this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2025
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U.S. Tech Layoffs Hit Two-Decade High in October (thefivepost.com)
submitted 4 days ago by cm0002@ttrpg.network to c/usa@midwest.social
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[–] bassomitron@lemmy.world 25 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Shit is bleak. I work in the government and have started casually applying to jobs in the private sector (missing 3 checks is really shitty). Luckily, I have a savings buffer and my wife works, but that's not going to last forever and her income isn't enough to support us indefinitely. But there's barely anything that offers comparable salary/benefits and/or is either near me or allows remote work. My niece graduated from university with a degree in comp sci and has been looking for a junior developer job since February of this year.

Hell, you go on the DevOps subreddit and there's countless posts of people witnessing the same terrible tech job market. It's really depressing.

[–] argueswithidiots@lemmy.world 9 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I feel for you, and I hope this works out for you in the end. I'm in the private sector, and have been actively searching and applying for a year, and I've spoken to two recruiters. I'm pretty well qualified for the roles I've been applying to, but it's a fairly niche skill set so it's been maybe 70-80 applications over the course of the past year.

I've never been happier to have been out of the government; I left a few years ago.

[–] bassomitron@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

So are you presently employed but just applying for a better job? Sorry if I'm misreading, pretty hungover and exhausted.

[–] argueswithidiots@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

You're not misreading. It was an attempt at commentary on the current state of the job market, specifically at fintechs. This is not the same job market from even just a couple years ago, at least iny experience of it. I realize two different people within the same subset of the market can have markedly different experiences . But for me, I can't even get someone to talk to me beyond a couple of recruiter contacts which went nowhere once the hiring manager got involved.

I'm not looking for a better job necessarily, just a different one. I'm in a volatile industry which is beset by a reliance on utilization percentage to justify continued employment. There is a level of constant anxiety to every aspect of the job and it's driving me slowly insane. Or maybe not slowly.

[–] the_q@lemmy.zip -5 points 4 days ago (3 children)

AI is taking your job and a lot of you are still advocating for its usefulness.

[–] cm0002@ttrpg.network 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

In a just, reasonable world it wouldn't matter because the governments would be doing logical things like rolling out some sort of UBI program to catch people or ensuring basic needs are met job or no job, setting up retraining programs for people to easily pivot etc.

It is useful, it's the governments of the world response to its job elimination that's the problem

[–] the_q@lemmy.zip 0 points 4 days ago (1 children)

How is it useful?

[–] aReallyCrunchyLeaf@lemmy.ml 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Ultra Google search, textbook/tutor machine, boilerplate code generator, context explainer, etc. it's being wildly oversold, overvalued, and in classic capitalist style American companies are happy to trash the environment in order to make a buck, but those are issues baked into the system, not the technology of LLMs in general. It sucks for pretty much 90% of what it's being sold as so people are rightly recoiling from it, but it does have a use.

Naturally, China has figured out how to do it for 1/100th of the economic and environmental cost.

Also in my personal experience, most IT folks I work with are skeptical at best towards it and almost none of them are comfortable letting it anywhere near production. Pretty much as a rule the people extolling it's virtues are categorically the dumbest fucking slobbering morons you've ever met in your life.

[–] argueswithidiots@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

This is the answer.

It's not AI, it's a super searcher. Once you ask it to start making decisions, or choices for you, is when you've lost the plot. I use it like that, just as a tool because it can aggregate disparate data much faster than me alone. I spend the time saved checking what it tells me, but I've found quite useful in limited situations with solid guardrails.

[–] aReallyCrunchyLeaf@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

Yeah. "AI" is marketing jargon. It's just a new, novel translation tool.

A big problem our society faces now is that the people who have the ability to shove a thing like AI into every corner of our digital lives are the same dingdongs that stand to gain from its widespread adoption. We essentially have no say in whether or not we want to use it, because we are locked into all their closed source platforms and if they want to make your phone into an AI slop bucket, they can and they absolutely will.

These freaks got too trigger happy though. They've been salivating for years for the next big thing after the cloud paradigm shift of the mid 2010's. That was the last time tech got a major marketing lift and they're pissed because they're stagnating. Hardware is slowing down, everyone's got a supercomputer in their pocket, everyone's on the cloud, and they can only enshittify so much before people swap products (something capitalists fucking HATE is when they're actually forced to compete on making a good product). This was the answer to their prayers. A shining star. A machine that steals what already exists and spits it back at you. Limitless ability to plunder with zero responsibility to actually build a product anyone whats to buy. It's perfect!

But they fucked up. A healthy society could have taken the time to let this thing breathe and realized this is not the next big paradigm shift that will revolutionize the world. Well, it will, but only because they're forcing it to. Cloud was genuinely a powerful tool. This is barely more useful than Google translate. Its widespread, forced adoption will mark the beginning of a series of deliberate self-owns that the tech industry inflicts upon itself in order to try and squeeze every last drop out of the internet and the people of the world until they enshittify their products so much that they will be literally unusable for their originally intended purpose.

As usual, I take solace in the fact that despite them being hailed as genius visionaries, these are truly some of the dumbest fucking people to ever live. Jobs was an abusive terrorist, but at least the guy had a cult of personality. These fucking dweebs are so comically repulsive, they are one hundred thousand percent guaranteed to fuck this up. If it didn't stand to literally ruin the lives of many people I know and care about, I would be giddy at the thought of pointing and laughing at their sniveling piss baby faces when they cry and moan to the US government after they blow up the economy.

[–] argueswithidiots@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I love everything about the way this written.

Kudos, sir.

[–] aReallyCrunchyLeaf@lemmy.ml 2 points 3 days ago

Hey thanks, lol

[–] auraithx@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 3 days ago

How can you not love fully automated space communism

[–] explodicle@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 days ago

How are these at odds? Doing a job is useful. The problem is clearly our economic system.