HackerNews has a "jobs" thread that comes around once a month or so, often there are good pieces of info in there. What sort of insights are you looking for? You've got the ear of quite a few seasoned professionals at your fingertips 😅

Good question. I guess my number one question is “how good/bad is the job market right now, and do you have an answer that’s more specific than ‘the sky is falling’?”

I know of the HN jobs thread but I never really checked it out

I think it's very much regional, and it also depends on the specific tech. Some verticals are growing, some are shrinking. I think the Big Tech layoffs are the thing people focus on but a) they're small percentages of those companies' tech staff b) those companies overhired (in some cases dramatically so) during the pandemic so this is just a "market adjustment" c) many non-tech companies are expanding their IT departments as computers become more and more central to non-tech companies' business. You just don't hear much of the latter unless you really dig into the news.

That brings up another question I’ve been having but never got an answer to: how long will the “bulge” of laid of FAANG workers last, now that it’s been a few months since the layoff wave?

@U02FU7RMG8M Where are you based, geographically?

USA

Me too but it's a big place. Are you in the Bay Area like me?

Nope NYC area

I'd say mostly FAANG layoffs won't affect you in NYC. I don't think those layoffs are really affecting the job market much here in the Bay Area, TBH.

> I don’t think those layoffs are really affecting the job market much here in the Bay Area Huh what makes you say that? I thought that this would be area that would be most affected

Because really they're small numbers -- if you look at the actual number of IT staff laid off here rather than the whole layoff numbers across departments and across geo regions.

Sure, but wouldn’t it have an effect on the margins, i.e. the number of people who are competing with those laid off workers is also rather small?

TBH, there's so much churn in Bay Area IT generally -- and I really feel like the media is just making a mountain out of a molehill about this. I was here for the 2001 dot-com bubble bursting...

Back then, a lot of people moved out of the Bay Area and so the effect was dispersed across a lot of regions and different industries, even tho' it was a "massive" round of layoffs within the tech sector in this one area.

> Good question. I guess my number one question is “how good/bad is the job market right now, and do you have an answer that’s more specific than ‘the sky is falling’?” My sense is: kinda bad but finally improving. I'm basing that partly on just having an ear to the ground, and partly on looking at the chart from layoffs.fyi: I do think that the bulge of laid-off workers has had a noticeable effect, but I think that bulge is at least mostly absorbed at this point, especially since a lot of companies are back to wanting to hire in order to figure out how to incorporate AI into whatever random thing they do.

the media is just making a mountain out of a molehill about thisNarrow “media” to “social media” (e.g. Reddit) and you are spot-on (edit: though it may not be that much of an exaggeration given what eggsyntax said)

I really feel like the media is just making a mountain out of a molehill about thisIt may not be at the scale of the dot-com crash, but I've definitely seen a lot of people having way more trouble getting a job than they had had in many years, and hearing quite a few stories about nothing-special job postings getting hundreds of applications on the first day...

BTW @U077BEWNQ thanks for linking to layoffs.fyi that seems like another interesting resource (to answer my original question)

Yeah, great resource for sure.

I think we hear a lot more people in this ever-connected world -- I think that amplifies the "bad news" aspect. A lot of these people haven't been looking for jobs until they got laid off so they didn't know what the job market was like -- my sense is that a lot of "nothing-special" job postings get hundreds of applicants all the time. I guess I'm just very cynical haven't lived in the Bay Area for nearly 25 years (and having been a hiring manager here all that time).

And, yeah, if Reddit is your main focus for this conversation, that's going to sound pretty hysterical I suspect... 😉

> A lot of these people haven’t been looking for jobs until they got laid off so they didn’t know what the job market was like This affects college students, new grads, and bootcampers extremely hard as well - speaking from experience, CS students are sold this idea that software/IT is this golden ticket, and when they actually have to struggle for internships and entry level jobs it’s like a brick in their faces

Well, yes, and that has frankly been a lie for a long time...