement, savings, and emergencies then you have the mental fortitude to save for a house. People are bad with money, we know that. One of the best examples is buying a house they can’t afford.
> It's definitely possible but I think it's out of reach for the average person.
Yes, agree.
> So how does one buy a house without being dependent on cash flow?
The answer to which is “you don’t”.
Most people can’t afford to buy a house and never will. Even many homeowners.
I will spell it out if it isn’t already clear.
Live within your means and save as much as you can, investing that savings in a diversified portfolio. Buy a home only when your savings allow for it.
Most homes in America are owned by the person who lives there.
If you can’t retire or pay medical expenses or maintain your physical and emotional wellbeing because you spent money on a house then you couldn’t afford it. Owning a house doesn’t mean you can pay the property taxes or maintenance costs.
My point is that people are making financially unsound home buying purchases.
Another way to say this is that Bugatti doesn’t sell Veyrons to people with $1,000,000.00. Bugatti sells Veyrons to people with an extra $1,000,000.00.
That rate is higher now than in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s or 90s. It rofl stomps the pre-war era.
The census also collects data on the subject https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/coh-owner....
If that's even in the ballpark we're going to see a lot of assets aquired by insurance and hospitals to pay off the final years and this residential ownershio will torpeo.
In general terms the oldest cohort has steadily advanced in home ownership (I’d guess due to our welfare for the aged that isn’t needs based and better old age health, not land gifts but who knows). So there is definitely a trend of the oldest age cohort increasing its homeownership % while the other cohorts decrease.
But for the under 35 crowd today, they own their own home at a higher percentage than boomers or gen x did when they were in that cohort.
There is also the consideration that the US is just older than it’s ever been. I’m not a demographer do I have no idea how that plays out.
The post-war era has seen only minor changes in homeownership rates. And those tend to be around macro economic events like 2008 and Covid (and the Reagan era mortgage rates woof).
Importantly the quality of the housing was in many cases horrendous.
It's expensive being poor and the job market isn't getting better to compensate this economy. If you rent forever you spend more than someone paying off a mortgage (only amortized by needing to upkeep the house youself). If you're wokrking your back out everyday you're more likely to pay more insurance and medical bills than the cushy white collar job with proggresion options.
Most people don't even have the $1000 rainy day fund. They are 3 steps removed from the thought of a "diversified portfolio".
Median home price in the US peaked at $479,500.00 in 2022. By Q3 2023 it was down to $431,000.00. In Q3 2024 we reached $420,000.00.
But even using the index numbers it isn’t hard to see that housing prices do in fact go both up and down.
If we are considering kids, presumably there is another partner (and income) to be added to the equation. While you may have half the amount saved due to the cost of raising children, your partner would have the other half.
8% was chosen to discount 3% inflation (cost of living) from SnP 500’s average 11% growth.
Using [3] October 2009 to present gives an annualized return of 13.763% and going back 20 years to include the great recession returns 12.06%.
Post-tax current-day value scenarios:
Starting in 2004 (20Y):
$500.00/mo: $418,349.29
$2,500.00/mo: $2,091,746.42
$500.00/mo: $252,413.58
$2,500.00/mo: $1,262,067.88
[2]: https://dqydj.com/sp-500-return-calculator/
[3]: https://dqydj.com/sp-500-periodic-reinvestment-calculator-di...
I don't know of any lower-risk and higher-interest alternative to the 30-years-fixed that is currently offered to US consumers, and based of the above answer, neither do you.
What savings account do you have? Even the best HYSA's I've seen in the '10's is 4%
I suppose if you're really confident in your monopoly money you can do it.
OK, and how does that work when houses appreciate at 9%?
House prices are unaffordable because people take on loans they can’t afford. This reinforces the unaffordable prices. If milk was $40.00 a gallon you’d just stop putting it on cereal and eventually farmers get the message. Houses are the same thing.
If you can’t comfortably afford a house then don’t buy it. You’re stuck renting or buying something more modest. This isn’t complicated.
The idea that house prices can only go up is delusional. Nothing about a house is uniquely inflation proof or even inflation resistant. This isn’t the only investment vehicle available to you.
This idea that houses are an important part of financial security is putting the cart in front of the horse. It leads to the NIMBYism that prevents additional supply from being built because prices must always go up.
We all exist in the same economy and no action happens in a vacuum. When you buy something you have reduced supply and applied upward pressure on price. Individually this effect is so small it is immeasurable. In aggregate it isn’t.
Which should have been a lesson, but five years later, housing prices recovered and ballooned. I don't know why besides increased demand and reduced availability, clearly people can still get mortgages despite the lessons learned from the crisis.
But most of history relied on a labor market focusing on retention and training. We're far past that. We're a gig econnomy in all but name with these kinds of evonomic swings.
You can't eat cash either. If "can I eat it" is your metric, buy army rations.
My financial teachings were always emergency fund -> 3-6 months of savings immediately accessible -> consider stocks (hire a financial planner if you don't know stocks) -> consider asset management. your first foray into saving if you're barely spacing by isn't to rely on the S&P 500.
You can't eat cash either. If "can I eat it" is your asset metric, buy long-lasting preserved foods.
One main fault in the analogy is that in an economic crisis, there is a vicious cycle of income loss which leads to lower demand leading to more lost jobs. This coordination failure can be handled by fiscal/monetary policy. Whereas server failure, even when widespread due to a virus doesn't happen recursively like that.
That said, I think it is a pretty bad idea. Use of public funds dont increase with property value, it just means you have deeper pockets. I would be more in favor of flat taxes on homes independent of value, so people pay their fair share for community resources consumed.
Or tiny homes like the luxury single occupant container buildings on a bit of land?
Tiny homes are not the solution, they are hipster semi-cottage-core fashion homes. You're probably thinking of regular apartments, but for some reason they aren't built at the rate needed. Build ten million apartments (for starters) and the cost of living will go down. Satisfy / saturate the market first, then think of gentrifying with fashion homes.
crabs in a bucket. Those who got in and got theirs don't want their property value falling. Americans treating housing as a stock instead of a necessary resource for living really ruined a lot of the dynamic of city planning.
Getting fired/laid off is about the only thing that can save you.
Maybe disappear into the woods, or change countries. Or self delete.
Also your estimation of HN users is probably out of date with the current state of the employment market.
[1] https://help.glassdoor.com/s/article/Tips-on-writing-a-revie...
> your estimation of HN users is probably out of date with the current state of the employment market
You're probably not around start-ups if layoffs are a top concern.
Well yes. If you're at a startup you should assume you're always a few months from being laid off. Everyone should assume that. You're fighing to survive; the default is dead.
Dropbox, on the other hand, is not a start-up. It's had to file WARN notices [1]. "Nobody can do a background check on a company to see who they laid off or fired before they work there" is false.
It’s one thing to be laid off from a startup in general. Another entirely to be laid off right now.
The number of recent layoffs is everyone’s concern right now because of how hard it will be for you to find a job afterward. Layoffs always were going on, and always will for startups, but the days of turning down job offers due to small uncertainties are mostly paused or gone at this point. The demand crunch is very real.
What? I don't want you to know when I was fired and why. Employment reports typically don't contain the why either because that's litigation bait.
We're talking about the information asymmetry in hiring and firing. Why does knowing the titles and time periods of those laid off in the past help you estimate your lay-off odds in the future?
>Why does knowing the titles and time periods of those laid off in the past help you estimate your lay-off odds in the future?
I don't know. Why does knowing my titles and time period help businesses judge how useful I'll be for this new position? It's the same issue but that's where the asymmetry is. People seem fine with big business being able to do that but not prospective employees who may care about retention rates.
But to answer your question: retentions rates let me know how hard the company will try to keep me during bad/down times. Someone who can't even retain for 2 years probably has smoke.
And the changes were the part of a system wide (civilization wide ?) response.
Someone has to take the garbage, and be paid for it.
If the job isn’t attracting workers, than by market logic the pay should be increased.
If the pay is being kept artificially low though, then there is inefficiency in the system.
What are you talking about? real (ie. inflation adjusted) wages have gone up more for the lowest quartile of americans[1]. Is paying people more to get them to work "re-enslavement" now?
[1] https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker, click the "wage level" button
Too many focus on equal outcome instead of equal opportuniy.
A rule applying across the board to everyone doesn't really imply that it provides equal opportunity.
Equal opportunity, not equal outcome.
That doesn't seem the least bit weird to me. If I choose to leave a job (or relationship), I could quite sensibly feel differently if that same job (or relationship) chooses to leave me.
> high tech salaries
Just the other day I clicked on the website of some random law firm's career page. I wasn't happy with what I saw (in the context of my own career). Some researchers with 1 year of experience with starting salary of 450k+... tech salaries look high as long as you don't check other professions.
Tech is high earning. It gets beat out by high finance and partner-level roles in e.g. law though. If someone is earning 450k in their first year it's probably similar to a quant finance role.
This is just one random firm that I picked from google: [0] - $235k - $365 - with 1 full year of experience, lol [1] - $310k - $390 - real estate contracts [2] - $260k - $390 - real estate contracts, with 2 years of experience
Can you get $350k+ in tech? Well, yes, but with including a lot of luck and ifs. Can you get $350k+ in tech with 1 year of experience? Realistically, only if your dad is called Nadella or Musk.
There are definitely jobs that pay much worse than tech, no question about it. And if you are happy with your salary, than good for you. But nowadays people are mostly made to believe that tech salaries are still extraordinary.
Looking at the best paying professions[3], tech makes only the very end of the list (and only manager level, not code-droid level).
[0]: https://jobs.phextranet.com/PH-Attorney/viRecruitSelfApply/R... [1]: https://jobs.phextranet.com/PH-Attorney/viRecruitSelfApply/R... [2]: https://jobs.phextranet.com/PH-Attorney/viRecruitSelfApply/R... [3]: https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/top-highest-pa...
The first role is a 2nd-5th year associate. $235k is for a 2nd year associate, $365k is for a 5th year associate. Each year they get a predefined pay bump. Third role is the same kind of thing (3rd-6th year associate), second role it says mid-level so not 1 YOE.
This firm is also a Big Law firm, the equivalent of FAANG, if not harder to get into. Notice how law is not on your list of top paying professions. Most lawyers are not super well paid.
Also, being an associate is not like being fresh into tech. I don't think it's like a tech new grad role. Average TC for an entry level SWE at Google is ~$200k, and you can be making that as a new grad. Average senior comp is ~$400k, and it's possible to reach that level in 5-7yrs.
Entry level: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
Senior: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/google/salaries/software-en...
Another thing to consider is hours. You will work so many more hours as a lawyer in Big Law than a SWE at FAANG.
Tech workers have it very good. Relatively high pay with relatively low hours. Higher comp professions have much higher barriers to entry and work much longer hours.
A lot of tech roles are intellectually stimulating and have a wage in the upper distribution of salaries. I think we have a very nice situation going for us.
It's weird that the average person working these jobs has bills to pay, and perhaps additional family members to care for?
That's because people have a single employer, while companies have several employees.
That's also why employees are protected, while companies are mostly not. And yeah, the US doubles down on the problem by linking health insurance with the job.
How is this weird? Your take is like the famous saying about the chicken and the pig both contributing equally to the egg and ham sandwich.
Put simply, these kinds of things are going to keep happening until our wealthiest (individuals/families/companies) are a lot less rich.
Really? You think its weird that someone leaving impacts that person more than their manager, team, or company?
A manager doesn't care that you leave because he still gets to bring home a salary, all they have to do is hire another person and maybe cut back on scope for a little while. When someone is layed off or fired they have to go find a new job, their income streams dry up, and are forced to rely on savings. People often have long term financial commitments they cannot back out of, and not knowing how you'll make rent, if you can afford your child's school fees, or even maybe having to cut back on how much you eat, _is stressful_ and emotionally taxing.
Are you fucking kidding me? "Which is a bit weird" I'll tell you what's weird: management who doesn't understand that their employees rely on them more than they rely on the employee.
Of course its fine when someone chooses to leave their job, they've made contingencies and planned around it. Whether it's through savings, another job, or the lottery, people have at least some idea of their plan when they leave a job.
I'm sure people making >200k/year and getting a 4 month severance package will be cutting back on how much they eat.
What you say is true about low or even medium income jobs. But most of the cuts are to tech workers and their managers, ie. people best equipped to manage in this kind of event.
I agree they should be in a better position because of their income, and I'd say more than an average amount are. But there are still a lot of people in that bracket who absolutely would have the floor pulled out from under them.
People are often caught with their pants down assuming the good times will keep rolling. And even when they see the market downturn or have a generous severance, it still can be very difficult to scrape together the 6+ months emergency fund required on short notice.
Meanwhile if you've lived an easy life you may not have learned how to cope when the hard times come.
Yeah, I'm curious how someone can have an opinions on workplaces and workers and not seem to have personal experience with the subject, especially in a community like this.
Do they just come from a wealthy family so the stance is "Getting fired isn't a big deal, just ask your dad to cover expenses until your next job."?
> Please tell us briefly about your background.
> I grew up in the Netherlands, and I was interested in technology from a young age. I started a gaming website when I was 13. Later, I attended Erasmus University Rotterdam before founding Fashiolista, my first startup and an early social network similar to Pinterest. It grew to millions of users...
I can't imagine living with only 6 months of savings. There's no guarantee that I could find another job in 6 months, and unexpected expenses (medical, car trouble, housing repairs) can easily wipe out a month of savings anyway. In fact, given that a layoff means likely also an economic downturn, finding a job at the same salary within 6 months seems highly unlikely.
I have probably 3 years of no-risk savings at this point, have managed to reduce my living expenses to the point where I could work a 40-hour minimum wage job and still pay for my expenses, and have multiple back-up careers, and I'm only now starting to feel that taking money out of savings is an acceptable risk. That took years of frugal living on a high tech salary. People in their first few years at a tech job or with families will probably never achieve that.
Do you have any evidence of this? There are unfounded claims of “productivity metrics” but I have never actually seen one.
E: I realize this is a poor choice of words after saying productivity metrics don’t exist. What I mean is my tasks are easier to complete in a WFH environment than they are in an office.
I have been far more productive from home. The constraints around communication necessitate effective documentation which enables asynchronous communication which alleviates scheduling challenges which improves delivery.
Maybe managers need to go in to the office to rub elbows but ICs definitely don’t.
Same. It's been a boon for me, and I genuinely enjoy my work, so it's win win. But anecdotally, I know people who abuse it.
On net, remote work is a plus: less commute, less pollution etc etc. And even the abusers, it's not like those people were highly productive in the office, I'm sure.
If you can't tell remote employees are slacking then you also can't tell if they are slacking in the office, you are just getting fooled by thinking presence implies work.
So tired of hearing this "argument".
The market has been slowly shrinking into fewer and fewer hands over time, which is why it has become more competitive over time. This has also led to cooperative behavior among the large marketshare companies in the sectors to disadvantage competitors, and employees.
Companies do not bid up to the max they can, because the executives take their cut first. The companies bids can only ever be the max of what is left after that, and varies by the greed of those people.
Interest rates would be the shock you described, but Tech unemployment as far as I can tell has until now been bulletproof, and uncorrelated with interest rate rises or falls. Its not rational to assume this market shock is a result of interest rates, AI is the only competitive alternative.
The issue is not that you're getting fired. Its that you can no longer get base goods needed for survival arbitrarily and without notice, and without capital reserves which are finite you are living on the street.
When the entire market as an entirety is contracting, there are no new jobs to move to in other fields.
Worse, the concentrated market is naturally incentivized to impose high costs on any job seekers to interfere in labor relations to create barriers to entry for competitors while suppressing wages for prospective workers.
This natural progression occurs when anti-trust fails, and money printing makes it worse potentially leading to either deflation (a collapse to non-market socialism) or hyper-inflation (a collapse to non-market socialism). Debt issued as preferential loans from a money-printer makes a company state-dependent/controlled apparatus even if its claim is that it is held privately.
The economy today is worse than 2008, much worse then the dotcom bust, and if you plot the trend with good data going back and starting around the 1970s, the trend shows progressive ruin as time passes, with seiving and consolidation occurring regularly. That is the force driving this problem, and it doesn't enable tech salaries.
> There should also be some reasonable government provided safety net so people can reskill/learn.
There is a limit to what government can provide, it takes awhile to get to those limits (we're in a super-cycle going back to the 1920s) but we'll be there in the next 5-10 years thanks in large part to deficit spending and the FED picking winners and losers.
The main issues with academia also applies to government. They are structurally the same. Education today is not about learning skills, that is always secondary to instilling the qualities a loyal unthinking worker. That is what the entire prussian-model of schooling is about (which is what we have in this country).
These structures for training follow the same structure as guild socialism, and the same intractable failures (ref Mises for related details).
It inevitably ends up being a cult of qualification, where you are automatically considered unqualified without a piece of paper even if you have the actual skills to do the job. Once a target market size is identified and reached, new candidates are put on an endless escalator of suffering with arbitrary filters/requirements where the claimed outcome is nothing but an unobtainable pipe dream.
Do you mind expanding on this? How does remote work change the standards of how much work somebody has to get down?
A couple months ago interviewing.io posted something bragging about how "we do anonymous mock interviews. If people perform well in those interviews, they get introduced directly to a decision-maker at top-tier companies, regardless of how they look on paper." ( https://interviewing.io/blog/i-love-meritocracy-but-all-the-... )
This annoyed me enough that I sent in an email complaining that their introduction process specifically notes that I am not eligible for anything, despite performance measured by the site as "highest ever achieved: 94th percentile" (so, knock that down a bit for being a high water mark), because of an insufficient number of years of experience.
They responded:
> It really sucks, especially in this market, but this policy is a function of us having tried for years to get companies to take junior intros, and it didn't work. We offered to do it completely for free, too, fwiw, and no dice.
How competitive is the market for talent? Let's stipulate that, because of a lack of prior employment, I'm not qualified to have a job. How exactly would that situation change?
Clarification: Just because companies don't want a 3rd party like us providing them with junior candidates, it doesn't mean they don't want them. Even back in 2017-2019, when the market was booming, we couldn't get employers to take our juniors... because they generally have their own robust pipeline.
So the solution is to go to companies directly, rather than relying on a 3rd party service like ours, which companies tend to use specifically for roles they can't fill on their own.
You seem to be confirming that the market for talent isn't competitive - in your view, companies have more applications than they want.
Or maybe you're going for a different point? For the suggestion, my experience is that companies won't consider direct applications either, and in the general case do not ever even list junior positions. (An observation which is not unique to me; see e.g. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/07/fr... )
If you're worried that I'm implicitly slamming interviewing.io for claiming to do something very different than what they actually do, I don't think you've rebutted that - "if people perform well in our interviews, we will introduce them to top-tier companies as long as we think their resume looks good" isn't particularly similar to "if people perform well in our interviews, we will introduce them to top-tier companies, regardless of how they look on paper".
The point I was making is that even though companies don't want to hire juniors through us, they still DO WANT to hire juniors in the absolute. So junior hiring isn't dead.
Here, saying "the market for talent is competitive" clearly means that hirers are competing with each other over potential employees. Deciding that you already have too many potential employees is the opposite of that. It would mean that the market to sell talent is competitive, which isn't what was claimed.
There is, it's called Medicaid.
I shouldn't have to sell my house to get medical care.
Not a single person in the US is denied healthcare based on inability to pay.
This is not true. Emergency rooms are required to take you in and stabilize your situation even if you can't pay. Everything else is not available if you can't pay.
Think of something like cancer, which an emergency room can't treat since it develops over time. You will indeed be left to die on the streets if you don't have the money or coverage from somewhere.
Yes, because that's the law. Then they hand you an exorbitant bill on the way out, which you can't pay. Then you get hounded by collections. Then your credit score tanks. etc. etc. etc.
Not everything is a direct line, the end result is the same.
No the issue is that I get fired after the prior townhall saying "we are not doing layoffs". Companies will outright lie to get little ounces of productivity and treat you like a criminal the moment they break the news, as if we're all school shooters waiting to happen in anger and rage over betrayal.
The circus of the 2023/2024 job market doesn't help either. Even pre-pandemic the process was padded, but now I'm not even convinced 80% of companies have a human reading my resume.
>There should also be some reasonable government provided safety net so people can reskill/learn and move to other fields.
I'd rather not "hit hard times" while shareholders are making a killing and make a conclustion that my entire career needs to shuffle so they can save pennies.
- The market for talent is competitive. So companies bid up to the absolute max they can - The market for managers is also competitive. Creating dynamics that lead to larger teams and raises for team members - Companies allow things like remote work, which is a perk, but also has a lot of abuse in terms of how much work gets done
The end result is that if companies are spending their max, if there's a shock to the market/system etc they have to cut. You'd see this less if there was more padding/ less competitive pressure/lower salaries.
I think that's fine and the system is working as intended. People should be freed up to move to other roles where they can be productive. Your manager doesn't get upset when you leave, bit weird how people feel so differently when they get fired.
The issue is not that you're getting fired. The issue is that healthcare is attached to employment, that makes zero sense. There should also be some reasonable government provided safety net so people can reskill/learn and move to other fields.