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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   3869 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for June 23, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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A ton of people I know have been laid off lately, and not just in tech. I have younger relatives graduating from college and it's taking them a long time to find anything. I don't remember anything like this since 2008-2009. Does this match up with what other people are seeing?

Layoffs slowed down in tech I think.

It was really bad in 2023, not so bad now. But all of that is relative to the insane market of 2021.

It’s slowly picking up but is overall fairly healthy relative to other engineering industries. Even the 2023 market was probably way better than the market for industrial or chemical engineers has maybe ever been?

Younger people in tech definitely have it worse, no doubt about that. Even if demand had stayed static there are just way more people studying computer science now so the competition is insane. At the Big-ish Tech company I work at, internships only go to both the best and brightest students from the best colleges but also those with referrals. If you don’t have a referral you’re toast.

Seems very field-dependant. Finance is seeing slow recruitment and some layoffs, but 2018 was worse and 2007-2010 was in a different dimension entirely, and there are still places hiring aggressively. I would put it this way, in 2008 a lot of people spent a year or two looking for a job and then left the industry entirely, like retrained as lawyers or chefs or went into (non-finance) sales or opened a small business or became accountants or did coding bootcamps or became high school teachers or whatever. There were no jobs at all. Maybe it’s like that in tech, but you don’t see many experienced engineers leaving tech entirely for now I think.

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