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Ask HN: Are you negatively affected by the recent economic stagnation?

5 points by adinhitlore 1 day ago | hide | 12 comments

or is just me? looks like jobs or personal real estate sales are failing me hard...if i was younger (now late 30s) i would've considered a fake firefighter stripper path, for now i'd persist on this cursed route.

Fewer people migrate to Germany, and those who already migrated struggle to find jobs. My website helps people settle in Germany. Many of my colleagues are relocation consultants. They feel the difference. I spoke with someone at the city's talent and business promotion board and they see it too.

I have much more unemployed friends and they stay unemployed longer. Employers have started requiring fluent German.

For me, AI is a bigger threat. It wrecked my prospects as a developer, which was always my fallback if the site failed. Then LLMs and AI overviews started wrecking my traffic. It made me divert a lot of attention away from making the website helpful, towards making it resilient.

If nicbou the builder is having a hard time, that's all the economic downturn data point I need.

I share a similar sentiment about Germany. I mean, we do have a recession for a couple of years already.

As a Software Developer, I've experienced layoffs of International companies just nuking their German team, for both cost and law risks (from people trying to create a worker council and the like).

I'm still employed because of my YOE, my skills & a wide network of people that have seen the quality of my work, but I see even previous CTOs and great engineers without a job.

Maybe in the years ahead, I might need to work doing something else.

I've always wanted to go to trade school and run my own business anyways, just didn't due to software engineering being so fun, interesting, challenging and ofc, well-paid.

I've been practicing my German a lot (C1+), so in worst case scenario I can do other work, maybe become an electrician or something that involves moving atoms, rather than bits.

Do you see an impact on how people behave at work?

I have been out of work for roughly two years, though I should note that, for religious reasons, I have limited my search to positions involving Rust. Toward the end of last year, however, it seemed that the situation was beginning to improve: new job postings appeared that looked credible, and by the start of this year I had two interviews (both initiated by companies themselves). In one case, I advanced to the later stages of the process and was close to receiving an offer. So I was hopeful things will turn around.

I think, now, given what's happening in the Gulf, you can firmly assume that the recovery will fully stop; if not worse. It's safer to assume that this will not resolve any time soon. I am from near the region, and I know a few friends who had to go back to the country because their jobs/workplace was affected. So that's one job market that's now bust.

Interest rates will remain high, if not go higher. Life will get significantly more expensive with $100+ oil. This will be a global pain, unfortunately.

I am curious - what does choosing only Rust have to do with religion? Or am I taking your statement to literally?

Not the OP, but I interpreted "religious" as something like a strong, unyielding preference. As in "I wear my helmet religiously when cycling."

That’s what I thought too but didn’t want to make any assumptions. In that case it’s honestly stupid to not having income come in for two years because of a preference for a certain language.

When I’m out of job - which has only happened for a grand total of 5 weeks in 30 years including 3x where I was laid off or PIPed (Amazon 2023) - my first priority was to get any job to stop the bleeding and keep interviewing if it wasn’t what I wanted. Luckily, only once did I have to take a stop gap job/contract (2011)

See the Epistle of James (James 5:3)

"And their rust will be a witness against you and will consume your flesh like fire."

Now you've got me curious about what the Bible has to say about crustaceans, and if anyone's already created a religion around Rust [the programming language].

How have you survived for 2 years without a job?

all comes down to accumulated savings and personal burn rate. Much easier for some people than others to budget for, but generally "software developer" isn't one of the more difficult positions to earn the right to be picky...

I'm affected by inflation. Salary increases have not kept up. Not at all.

I am affected my a political choice, which is law which did happen in 2015/2016 in my country (EU member state).

This have been disastrous: the web sites of my administration have been replaced by web apps, of course requiring one of the web engines from the WHATNG cartel.