I've been casually job hunting for a couple months since rounds of layoffs started at my company.
I've applied to umpteen places and haven't had a single callback. In my twenty+ years working as a dev, this is the worst I've seen it since about 2005.
It is difficult to balance the competing priorities of "home ownership is widely affordable" and "home prices must always go up".
When the balance is not broadly possible, our system seems to favor "home prices must always go up", at least in the short term.
It's basically illegal to build dense homes in most cities. And despite what people say, the vacancy rate is at historic lows so its not just "people are keeping them empty"
Its a disgrace that people deny the supply crunch we are in
Why get out of a 3-4% loan just to get into a 7-8% loan?
Homes are unaffordable to most. Even if you sell your house for a million dollar where will You move to?
As far jobs are concerned the job market is completely fucked up. Their is oversupply and there are no wage increase.
It does not take a genius to understand why there is no mobility.
In a way this is the ultimate goal of conservatism in its literal sense to conserve. The rich want have their place in society safely entrenched at the top, with no risk of people rising from below to displace them. Those at the bottom should stay locked in there and work and toil because that is the natural order of things.
WSJ seems to block the normal archives, but absent a gift link, this twitter referral seems to work:
Nobody is switching jobs because if you move you likely have to switch two jobs rather than just one.
Improving mobility means that you have to make a single earner household a viable pathway again. That means bring house prices down and subsidizing childcare.
Which would cost a bunch of billionaires a couple of pennies. So it will never happen.
Lack of universal healthcare is the single greatest hurdle to job mobility and entrepreneurship in America in my opinion.
Unprecedented mobility allowed unprecedented competition. The core of the problem is that when there's a job posting or a house for sale, you're competing not only with people in your local area, but also with people from all over the world. For example, in my city HALF of home sales are to foreigners. The effect is that top x% keeps amassing wealth, while the rest suffers from brain drain and depopulation. Literally same problem as Tinder - it promised men to date all over the world, in effect it made them compete with other men from all over the world, and nobody's getting dates.
The problem will fix itself when moving to a big city completely stops being a viable option, and average Joe will be forced to live in bumfuck nowhere. Once enough Joes stay in bumfuck nowhere, they'll eventually build a working small-scale local economy.
There aren’t enough homes or jobs. What do?
The economy isn't doing bad, it's just not there and everyone is still pretending.
Just a single data point against this. I got interviews with 4 companies out of 30 or so I applied to. Cleared all the onsites. Think FAANG, famous hedge fund, popular data analytics platform, and defense. 4 different industries. Job market's not the best, but it's also not that bad if you have 5 YOE+. Offers were good, ~$50-100K over my current pay.
So many people are using AI during the interviews to cheat, as long as you don't use AI and are good at leetcode, probably not that hard to snag an offer. I also interview people at a FAANG, and #1 reason to reject people these days is AI use. If you don't use AI and can leetcode and system design, you're pretty solid and will stand out from other half-baked candidates.
https://archive.md/ZH1ab