I read anecdotally that consulting firms are hiring. Seems yucky but a job's a job.
Any sectors that are immune? layoffs.fyi paints a scary picture.
Unless we want to restart the "NBER decides what a recession is" gaslighting.
But maybe you can give an example of one that resulted simply from fear or self fulfilling prophecy?
I jut wonder why the economy goes through such cycles and how to break that cycle.
Usually when significant inflation is created prices go up across the board (what we are seeing now) or prices stay relatively still, when they would have normally gone down due to more efficient production (2010s).
Secondly, I don't think we need to worry yet. We're seeing layoffs, but layed off people getting hired very quickly.
Thirdly, in such an environment, don't be so picky. Doesn't matter if it's yucky if it pays the bills.
Lastly, quit watching layoffs.fyi. Like most media it's by design only bad news. Breathe. Everything will be ok.
I wanted to help but it was too late. Felt kind of bad, then I realized that was a dumb thing to feel.
USD Inflation has been pretty high recently. Perhaps keep your cash in some other currency?
Living in EU I was thinking to diversify cash to USD.
Do you recommend any other currency?
Doubt you meant it to be friend but this is pretty insulting. I've worked in consulting for 6 years and much prefer it to the 5 years I spent in products. I get to learn at a very deep level about various production processes and the real problems that affect actual workers. I then get to collaboratively build solutions which help those people. Consulting isn't all figuring out how to upsell clients on some cloud consumption they don't need.
My experience has been has consulting is very lucrative, very intense work, with periods of being paid to sit on a chair and do nothing because of (corporate reason if the day here).
Furthermore, you’re never “part of the team”, you’re “that extra guy who leaves in 12-18 weeks”, and although you form lots of trivial connections, you don’t stay around long enough to form deep relationships with any work colleagues.
There are also plenty of “cog in the machine” consultancy firms that just hire whatever random dickhead and give them a training course or two then fob them off to companies that need an expert in whatever the flavour of the day is. You join the ranks of consultants, you get the skeptical looks from other folk who’ve encountered clueless consultants. For better or worse, you get judged for it.
If that’s what you’re into, sure. …but it’s not a great job for everyone.
Yucky doesn’t necessarily mean “slimly sales job”; it might just mean, not a comfy 9-5 job.
(My experience working at various small - medium startups for most of the past decade)
Anecdotally, I've done the consulting circuit and similarly respond with an instinctive "yuck".
Comment was really there to help kickstart discussion on what jobs/sectors/companies will continue to hire (e.g. someone posted an insight that defense demand is strong). I still have my job at a big name tech firm but I don't know how others (or myself) will be able to get a job at the same/similar brand (doing AI/infra) in the next year. As others have commented, companies benefiting from low-interest, high demand will be under belt-tightening for a while (not even sure if we will be out of this mess in a year).
So, look for jobs at companies with solutions that solve actual problems for people or companies.
1. there is company bloat everywhere. Too many people going to work and 'hiding' instead of working.
2. tech is 10x better these days. You can do way more with way less.
As for weathering it, tech is still the fastest growing sector out there. It won't be hard to find a job.
If companies don’t need as many employees in tech where the bloat is then why would they hire them back in the same proportion with new jobs? If they hire them back in a much smaller proportion then it would be hard to find a job, no?
If you’re interested in top-10 tech companies, just know it’ll be difficult to find a job. Otherwise there are still tech companies posting high profits out there.
I have plenty of liquid capital to outlast a 2-3yr period of unemployment if the worst happens. Very unlikely but possible hence why I keep the cushion I have.
If however there is a big recession and a big market downturn and I'm not laid off in the process I intend to aggressively buy securities with that big cushion I built up over the last few years instead.
Not sure what else one can do when the bond market has moved so sharply of late. At this point a recession is priced in and the bond market while it's too optimistic sometimes is very rarely too pessimistic. So I would say it's coming no matter what because the forces that be have decided it will come.
I did try to investigate Cleantech jobs last cycle, back in mid 2021, and didn't have a great experience, personally. Most of the jobs posted seemed to fall into one of two buckets:
1 - Startups that "helped companies go carbon neutral", i.e. they accept money from the business, skim some off the top (for their business), and funnel it towards various clean initiatives, then send some certificate to the company showing they've offset X amount of carbon. It just doesn't seem much different than a grift to me, and there's various issues with carbon offsets that John Oliver goes into here[2]. Also regardless of whether it's a grift or not, that sounds like totally uninteresting tech to work on.
2 - Startups that bill themselves as helping companies get more efficient, i.e. help improve their logistics or make their electric grids "smart" to save energy, etc. Problem with that is that already seems like something a company wants and tries to do anyway, and while yes in the short term it does seem like that results in wasting less energy and saves resources, in the long term, it just allows the company to ramp up further and use even more energy and resources. Like two companies with the most efficient logistics in the world are Amazon and Walmart, and that just let them become even more massive.
So wading thruogh all that to find more interesting Cleantech companies I found to be difficult. I did go forward with a few recruiters anyway, and at least with the companies I went forward with they were terrible at scheduling interviews and also seemed to top out at fairly low wages compared to other companies anyway (like I was seeing 120k at the top of the range for even architect roles, and I wasn't super keen on working for that little).
In the end the companies that extended offers were all consulting firms, so I ended up in kind of the opposite realm anyway.
But hey, clean and climate tech are apparently hiring a lot right now, so they're an option if you're worried about your job elsewhere.
Also if someone is in this field and has had a different experience than I have had, please let me know. I'd like to feel like I'm helping more than hurting for the world, just haven't found anything that sorta fits my skills (primarily web and games) that seemed worthwhile.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/05/laid-off-climate-tech-is-l...
It might not have been Bray but it was someone in the XML world circa 2006.
Defense industry is hiring big time.
It seems the exciting industries are falling apart, but the “old boring” industries are doing just fine.
Insurance, medical tech, government, and defense are hiring.
Come to think of it, insurance, medicine, and defense are probably the oldest industries around.
