* 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.
The biggest jumps in the past 50 years appear to coincide with W Bush and Obama administrations. They certainly did have tariffs then, but were they responsible there? How about corruption? AI was not, but there was an analogous dot com bubble but by 2000 and beyond we were on the other side of it and tech demand was actually bursting! Not long after which unemployment went up, so it wasn't the overinflated bubble that caused unemployment. Cheap globally accessible labor has not just recently become available. Anti-trust was pretty weak for a long time. Healthcare system is terribly expensive and corrupt and arguably Obamacare made it worse.
>Cheap globally accessible labor has not just recently become available. Anti-trust was pretty weak for a long time. Healthcare system is terribly expensive and corrupt and arguably Obamacare made it worse.
It's good that you pointed out some of the examples that may not be wholly responsible, but have surely compounded over quite some time and may very well be worse on the ground than the most realistic statistics could ever measure very meaningfully.
I wouldn't say the bullet points are hit or miss, more like some home-runs and some bunts.
Good chart from the FED, but experience has shown that 2010 to 2012 was a noth.ing.burger compared to 1976 nor 1983. You ain't seen no "real" recession yet.
And that's the most highly referenced statistic we have so it shows how widely skewed and unrealistic it can be to take things like this at face value when it comes to comparing data over time.
Remember currency had huge changes in real value at different points while its face value stayed the same, and the purpose of these charts was to not let that seem like the dominating factor.
Same as the purpose of inventing GDP in such a way there could never be valid comparison to traditional GNP.
Edit: not my downvote, corrective upvote actually, that's the most accurate data there is so it's still better to have than nothing, and to gather what it means when you understand its undercurrents for over 50 full years first hand
Ah don't worry about the downvotes, my post was confrontational and a lot of people are not capable of coping with that. I was not trying to single you out though. I don't doubt you have experience and reasons for what you've said, problem is so does everybody, even "actual" economists never seem to agree on anything much.
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.
It's different this time because the build-up since the last recession (excluding pandemic which didn't cause real recession but instead added more coal to the fire) has been the longest in history by far. Unless economists learned to prevent recessions, which is very unlikely, long build-up may mean spectacular crash. On the other hand, it may indicate that we are in a recession, hence the graph's similarities to 2007-2009 period, but it's just going to take a long time and then crash spectacularly, too. I am just speculating but it "feels" that way.
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.
Between 1950 and 2008 it briefly spiked above 20 six times total. Since 2008, the number never meaningfully fell below 20, staying in the 30-40 zone between 2008 and 2015, and then hovering between 20 and 25 since then. Yes, it's obvious that the status quo has changed.
IMO the reason is that there's simply more paper trail behind you. If you fall behind once, it's not like you can get your things, change name, and start a new life in another state.
> if your parents name you Tequila, get a name change.
I want to be named Charizard but my country doesn't allow name change.
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.
You're talking to the ones who were not among this category of unemployment statistics.
Their experience is just as real if they never faced as tough a market personally, but it is pure survivor bias.
For many of the other over-70's now, the ones who are still living could often tell you how in the 1970's there would be hundreds of applicants for every entry-level job of any kind. Many with advanced degrees.
You want to work for minimum wage, bus tables in a restaurant or collect trash for the sanitation department? Too bad, the odds are overwhelmingly against you whether you have current experience in the field or not.
>There is no job.
Exactly. That's the way it was, only much worse then.
Still, right now things are looking gradually worse as misguided financial macro forces are gathering steam, without the more mature influence that would make a positive difference.
As for "status-quo" that actually can be something stable, and worth working your way up to reach sometimes. Although very often regarded as mediocrity OTOH.
This type of financial malfeasance is so familiar that I think the better terminology is the SNAFU.
Roger. Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.
There's just a new normal now you're expected to accept.
> It has never been like this, why is it like this now?
Imagine you have a hiring panel of 20 people, and you are a member of it. It's obvious that the whole process is completely broken. What's your correct move? If you improve the hiring process, the size of the hiring panel will be reduced from 20 people to 5, which means there's 75% chance you'll be fired. Congratulations, you played yourself. Instead, the correct move is to keep making the hiring process as bad as possible, so that the company expands the hiring panel even further, which lowers the risk of you being fired.
When you take a look at why soviet economy failed, the biggest issue was that the system actually rewarded inefficient institutions, allocating to them more resources, while punishing efficient institutions. Exactly the same problems exist within a single capitalist company.
On top of that, the employment has shifted from small business to large corporations. The best example is food delivery - 10 years ago you would've been hired directly by the restaurant, which means that either restaurants would freely compete for workers or workers would compete for restaurants, depending on the market. But nowadays either everyone deals with whatever bullshit UberEats pulls off or you're out of the game.
That's a simplified example I used to explain the point. Of course you rarely have people whose job is nothing but hiring, but often you have people whose all responsibilities revolve around inefficient processes, and making these processes efficient threatens their jobs.
TurboTax is a great example of this - the entire purpose of their existence is to make sure that filling taxes is as complicated as possible so that people keep using their services. In other countries simpler and cheaper tax systems are used, but if such a system was adopted in the US, the entire business model of TurboTax would immediately collapse, so they will fight tooth and nail against any improvement.
> 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.
Edit: can't reply
> There is a thing called employment at will. Particularly in California. Makes firing fast.
That doesn't protect you as an employer from litigation over Unfair Dismissal or Wrongful Termination
> There is nothing particularly risky about firing employees in many cases
Depends on how much documentation you have and how egregious of a mistake the offending employee has had, as the line between perf-based (allowed) and pretextual (not allowed) termination is thin
> economy covers basics, and not enough new companies appear to offer new good products.
A highly performant and impactful company is orthogonal to mass employment.
Compare Costco with Walmart - Costco pays superior salaries and benefits compared to Walmart with significant upward mobility and is able to outcompete Walmart's revenue per employee.
But Costco only employed 341k people compared to Walmart 2.1 million. The reality is Costco is very employer supportive but also significantly more selective about the employees they hire.
---
Life is competitive. You will have to compete no matter what.
> It's much riskier to hire the wrong employee now. If a bad hire is made...
There is a thing called employment at will. Particularly in California. Makes firing fast.
There is nothing particularly risky about firing employees in many cases. 2 months firing is a joke compared with 4 months at least, which those same companies spend looking for talent.
The main reason is not enough ideas what to do - economy covers basics, and not enough new companies appear to offer new good products.
>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.
Now? That's been the case since at least the 1980s, at least in non-union jobs.
What makes you think things were different before the "now" you reference?
> What makes you think things were different before the "now" you reference?
Unemployment insurance premiums. [0]
Employers pay variable UI premiums and state UI funds now use Experience Ratings to increase insurance premiums on those companies where employees are not being fired for-cause, and states are challenging for-cause because the majority of state unemployment funds remain insolvent after 2008 and 2020 [1]. As such, UI funds have an incentive to challenge a for-cause termination in order to justify increasing the insurance premium for an employer.
> That's been the case since at least the 1980s, at least in non-union jobs
States weren't attempting to increase premiums on employees to the same degree as they are today versus the 1980s. Most UI funds in the US entered insolvency in 2008 and never recovered, and whoever scraped by in 2008 got whammied in 2020 during the COVID pandemic.
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).
If you know about this ahead of time, and can be a contractor, then forming a corporation that is its own tax entity gives you this in the US. I did exactly this in the mid-90s when 9 months of work was suddenly going to yield 4-5x what I had made the previous year, then I would lose the position immediately after, and I knew I would need a break at that point. I paid myself the regular salary whether the corporation was making a lot or making nothing. The corporation had to pay taxes on the profit the first year, but it could deduct the loses against those profits in later years. The same thing happened 5 years later. All my work for a decade was through the corporation I had formed. You can also do things like have a company car (with the company deducting insurance, gas, maintenance, etc.), rent your home office to the company, and much more. US tax laws are much better for corporations and their owners than for individuals.
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.
Best we can do is loss recognition for the capital class.
But take comfort knowing that the company that fired you probably won't have to pay taxes this year, and will be able to carry the loss forward even in years of profitability. And that the owners of the company stock were able to use the loss in value of their stock to offset their taxes as well.
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.
> Interest rates are relatively high compared to what they were several years ago.
And compared to last 50 years, Interest rates are still WAY lower, and unemployment is still WAY higher.
Make no mistake: Sure, the "curve" of unemployment trends downwards as interest rates drop [1]. But the "base" of unemployment is constantly increasing with each cycle [2]. There is no reality of unemployment rate going back to what it was before.
It's easy to be unaware of this pattern if one is constantly re-employed and never part of the 27-week unemployed graph, or if the point of reference is just the post-2000 or post-2008 crisis.
But 20% baseline of people who are unemployed more than 27 weeks. Let that sink in. It's pretty insane. And that baseline is only increasing.
What the OP commenter says has truth in data to it: Unemployment increase is not a linear scale of a working society. It's driven by tipping points where major changes happen (e.g. the current political changes in US).
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.
This is kind of a silly take. It’s not like there’s much else I can do but prepare in the best way I think I can. I actually am really optimistic about how things will work out, but it’s going to be weird for a bit
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.
The American economy and GDP was driven by consumer spending (around 68%). Who knew if you offshored the jobs, pushed an ever increasing share of capital to higher tax brackets and away from consumers, and then started replacing consumer/workers with AI, that a consumer driven economy would drop off?
And since our taxation system is also primarily worker funded (over 50%) and during times of loss businesses/capitalists can write off a ton of their share of the tax burden, we're in for a lot of pain.
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.”)
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.
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.
* 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.
Not to be rude, but is this just a list of your feelings on the matter or is there real data and consensus behind them?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS13025703
The biggest jumps in the past 50 years appear to coincide with W Bush and Obama administrations. They certainly did have tariffs then, but were they responsible there? How about corruption? AI was not, but there was an analogous dot com bubble but by 2000 and beyond we were on the other side of it and tech demand was actually bursting! Not long after which unemployment went up, so it wasn't the overinflated bubble that caused unemployment. Cheap globally accessible labor has not just recently become available. Anti-trust was pretty weak for a long time. Healthcare system is terribly expensive and corrupt and arguably Obamacare made it worse.
>Cheap globally accessible labor has not just recently become available. Anti-trust was pretty weak for a long time. Healthcare system is terribly expensive and corrupt and arguably Obamacare made it worse.
It's good that you pointed out some of the examples that may not be wholly responsible, but have surely compounded over quite some time and may very well be worse on the ground than the most realistic statistics could ever measure very meaningfully.
I wouldn't say the bullet points are hit or miss, more like some home-runs and some bunts.
Good chart from the FED, but experience has shown that 2010 to 2012 was a noth.ing.burger compared to 1976 nor 1983. You ain't seen no "real" recession yet.
And that's the most highly referenced statistic we have so it shows how widely skewed and unrealistic it can be to take things like this at face value when it comes to comparing data over time.
Remember currency had huge changes in real value at different points while its face value stayed the same, and the purpose of these charts was to not let that seem like the dominating factor.
Same as the purpose of inventing GDP in such a way there could never be valid comparison to traditional GNP.
Edit: not my downvote, corrective upvote actually, that's the most accurate data there is so it's still better to have than nothing, and to gather what it means when you understand its undercurrents for over 50 full years first hand
Ah don't worry about the downvotes, my post was confrontational and a lot of people are not capable of coping with that. I was not trying to single you out though. I don't doubt you have experience and reasons for what you've said, problem is so does everybody, even "actual" economists never seem to agree on anything much.
Them starting their graph at 2021 made me look up the actual data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS13025703
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.
It's different this time because the build-up since the last recession (excluding pandemic which didn't cause real recession but instead added more coal to the fire) has been the longest in history by far. Unless economists learned to prevent recessions, which is very unlikely, long build-up may mean spectacular crash. On the other hand, it may indicate that we are in a recession, hence the graph's similarities to 2007-2009 period, but it's just going to take a long time and then crash spectacularly, too. I am just speculating but it "feels" that way.
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.
The level seems to be increasing, clearly, despite the cyclical components
Between 1950 and 2008 it briefly spiked above 20 six times total. Since 2008, the number never meaningfully fell below 20, staying in the 30-40 zone between 2008 and 2015, and then hovering between 20 and 25 since then. Yes, it's obvious that the status quo has changed.
IMO the reason is that there's simply more paper trail behind you. If you fall behind once, it's not like you can get your things, change name, and start a new life in another state.
> if your parents name you Tequila, get a name change.
I want to be named Charizard but my country doesn't allow name change.
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]
[1]: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5704756#:~:text=Are%20...
Seems?
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.
There is no job.
>That's people over 50.
50 is not well-enough experienced.
You're talking to the ones who were not among this category of unemployment statistics.
Their experience is just as real if they never faced as tough a market personally, but it is pure survivor bias.
For many of the other over-70's now, the ones who are still living could often tell you how in the 1970's there would be hundreds of applicants for every entry-level job of any kind. Many with advanced degrees.
You want to work for minimum wage, bus tables in a restaurant or collect trash for the sanitation department? Too bad, the odds are overwhelmingly against you whether you have current experience in the field or not.
>There is no job.
Exactly. That's the way it was, only much worse then.
Still, right now things are looking gradually worse as misguided financial macro forces are gathering steam, without the more mature influence that would make a positive difference.
As for "status-quo" that actually can be something stable, and worth working your way up to reach sometimes. Although very often regarded as mediocrity OTOH.
This type of financial malfeasance is so familiar that I think the better terminology is the SNAFU.
Roger. Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.
There's just a new normal now you're expected to accept.
Same situation though :(
> It has never been like this, why is it like this now?
Imagine you have a hiring panel of 20 people, and you are a member of it. It's obvious that the whole process is completely broken. What's your correct move? If you improve the hiring process, the size of the hiring panel will be reduced from 20 people to 5, which means there's 75% chance you'll be fired. Congratulations, you played yourself. Instead, the correct move is to keep making the hiring process as bad as possible, so that the company expands the hiring panel even further, which lowers the risk of you being fired.
When you take a look at why soviet economy failed, the biggest issue was that the system actually rewarded inefficient institutions, allocating to them more resources, while punishing efficient institutions. Exactly the same problems exist within a single capitalist company.
On top of that, the employment has shifted from small business to large corporations. The best example is food delivery - 10 years ago you would've been hired directly by the restaurant, which means that either restaurants would freely compete for workers or workers would compete for restaurants, depending on the market. But nowadays either everyone deals with whatever bullshit UberEats pulls off or you're out of the game.
> If you improve the hiring process, the size of the hiring panel will be reduced from 20 people to 5, which means there's 75% chance you'll be fired.
Wait, what?
That only makes sense if the hiring panel is made up exclusively of people whose job is nothing but hiring.
That has never been the case anywhere I have worked or seen.
That's a simplified example I used to explain the point. Of course you rarely have people whose job is nothing but hiring, but often you have people whose all responsibilities revolve around inefficient processes, and making these processes efficient threatens their jobs.
TurboTax is a great example of this - the entire purpose of their existence is to make sure that filling taxes is as complicated as possible so that people keep using their services. In other countries simpler and cheaper tax systems are used, but if such a system was adopted in the US, the entire business model of TurboTax would immediately collapse, so they will fight tooth and nail against any improvement.
> 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.
Edit: can't reply
> There is a thing called employment at will. Particularly in California. Makes firing fast.
That doesn't protect you as an employer from litigation over Unfair Dismissal or Wrongful Termination
> There is nothing particularly risky about firing employees in many cases
Depends on how much documentation you have and how egregious of a mistake the offending employee has had, as the line between perf-based (allowed) and pretextual (not allowed) termination is thin
> economy covers basics, and not enough new companies appear to offer new good products.
A highly performant and impactful company is orthogonal to mass employment.
Compare Costco with Walmart - Costco pays superior salaries and benefits compared to Walmart with significant upward mobility and is able to outcompete Walmart's revenue per employee.
But Costco only employed 341k people compared to Walmart 2.1 million. The reality is Costco is very employer supportive but also significantly more selective about the employees they hire.
---
Life is competitive. You will have to compete no matter what.
> It's much riskier to hire the wrong employee now. If a bad hire is made...
There is a thing called employment at will. Particularly in California. Makes firing fast.
There is nothing particularly risky about firing employees in many cases. 2 months firing is a joke compared with 4 months at least, which those same companies spend looking for talent.
The main reason is not enough ideas what to do - economy covers basics, and not enough new companies appear to offer new good products.
>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.
Now? That's been the case since at least the 1980s, at least in non-union jobs.
What makes you think things were different before the "now" you reference?
> What makes you think things were different before the "now" you reference?
Unemployment insurance premiums. [0]
Employers pay variable UI premiums and state UI funds now use Experience Ratings to increase insurance premiums on those companies where employees are not being fired for-cause, and states are challenging for-cause because the majority of state unemployment funds remain insolvent after 2008 and 2020 [1]. As such, UI funds have an incentive to challenge a for-cause termination in order to justify increasing the insurance premium for an employer.
> That's been the case since at least the 1980s, at least in non-union jobs
States weren't attempting to increase premiums on employees to the same degree as they are today versus the 1980s. Most UI funds in the US entered insolvency in 2008 and never recovered, and whoever scraped by in 2008 got whammied in 2020 during the COVID pandemic.
[0] - https://smallbusiness.chron.com/employers-unemployment-rate-...
[1] - https://oui.doleta.gov/unemploy/docs/trustFundSolvReport2025...
So highly ramped up requirements without additional compensation but also people aren't disposable enough.
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.
The average non cyclical component of longterm unemployment has been rising steadily since the 50s tho
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.
Farming economies ran out of land, not jobs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour
Good point.
In a controlled economy when it is dialed down and or slips out-of-control and dips downward, that's what you get.
>Farming economies ran out of land, not jobs.
That's quite a bit like a macro element of nature.
Too many people for too few remaining resources either way.
I've seen this with several friends.
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).
If you know about this ahead of time, and can be a contractor, then forming a corporation that is its own tax entity gives you this in the US. I did exactly this in the mid-90s when 9 months of work was suddenly going to yield 4-5x what I had made the previous year, then I would lose the position immediately after, and I knew I would need a break at that point. I paid myself the regular salary whether the corporation was making a lot or making nothing. The corporation had to pay taxes on the profit the first year, but it could deduct the loses against those profits in later years. The same thing happened 5 years later. All my work for a decade was through the corporation I had formed. You can also do things like have a company car (with the company deducting insurance, gas, maintenance, etc.), rent your home office to the company, and much more. US tax laws are much better for corporations and their owners than for individuals.
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.
Best we can do is loss recognition for the capital class.
But take comfort knowing that the company that fired you probably won't have to pay taxes this year, and will be able to carry the loss forward even in years of profitability. And that the owners of the company stock were able to use the loss in value of their stock to offset their taxes as well.
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.
> Interest rates are relatively high compared to what they were several years ago.
And compared to last 50 years, Interest rates are still WAY lower, and unemployment is still WAY higher.
Make no mistake: Sure, the "curve" of unemployment trends downwards as interest rates drop [1]. But the "base" of unemployment is constantly increasing with each cycle [2]. There is no reality of unemployment rate going back to what it was before.
It's easy to be unaware of this pattern if one is constantly re-employed and never part of the 27-week unemployed graph, or if the point of reference is just the post-2000 or post-2008 crisis.
But 20% baseline of people who are unemployed more than 27 weeks. Let that sink in. It's pretty insane. And that baseline is only increasing.
What the OP commenter says has truth in data to it: Unemployment increase is not a linear scale of a working society. It's driven by tipping points where major changes happen (e.g. the current political changes in US).
Sources:
1. Unemployment rate last 50 years FRED graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS13025703
2. Interest rate last 50 years FRED graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFF
Wow, you're the first person I've ever heard of to buy land in the woods to prepare for the imminent economic disaster.
I mean, I also wanted land in this particular area of the woods, because I like it.
But also, it seemed pretty synergistic given how things are going. I guess it definitely made the sale a little easier to stomach.
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.
This is kind of a silly take. It’s not like there’s much else I can do but prepare in the best way I think I can. I actually am really optimistic about how things will work out, but it’s going to be weird for a bit
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.
The American economy and GDP was driven by consumer spending (around 68%). Who knew if you offshored the jobs, pushed an ever increasing share of capital to higher tax brackets and away from consumers, and then started replacing consumer/workers with AI, that a consumer driven economy would drop off?
"U.S workers just took home their smallest share of capital since 1947, at least" https://finance.yahoo.com/news/u-workers-just-took-home-2140...
And since our taxation system is also primarily worker funded (over 50%) and during times of loss businesses/capitalists can write off a ton of their share of the tax burden, we're in for a lot of pain.
I can’t think of a single angle this administration isn’t destroying America from.
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.
~ 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.
He's taking Venezuela's oil money into accounts that he controls. Who knows what this money will be used for.
citation?
here's mine: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/13/venezuela-oil-sales-qatar-ch...
“We walked back this specific grift.”
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.”)
so.. then he's not taking the money into accounts he controls, only attempted to? got it
The fact that doesn’t matter to you is the problem.
https://www.axios.com/2026/02/16/prediction-markets-insider-...
you read me wrong - it doesn't surprise me
If you're being generous you can give them some credit for arresting demographic decline. Albeit likely too little, too late.
Not sure what you mean. US population may decrease in 2026.
How so? From blocking folks from having abortions?
If anything he has facilitated further decline by stemming immigration.
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The main reasons it's much harder to get a job are:
- higher interest rates
- section 174
As I understand it, OBB reverted 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.
> Interest rates have fallen, not to near 0 as they were, but down from highs with no apparent effect.
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.
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.
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.
The Trump administration feels that accountability is only for the people who report accurate data. They get fired.
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- 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.