* Tariffs are hurting most real-world jobs - you don't know what your inputs will cost in 6-12 months and so can't plan
* Political Corruption - you don't know if your permit, M&A, or regulatory rule-change will go through without a bribe to the right person
* Tech, which makes up most of the market, is all in on AI - these companies are late stage and the AI narrative is the only growth story so the market doesn't reward them for investing in anything else
* Cheap globally accessible labor
* Lack of enforcement of anti-trust means stodgy uncompetitive markets with players that make their margin through rent-seeking rather than increasing production or quality of goods and services.
* Poor investments and corruption in our healthcare system make it really expensive to hire Americans
* Poor investments and corruption in education make many Americans unsuitable for high skilled work.
It's heavily cyclical for reasons I don't understand. It skyrocketed to 45% after the housing crash. It tends to peak in the low to mid 20s. We're currently at 25%. Definitely yellow journalism for now. And as for the article - if your parents name you Tequila, get a name change.
What looks unusual in this graph is that the line usually spikes rapidly during and after a recession. It's not clear what we're in right now, since recessions are declared after the fact, but the slow trend upwards without a declared recession does look like a break from past decades.
I was about to post the same thing. It is cyclical, and over the last several decades, the percentage of long-term unemployed during low unemployment periods seems to have steadily increased more than the rate during high unemployment periods, covid excepting.
It seems increasingly likely the U.S. is running full hog into one of the worst economic disasters we’ve ever seen with no contingency plan or strategy for resolution. [1]
Especially when you realise that our tolerance for AI propping up the rest of the economy has stifled the "natural selection" that weeds out poor performers and poor business choices and rewards innovation and success. An imprecise economy is a worrying thing.
> He’s also noticed the interview process getting longer as companies get “more picky,” he says. One recent company required eight rounds, and he still didn’t get the role.
No one can truely understand how grueling this is until they see this happen. My girlfriend recently had a hard time finding a new gig. Entry level office jobs are doing >7 rounds. Phone, recruiter, HR, manager, manager + team member, manager + skip level, ... etc.
Whats even worse is all the people in your life who are older can't understand this at all.
I tried to explain getting ghosted, ghost jobs, online applying, multi-round interviews to my grandma. It just does not make sense. It has never been like this, why is it like this now?
The eight round interviews are incredibly stupid from the hiring side as well. My job’s thankfully not gone quite that far, but I’ve had a bunch of hiring panels where I don’t have anything to add that the four other people who interviewed the candidate didn’t already cover and my involvement in the process was just a complete waste of time.
> Whats even worse is all the people in your life who are older can't understand this at all.
That's people over 50. Millenials are basically out of job market once losing the current job. I haven't heard anyone from younger generations in my vicinity getting a serious stable job either, and there is nowhere to emigrate to this time.
> I tried to explain getting ghosted, ghost jobs, online applying, multi-round interviews to my grandma. It just does not make sense.
> I tried to explain getting ghosted, ghost jobs, online applying, multi-round interviews to my grandma. It just does not make sense. It has never been like this, why is it like this now?
It's much riskier to hire the wrong employee now. If a bad hire is made, it takes around 2 quarters to build the paper trail needed to be litigation-proof when firing.
Additionally, work is much more streamlined now - it is safe to expect that an employee can wear multiple hats. Engineers are expected to have basic Project, UX, and Product Management skills now. PMs are expected to have basic Project, UX, Sales, FP&A, Marketing, and/or Engineering skills now. Execs are primarily promoted from ICs and are expected to be able to dive into the coalface.
Furthermore, companies are now judged based on cashflow positivity, not just growth, so a hire has to be the right hire because tech salaries can make-or-break the P&L of a feature.
As such there is much less tolerance for the wrong hire.
Basically, modern hiring is about efficency and optimization.
You may hate it, but that's the reality. No one has a legal obligation to hire you or optimize for a simplified process.
You can't do anything about it, so you will have to think about how to find that edge.
This is cyclical. There is nothing particularly onerous about the current situation compared to previous cycles at this point. An adult will experience a few of these cycles over their career. You should be prepared for it to happen.
I understand that it might be shocking for a young person who has never lived through this before. It also sucks to enter the job market at the bottom of one of these cycles. The bottom almost never lasts more than a year or two, which seems like an eternity while you are in it.
The article opens with someone who was making six-figures at 47 years old in a low-cost-of-living part of the country. They’ve seen a few of these cycles already and with a modicum of prudent planning would be well-positioned to ride it out.
Hostility to labor has been accelerating throughout my 25 years in the workforce. Graduated into dotcom bust then global financial crisis then another massive transfer of wealth to the already ultra-wealthy in response to covid. If you don't already have yours good luck getting it.
The classic phrase for this is the "reserve army of the unemployed".[1] That goes back to Engels and Marx, around 1845. That's surprisingly early for industrial unemployment. The Industrial Revolution was still starting up.
One of the issues with tech is that if you make $250k in a good year, you are taxed on that. Whereas if you're then unemployed the next year, you don't get anything back as if you had only made $120k. It should work that you can recuperate paid taxes if you're laid off so that those in volatile industries (which tech is) actually pay their average salary. The tax code is set upon the belief that income is consistent for individuals, when it is not today. This is just an example of things I've seen that seem unfair to me. It's crazy someone can go from making $600k and taxed to their teeth to making nothing for the next two years, and if they had instead made $200k per year, they would have ended up better off (not due to spending, just due to taxation).
People with lumpy incomes get absolutely brutalized by the tax code. It sucks but also not easy to remedy. The calculations and exemptions change every year, so it isn’t as simple as looking back five years and averaging it.
All I'm saying is that their should be a way to recapture the taxes if you've suddenly gone from tons of income to no income. Even the figures I'm citing are not a lot of money in some places like the CA bay area, unfortunately.
Here in the Netherlands you can actually request your income for taxes to be averaged every 5 years.
Typically this only makes sense when experiencing big changes in income due to our tax brackets. But when it does happen it can help a lot and saves tens of thousands of euros.
People are going to flame me for this, but it's the end of the line because of a confluence of AI, bad planning, offshoring, and a few other things. But this is the end of capitalism as we know it because the value of labor is plummeting globally, it's not going to happen overnight, but this is kind of the logical end of things. Education no longer implies employment - I did my masters a few years ago and promptly got scooped up, but the undergrads that graduated around the same time did not - and I was different, I had prior relevant work history.
Nah, this is the end of it. It's going to convulse a bit and hurt as we get this sorted out, but we're literally in the midst of both a political, social, and economic revolution right now, and everyone seems to mostly be doomscrolling through it.
What we get on the other side? I have no idea, but it's kind of funny to watch people gnash their teeth at this stuff. I mean, it sucks if you can't find a job, I get it, but the only real play is to "embrace the chaos" and adapt to the changing times. This might be the first time "we" have had to deal with this sort of uncertainty and chaos, but historically we're regressing to the mean.
Personally, I bought land in the woods last year when I saw this starting to occur, my "startup" (read lifestyle business) is vibe coding apps while people still bother to pay for that and doing hydroponics.
Interest rates are relatively high compared to what they were several years ago. When interest rates are low everyone and their dog gets hired because its cheap to do that. When interest rates are high companies need to be more selective and growth/risk taking decreases.
If we can somehow get inflation under control it will trigger lower interest rates and hiring will increase again. But the current, and possibly only, strategy is to stagnate wage growth and increase the number of people out of work so that the economy has less money circulating in order to reduce inflation.
I've lived through a few of these. Its definitely cyclical.
I've lived through a few of these now too, maybe not as many as you, I don't know, but...
I do think this time is a little bit different. I don't think a lot of these jobs are coming back. Maybe ever.
I'm not saying I'm some crazy woodland luddite maniac, I mean, I'll be tailscaling into the business VPS from the cabin... but... yeah, I think this time is a bit different. I think stuff like this has happened before with like "John Henry was a Steel Driving Man" sort of vibes? But a lot of people are going to try to out-machine the machines right now, and I think that's a losing strategy?
We'll see in 10 years, and I'm in a bit of a privileged position that I'm able to do this, so I don't envy the folks who are struggling right now? But, more concretely, I do think this is different. Interest rates are absolutely part of it, but there's so much deviation from the historical norms right now that I think normalcy bias is a loosing move.
Personally, I'm adapting - also, I'm playing with robots, but that's mostly because it's fun.
It's funny how everytime the economic system is going to collapse, the response is often to complain about capitalism while purchasing more private property under the very same institutions that are about ready to fall over. It's easier to understand violent warlords honestly. At least they're being serious.
Eh, I think there are valid counterarguments to that. Buying property under the current ruling system buys you exclusive rights to that property while that ruling system is in power, and you can use that time to make preparations and such that could help you if shit DOES hit the fan. You might not have the government enforcing your property rights but maybe you can enforce them yourself.
Interest rates are normal or even low. The situation of interest around 0% for years was an extreme anomaly never seen before. Since 1973 interest rates were almost always above 5%, and the only moments they fell under 3% they created the 2008 boom and bust.
Gilding, albeit more toilets than lilies, is on the up and up.
If there was any standardized measure, a Grift Index if you will, then that would surely be showing exponential growth for certain players.
The Trump grab for an airport named after him is just the latest grift in a presidential term that experts so far estimate has enriched the Trump family by at least $4 billion.
Trump’s Claim to Venezuelan Oil Money Draws Scrutiny in Congress - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/us/politics/trumps-claim-... | https://archive.today/xhNT9 - January 7th, 2026 (“President Trump’s declaration that he would personally control the proceeds from oil produced in Venezuela drew instant condemnation on Wednesday from Democrats in Congress who noted that the president had no constitutional authority for such an undertaking.”)
On a bright side it feels that for once the situation is quite uniform from America, through Europe, to Oceania. Official unemployment numbers are artificially low, people are without healthcare, no one is getting hired, and pointing out any of these publicly one hears "you're lying because you are supporting the other political party".
> Official numbers about the job market show a relatively stable labor economy with stronger than expected job growth in January — more than half of jobs added were in health care — and a slight drop in the unemployment rate to 4.3%, or 7.4 million people.
This is why people keep hearing "the job market is fine" and believing it. The headline numbers are misleading.
Look at last year: official figures reported 600K+ new jobs, which were later revised down to 181K. It's not statistical noise. That's a systematic pattern of overstating job growth that's been happening since the Biden administration, with virtually no accountability. Of course current admin is going to like it.
This month is no different. The report shows strong hiring concentrated in health care, which already seems odd and it directly contradicts ADP data showing only modest job gains. That gap almost certainly means another revision is coming. But here's the thing: revisions rarely make headlines. The inflated original numbers do.
tl;dr: The job market isn't strong. The numbers are cooked.
- Contract role, seemed to have run its full course. Didn’t plan ahead?
- Laid off from a startup. Startups are inherently volatile, should have planned ahead.
- H-1B (it seems), needs to find a job AND sponsorship, far more difficult than what the average US citizen will face
- Contract work again, ran its full course
- Communications degrees are difficult to find employment with anyway
These examples are egregiously bad considering HN has loads of great examples for proving this article’s thesis. At least we can be sure ChatGPT didn’t write this article because it surely would have urged better examples.
> Today, 1 in 4 unemployed people, or 1.8 million Americans, have been job searching for over half a year, which in most cases means they’ve also exhausted their unemployment insurance benefits. Benefits vary by state but on average replace less than 40% of a person’s previous income.
The 6-12 months needed to find a job is a worrisome economic predictor and isn’t effectively communicated by unemployment rates alone.
* Political Corruption - you don't know if your permit, M&A, or regulatory rule-change will go through without a bribe to the right person
* Tech, which makes up most of the market, is all in on AI - these companies are late stage and the AI narrative is the only growth story so the market doesn't reward them for investing in anything else
* Cheap globally accessible labor
* Lack of enforcement of anti-trust means stodgy uncompetitive markets with players that make their margin through rent-seeking rather than increasing production or quality of goods and services.
* Poor investments and corruption in our healthcare system make it really expensive to hire Americans
* Poor investments and corruption in education make many Americans unsuitable for high skilled work.
It's heavily cyclical for reasons I don't understand. It skyrocketed to 45% after the housing crash. It tends to peak in the low to mid 20s. We're currently at 25%. Definitely yellow journalism for now. And as for the article - if your parents name you Tequila, get a name change.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5704756#:~:text=Are%20...
No one can truely understand how grueling this is until they see this happen. My girlfriend recently had a hard time finding a new gig. Entry level office jobs are doing >7 rounds. Phone, recruiter, HR, manager, manager + team member, manager + skip level, ... etc.
Whats even worse is all the people in your life who are older can't understand this at all.
I tried to explain getting ghosted, ghost jobs, online applying, multi-round interviews to my grandma. It just does not make sense. It has never been like this, why is it like this now?
That's people over 50. Millenials are basically out of job market once losing the current job. I haven't heard anyone from younger generations in my vicinity getting a serious stable job either, and there is nowhere to emigrate to this time.
> I tried to explain getting ghosted, ghost jobs, online applying, multi-round interviews to my grandma. It just does not make sense.
There is no job.
It's much riskier to hire the wrong employee now. If a bad hire is made, it takes around 2 quarters to build the paper trail needed to be litigation-proof when firing.
Additionally, work is much more streamlined now - it is safe to expect that an employee can wear multiple hats. Engineers are expected to have basic Project, UX, and Product Management skills now. PMs are expected to have basic Project, UX, Sales, FP&A, Marketing, and/or Engineering skills now. Execs are primarily promoted from ICs and are expected to be able to dive into the coalface.
Furthermore, companies are now judged based on cashflow positivity, not just growth, so a hire has to be the right hire because tech salaries can make-or-break the P&L of a feature.
As such there is much less tolerance for the wrong hire.
Basically, modern hiring is about efficency and optimization.
You may hate it, but that's the reality. No one has a legal obligation to hire you or optimize for a simplified process.
You can't do anything about it, so you will have to think about how to find that edge.
I understand that it might be shocking for a young person who has never lived through this before. It also sucks to enter the job market at the bottom of one of these cycles. The bottom almost never lasts more than a year or two, which seems like an eternity while you are in it.
The article opens with someone who was making six-figures at 47 years old in a low-cost-of-living part of the country. They’ve seen a few of these cycles already and with a modicum of prudent planning would be well-positioned to ride it out.
Farming economies ran out of land, not jobs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour
One of the issues with tech is that if you make $250k in a good year, you are taxed on that. Whereas if you're then unemployed the next year, you don't get anything back as if you had only made $120k. It should work that you can recuperate paid taxes if you're laid off so that those in volatile industries (which tech is) actually pay their average salary. The tax code is set upon the belief that income is consistent for individuals, when it is not today. This is just an example of things I've seen that seem unfair to me. It's crazy someone can go from making $600k and taxed to their teeth to making nothing for the next two years, and if they had instead made $200k per year, they would have ended up better off (not due to spending, just due to taxation).
Typically this only makes sense when experiencing big changes in income due to our tax brackets. But when it does happen it can help a lot and saves tens of thousands of euros.
Nah, this is the end of it. It's going to convulse a bit and hurt as we get this sorted out, but we're literally in the midst of both a political, social, and economic revolution right now, and everyone seems to mostly be doomscrolling through it.
What we get on the other side? I have no idea, but it's kind of funny to watch people gnash their teeth at this stuff. I mean, it sucks if you can't find a job, I get it, but the only real play is to "embrace the chaos" and adapt to the changing times. This might be the first time "we" have had to deal with this sort of uncertainty and chaos, but historically we're regressing to the mean.
Personally, I bought land in the woods last year when I saw this starting to occur, my "startup" (read lifestyle business) is vibe coding apps while people still bother to pay for that and doing hydroponics.
If we can somehow get inflation under control it will trigger lower interest rates and hiring will increase again. But the current, and possibly only, strategy is to stagnate wage growth and increase the number of people out of work so that the economy has less money circulating in order to reduce inflation.
I've lived through a few of these. Its definitely cyclical.
I do think this time is a little bit different. I don't think a lot of these jobs are coming back. Maybe ever.
I'm not saying I'm some crazy woodland luddite maniac, I mean, I'll be tailscaling into the business VPS from the cabin... but... yeah, I think this time is a bit different. I think stuff like this has happened before with like "John Henry was a Steel Driving Man" sort of vibes? But a lot of people are going to try to out-machine the machines right now, and I think that's a losing strategy?
We'll see in 10 years, and I'm in a bit of a privileged position that I'm able to do this, so I don't envy the folks who are struggling right now? But, more concretely, I do think this is different. Interest rates are absolutely part of it, but there's so much deviation from the historical norms right now that I think normalcy bias is a loosing move.
Personally, I'm adapting - also, I'm playing with robots, but that's mostly because it's fun.
But also, it seemed pretty synergistic given how things are going. I guess it definitely made the sale a little easier to stomach.
- higher interest rates
- section 174
Interest rates have fallen, not to near 0 as they were, but down from highs with no apparent effect.
I used to agree with your statement, but it's feeling more and more it's not true.
Hey it turns out that going from decades of stability to 1 or 2 years of total fuckaroundery has economic impacts. Who knew?
This on top of the general trend that the post-ww2 USA gravy train has been ending for a couple decades now.
If there was any standardized measure, a Grift Index if you will, then that would surely be showing exponential growth for certain players.
~ https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-16-2026is just the latest in an extraordinary personal achievement by just one of the current crop of players.
here's mine: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/13/venezuela-oil-sales-qatar-ch...
Democrats Push for Transparency on Venezuelan Oil Money Controlled by U.S. - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/11/us/venezuela-oil-money-de... | https://archive.today/pWvLH - February 11th, 2026
Trump’s Claim to Venezuelan Oil Money Draws Scrutiny in Congress - https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/us/politics/trumps-claim-... | https://archive.today/xhNT9 - January 7th, 2026 (“President Trump’s declaration that he would personally control the proceeds from oil produced in Venezuela drew instant condemnation on Wednesday from Democrats in Congress who noted that the president had no constitutional authority for such an undertaking.”)
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/16/prediction-markets-insider-...
This is why people keep hearing "the job market is fine" and believing it. The headline numbers are misleading.
Look at last year: official figures reported 600K+ new jobs, which were later revised down to 181K. It's not statistical noise. That's a systematic pattern of overstating job growth that's been happening since the Biden administration, with virtually no accountability. Of course current admin is going to like it.
This month is no different. The report shows strong hiring concentrated in health care, which already seems odd and it directly contradicts ADP data showing only modest job gains. That gap almost certainly means another revision is coming. But here's the thing: revisions rarely make headlines. The inflated original numbers do.
tl;dr: The job market isn't strong. The numbers are cooked.
- Laid off from a startup. Startups are inherently volatile, should have planned ahead.
- H-1B (it seems), needs to find a job AND sponsorship, far more difficult than what the average US citizen will face
- Contract work again, ran its full course
- Communications degrees are difficult to find employment with anyway
These examples are egregiously bad considering HN has loads of great examples for proving this article’s thesis. At least we can be sure ChatGPT didn’t write this article because it surely would have urged better examples.
The 6-12 months needed to find a job is a worrisome economic predictor and isn’t effectively communicated by unemployment rates alone.