It is a tough job market. Minus the very top echelon of talent, switching jobs today is a lot more challenging than in the past. Management knows this and can shave a few pennies off the books by capitalizing on this moment.

it is management that is successfully convincing people that it is a tough job market - it is not - it is same as before. I am a contractor, have more work offered than I can take (same as before, maybe even slightly more). four friends/former colleagues got new jobs since the beginning of December, each had multiple offers and got decent to significant pay increases compared to previous positions.

14 months can’t find IT ops remote work

I think remote work peaked and is slowly declining now, for better or worse.

remote work is pretty much done, if you are looking for 100% remote work you'll have a very hard time finding it unless you get a job through a referral of a former colleague or something like that

If we’re doing anecdata I haven’t been able to get w-2 work in over a year and have been taking sporadic contract work.

I’m several hundred applications in and have hired a recruitment firm to help me find positions. Multiple companies where I referred by friends of mine declined to even phone screen and then those respective friends reported that the position was closed and they were given zero info as to what was happening.

Maybe that's because most jobs are Graberesque bullshit jobs where "high performance" is meaningless.

Most jobs shouldn't exist at all. The value captured by "firms" should instead be captured by the state and distributed peanut butter style to everyone.

I also found his thesis compelling, but it’s built on bad social science: https://open.substack.com/pub/gilpignol/p/bullshit-jobs-was-...

How exactly should the state "capture" value generated by these firms? Would it pay the employees more? What would the competitive advantage be? If the jobs are bullshit, why wouldn't some other firm capture the same value without those jobs, making even more profit with less overhead?

The risk-reward of over paying employees who are risk adverse is why this works for most employers.

Yup, it's a bad feeling hearing that lower performers are getting payed more than you.