[klipklop]

It’s been this way for at least 2 years.

I suspect that WSJ held back such topics until after the election…

The people I know that lose their job spend at least 1 year looking for a job. Usually at a significantly lower salary. With the current rate of inflation it’s a 1-2 punch that requires a big step down in lifestyle.

I don’t really see these conditions changing until there is a AI bubble pop or something. Facebook is no longer trying to poach FANG general SWE’s so there is no more pricing pressure in the market. Their recruiting departments have gone dark and their staff was eliminated.

[hn_throwaway_99]

There are a bunch of usual suspects for the current situation, some that are temporary but others that are very worrisome long term (for the US at least):

1. There was massive over-hiring at many tech companies during the pandemic boom. That hangover is still taking time to wring out.

2. The era of easy money is over. Lots and lots of speculative investments that make sense when interest rates are essentially 0 don't make sense at all when rates are 5+ percent.

3. Outsourcing has exploded since the pandemic, and this is a long term change that is definitely not going away. The remote work trend is a double edged sword. I've worked with lots of great developers in Latin America and Europe (both Eastern and Western Europe) whose salaries are much less than American software developers, and there is plenty of time zone overlap to get lots of collaboration time in.

4. Companies are realizing they can get by with a lot fewer people. Elon may have gone off the deep end with laying off 75% of Twitter, but a lot of places are realizing they can lay off ~20% with no loss of effectiveness, including future bets. In fact, I've seen some business leaders argue (and I agree with them) that the post pandemic downturn has actually provided an opportunity for better focus and less bureaucratic meetings. I.e. cutting some people has allowed them to move faster.

5. AI is having a big impact on at least some roles. Washington Post did an article shortly after ChatGPT came out about how a bunch of copywriters were being replaced by AI. I think AI is generally over hyped, but for roles like marketing, copywriting, recruiting, etc. it's definitely having an impact on jobs.

I think #s 3, 4 and 5 are long term trends that are here to stay.

[bsder]

> 3. Outsourcing has exploded since the pandemic, and this is a long term change that is definitely not going away. The remote work trend is a double edged sword.

I have been warning about this over and over and over since the beginning.

If your job can be done remotely, you are effectively unessential in the grand scheme of your company.

Those who went back to the office understood the political landscape well.

[cmxch]

3 can be fixed to some degree with the right political will and sold as data privacy. Might not make the economists happy but one shouldn’t have to do public sector or adjacent work to avoid the bugbear of offshoring.

[stuaxo]

Longer than this: certainly in the UK things were not in a good state before the pandemic started in early 2019.

I know at least one person who was a software dev who was worked very little over the last 5 years.

For myself, over that period I noticed almost all work except for government and financial dried up - lucky for me that was my most recent experience.

[strls]

This was not my experience. Many of the high paying tech companies were actively hiring senior/staff in London for most of 2022. OK, maybe not Google. This very suddenly changed late in the year.

[gruez]

>I suspect that WSJ held back such topics until after the election…

Why?

[weard_beard]

The current administration's poor messaging on inflation and the economic problems faced by many Americans was a significant contributing factor to their loss of the election. (https://www.barrons.com/articles/economy-2024-election-why-h...)

The WSJ and other major publications have a vested interest in brokering access by tailoring their coverage to be friendly to those in power. They are largely responsible for setting the agenda and tone of issues during an election.

(https://archive.pagecentertraining.psu.edu/public-relations-...)

Given these two factual statements... The stated stance of the current administration was to downplay the impact and scale of economic hardship, and the role of major media outlets during an election is to set out the agenda and issues to be debated during an election period...

I think it clearly follows that the WSJ had a vested interest in providing one perspective on the economy before and during the election, and now that this period is over, they can provide a different perspective more aligned with the perspective of the working class, and less aligned with the perspective of the incumbent administration.

[gruez]

>The WSJ and other major publications have a vested interest in brokering access by tailoring their coverage to be friendly to those in power

Are you thinking of the Washington Post? You realize that the WSJ has been described as "right-centrist"[1]? It's unclear why they'd want to support a Democratic administration. Even the "friendly to those in power" excuse doesn't work too well. For most of the election Trump was leading in election models, and near the end it was a coin toss. Being anti-Biden and pro-Trump would be the rational choice, even if they were apolitical and just wanted to be "friendly to those in power"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wall_Street_Journal#Editor...

[Ferret7446]

The earth has also been described as flat.

You see how your wording is not very convincing (and Wikipedia is heavily left biased, in case you thought your citation has any weight).

While I can see how "the WSJ has been described as "right-centrist"", the Overton window has shifted so much so rapidly that the WSJ is now comfortably slightly left leaning based on the "old" political spectrum (and by "old" I mean pre-2020 or so).

(But that's just, like, my opinion man.)

[weard_beard]

To my ears, this is like my 10 year old nephew explaining why his favorite pro wrestler would never be a heel. "Also", he asks, "what's a heel?"

[gruez]

For the benefit of people who doesn't watch wrestling, do you mind explaining why the WSJ would support an administration at the end of its term and was likely to lose? Or for that matter, why "major publications" like the new york times have no problem with making anti-incumbent endorsements[1], despite the claim that "The WSJ and other major publications have a vested interest in brokering access by tailoring their coverage to be friendly to those in power"? Whatever you said about "heels" sounds like a "heads I win, tails you loose" sort of proposition, where you can excuse any sort of counter-evidence as part of a greater ruse or whatever, making your theory basically unfalsifiable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...

[kev009]

A simple translation on the transactional relationship: because they know who butters their bread, and they know they can waffle into the next administration or current thing as long as they stay in the general good graces of the intelligence apparatus. It's wet behind the ears view a major news agency as anything other than an extension of the intelligence apparatus. Whatever supposed political leaning is symbolic and minuscule in the overall influence of direction and probably tied to useful wetness of ear of the hosts ego and not the overall apparatus. The heel comment could be likened to a hammer and anvil, with one party playing each role and the roles alternate over time but an overarching direction is being achieved by higher level thinkers.

[echelon]

It feels like FAANG needs to employ lots of people so they don't all go out and build competing services.

If skilled people are without work and their savings and lifestyle supports it, they should consider building startups.

[vineyardmike]

That’s what they did for years. I suspect there are some “nice” macroeconomic trends helping them avoid this. Like regulatory capture and the general regulatory fragmentation of the global tech sector. And that new AI tech is prohibitively expensive.

[klipklop]

I agree, something has changed.

Also good look any small business trying to buy Nvidia hardware to compete in the AI space. Best they can do is get gouged renting compute time.

[UncleOxidant]

Trying to do more with less would be one strategy - coming up with more efficient inference that takes less compute and energy. This seems to be what's driving companies in China like Deepseek. Whether one could be profitable with this strategy is another story, probably the best to hope for would be getting bought by one of the FAANGs (if you were able to show good results).

[echelon]

It's also possible that the first movers are doing all of the expensive and risky research and utterly failing to build a moat for themselves. It doesn't look like there's any particularly lock-in for any category of AI model, and open source is following closely behind.

Compute will get cheaper and open models will proliferate.

[detaro]

Doing that was a lot easier before though, with funding being more available, and big-tech has been happy to let others take the risk/dump VC funding into subsidizing their business models/... and then gobble up or copy the successful ones.

Also some of the big tech companies have been quite ruthless with firing people even when they could afford not to, which doesn't match that theory.