Job seekers face prolonged unemployment after layoffs
24 posts across 7 communities in the last 60 days; 46% from r/cscareerquestions.
“Doesn't matter how cheap something is if you can't afford it at all. Deflation assumes people still have income to spend, but mass layoffs remove the income. Also, cheaper bespoke software or automated tax services doesn't help you if you can't eat them. Food is the actual…”
“Bro this is my thing with all the people trying to claim "the market is booming," "everyone is hiring," "just take any job you can get" like sure unemployment is quite low (according to GOVERNMENT RUN websites which is its own thing to get into) but surely all of the people…”
“What to do now? any plans ? AI have replaced many people, hiring is low, countries are closing their boundaries by more strict immigration law which make now next to impossible to land a job with visa sponsorship. I need serious discussion below.”
Experienced software engineers, even those with 1.5 years of experience, struggle to find new employment following company layoffs. This creates anxiety and uncertainty about their career prospects.
SOURCES (37)
“Peak comedy for some, peak frustration for others I guess 😭 [re: Got laid off by AI (who could've thought)]”
“Rookie. My agent has completely replaced every contribution I made to my job. Now I'm unemployed.”
“Just wait until majority of white collar jobs are displaced. First you lose your job. Then you deplete your savings. Then you sell your investments as the stock market tanks. Then you default on your mortgage or can’t make rent, which will collapse the global economy Finally you get kicked to the curb and either starve or commit suicide. None of us are ready for this reality in the next decade, it’s going to be worse than the financial crisis and the Great Depression Become a plumber you say? Go”
“This is heartbreaking to read, as I find myself in a very similar position. I’m right around three months of unemployment, and I really worry about what’s gonna happen once that gap gets bigger. I wish you all the best.”
“Doesn't matter how cheap something is if you can't afford it at all. Deflation assumes people still have income to spend, but mass layoffs remove the income. Also, cheaper bespoke software or automated tax services doesn't help you if you can't eat them. Food is the actual bottleneck, and its cost is largely decoupled from LLM-driven productivity gains. Even with a fleet of farming robots doing all the labor, there's still a hard floor on food prices, because arable land is f”
“+ kept laptop/monitor, all equity vested, placement support, unemployment was paying $1,050 a week. What a time submitted by /u/PuzzleheadedSorbet36 [link] [comments]”
“Nah, this is a common urban legend. There's no duration of unemployment limit in the unemployment rate. I think the origin of this is the fact that the jobs report gives the number of unemployed, and also gives the number unemployed more than 6 months. But the latter is just a subset of the former. It's "of the 7 million unemployed, 2 million were unemployed more than 6 months."”
“Bro this is my thing with all the people trying to claim "the market is booming," "everyone is hiring," "just take any job you can get" like sure unemployment is quite low (according to GOVERNMENT RUN websites which is its own thing to get into) but surely all of the people posting about how brutal the entry level market can't ALL be lying right? If it was like ever so often that these posts got made, maybe I could get behind the argument that it's a skill/r”
“It's sucks but nothing you can do at this point. Maybe that company kept getting good clients not from social media but from somewhere else. Maybe lead generation team or something providing maximum numbers of clients. So they removed your team from the equation. I hope you af least got paid for your stay there”
“Not saying that this is necessarily untrue, but job postings on Indeed might not be the best metric. Doesn't feel like people in Germany use Indeed all that much.”
“A different time, but I know someone who was laid off around the dotcom crash but decided to take their time, and then 9/11 happened and a lot of companies really freaked out and stopped hiring. Obviously you can never predict the future or crazy one-off events like that. I'd feel more comfortable taking time off during a booming market rather than a really bad one, but neither path guarantees success or failure. Especially in these weird times, you never know if a company will suddenly star”
“Yeah I don't buy into this completely: cut every monthly subscription When unemployed the sub-$100/mo cost of a few subscriptions might be the only thing relatively affordable keeping some people sane. If my life were only job applications and looking at bills I don't think I'd last very long. Don't eat out, cancel whatever you don't actively use, limit other frivolous spending... but a $4 sub to VIZ's manga site or a $13 Spotify subscription is not what would put you und”
“What to do now? any plans ? AI have replaced many people, hiring is low, countries are closing their boundaries by more strict immigration law which make now next to impossible to land a job with visa sponsorship. I need serious discussion below. submitted by /u/Advanced-Eagle4750 [link] [comments]”
“Segueing to stock trading while I wait an see if my company recovers, which has made me more money than my day job used to... not sure i plan on going back to this industry at this point.”
“They sneakily quote their base salary and leave out the rest of their compensation.”
“Yep. Same thing happened to me at a previous company after a hostile takeover some years ago. All Canadian managers and Indian software sweatshop slaves. Pushed all Americans out. In retrospect it's so evil it's hilarious. I saw an Indian guy ask for permission to sleep in a meeting and a Canadian "scrum master" told him no. Edit: and that was PRE-AI lol, can't imagine what it's like now.”
“At the end of last year they conducted mass layoffs and have publicly signaled action towards becoming an "AI-native" operation. I'm currently trying to go through the removal of conditions process with them and it's a complete night-and-day difference from our experience 2 years ago during the initial GC process. I have tried desperately to speak to a single human being and it seems truly impossible. Every email is AI generated. AI answers their phone line. If you ask to speak”
“Maybe I should do some content streaming that pays me nothing lol.. submitted by /u/yu_ultidragon80 [link] [comments]”
“Welcome to a world who has accepted wealth inequality. This will NEVER improve as long as we don't tax the rich. By rich I mean +$100m rich. Who never have to work in their life because they have so much passive income thanks to their assets. This is now a service economy for rich people to consume. This is why we won't own a home or anything tbh. Vote for people that will tax the Ultra wealthy.”
“So Anthropic has announced a partnership with the vulture capitalists at Bain and conveniently made this announcement same day. White collar America is gone. submitted by /u/mandrakewilder [link] [comments]”
“The only things stopping the current economy from being a 'true recession' is the fact that a few large companies are passing the same several billion dollars back and forth in a circle. If you exclude that from the data, things are abysmal right now.”
“Hahaha, very fair! I guess I have felt somewhat aimless and flailing over the past year, and so I've been trying to crowdsource advice from a bunch of different people, including the good people of the local community college, while not taking her (or anyone else's) advice as gospel either. One of the more frustrating things about this predicament is that there doesn't seem to be a clear path forward for me. I feel like I am caught in a thicket where moving in any one particular dire”
“These days, the more I can hide on the internet, the better. So it can't be used against me.”
“Just got layed off yesterday after more that a year of working there. But I saw months ago that they were jsut looking for the least expensive developer to make the most amount of money for them. God this sucks.”
“If it helps, I listened to an interview with someone from Anthropic and even they think it will be genuinely difficult to replace management of processes or people. And even for writing, it would be dumb for a company to let AI write AND edit itself - at least one human will be prompting and editing it. Basically if you focus on management and editing/oversight, it will help make you more AI-proof (hopefully for at least a decade 🫠)”
“While I might agree with you, this appears to be emblematic of the future and how things are going. When more and more organisations are going down this exact path, the amount of clown shops not worth working for appears to be growing thick and fast. I have around 15-20 former colleagues on whatsapp. Historically, if someone wanted to move job, someone knew of something, could recommend, or just general shit chat. That same group over the past couple years, over half are unemployed, some for ove”
“The “positive code” is something they hide behind - they do not genuinely care for employees and are all about working them to the bone for more profit for the sake of IPO - I have seen them layoff almost entire teams”
“He doesnt need to take anything out on his 401k yet, if hes exhausted all but a month and has 0 jobs in sight, maybe, but even then it should be a LAST resort.”
“True. And hipothetically if companies fire devs, and AI comes to that ne erending loop, it basically means bankrupcy in a couple of days..”
“Yes. I'm under 90 days by a little over a week. My entire team gets severance except me.”
“Yup. I made some open source contributions during my unemployed time and the people who hired me on really seemed to love that.”
“If even someone like OP with FAANG experience can't find a job in a year, that's a pretty bad sign for the rest of us non FAANG types....”