> Recent cohorts have been infected with a sense that the job market is nothing more than a game that they need to min-max

Can you blame them? Other comments mention that automating applications is just the response to automating rejections, so why wouldn't an employee min-max their job when companies are min-maxing their employees?

>It’s sad to see smart, motivated young people get their opinions on the job market from cesspools like Reddit and TikTok, which teach them that trying is lame and the only way to retain your dignity is to withhold your effort from a job, lie your way through interviews, and “quiet quit” by testing the limits of how little you can. Reddit and TikTok swoop in to rationalize this behavior as the fault of companies and CEOs, not their own decisions.

I was given Tech Lead duties after being hired as a Senior SWE, but when it came time for the promotion and pay bump at the end of this year, I kept my current title and only got a 3% pay increase. All of the feedback was good. If there was criticism or bad opinions, it was withheld. I have to wait until next year to see if I can get that now while still carrying those duties, which is ample time to look for new positions.

I was also shown a chart where I was under the 50th percentile (roughly 33%) of pay of other Senior SWEs at the company. That was a nice disclosure, but they don't want to do anything about it. That is patently saying they believe I am below average even though I am doing regular senior SWE work plus tech lead duties without the title and pay. But they don't have any feedback for that. It's possible I just accepted a lower salary and they want to keep it as low as possible.

There could be other reasons why I didn't get it, but I have to guess at those reasons. I'm not going to do more than the minimum if they don't give me actionable feedback and don't reward taking on additional duties. Their move is to not give rewards for working harder, my move is job hopping for that increase.

You can't have many of these experiences before you become jaded. I am definitely not spending a minute outside of work when I take up additional duties on the job and still don't get rewarded for it.

I'm going to act like a business of one and just take as much as I can for as little as possible throughout the career. If that means spamming LLM applications for the next position, then so be it I guess.

Playing the blame game about whether workers or businesses caused this is pretty pointless, but the simple truth is that many people get far more money for far less effort than a Senior SWE (and certainly more than manual labor at all levels below where I'm at).

All of these stories we hear paints a picture of how the world really works, so can you really blame people for getting ahead that way and not taking the path of hard work when it doesn't reward you? I don't want to be taken advantage of and be a sucker - do you?

In my whole career I've seen 0 correlation between effort and rewards.

> The vibe in some of our cohorts went from smug malaise to being very humbled when they got laid off due to their own low performance.

I saw people doing great get laid off all the same. Not really how things should work, should it?

'We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us'

I see sovietization everywhere in the country now.

Public job board listings have been spammed by fake jobs called ghost jobs. Candidates must overcome that to find real jobs, and the boards in general do not remove said postings. Candidates are forced to identify characterize and remove listings on their side (extra work and cost), through strict OSINT background searches. Businesses have forced candidates to bear increasing arbitrary costs just to find a job and this is a longstanding trend (half a century). Comparisons could easily be made of a slave master in uncivilized times, where mental coercion and torture has replaced physical torture.

What is happening is the same mechanism that RNA interference plays in cellular networks. Equilibrium means no one gets jobs, and its far more cost effective to ramp up the spam (and indirectly the lagging, but adaptive noise floor) than to correct the underlying issue. Nothing else works.

Also, there is a big problem with wages when you can't support yourself a wife, and multiple children and because of cooperation among companies in various little things they have integrated, this has gotten worse (like a sieve) over decades.

The recent tech recession is manufactured and AI driven. You have execs looking to use AI to replace wholesale any workers further driving wages down while vigorously replacing any workers that would dare to pace their wages independently of inflation (just keeping them static in terms of purchasing power, not even increasing).

The malaise is because jobs aren't available, and people are working for slave wages, they are no better than wage slaves in many respects. Companies care far more for short term profits than they do for sustainability, despite there being clear documented evidence that slaves are the worst most costly type of labor because of that lack of agency (malaise as you call it).

Slaves do subtle sabotage, and front-of-line block with minimal output, they also don't have children. If you read a bit of history this goes all the way back to where Spain during the inquisition had to outlaw slavery by decree in the Americas because threatened their colonies there (from the destruction of the natives, i.e. killing themselves in granary, or killing their children so they wouldn't have to suffer). How bad did it have to get for the government responsible for the inquisition to at the same time say, no we can't have this. (The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Landis)

Business chooses what they do, Candidates don't choose for them. When business has adopted bad assumptions and frameworks, you need to re-examine your premises.

Qualified labor didn't just disappear, you filtered it out, and the fact that people don't see this shows just how blind people are today.

Also, when you black tarp out a landscape for long periods of time, of course everything dies underneath it, and its barren even if you change and remove that requirement, for a good amount of time.

Intelligent candidates have options in that they are flexible (and go to other sectors for business when no jobs are available). This is a sticky psychological decision, and they rarely as a general rule return to previous bad investments.

When you and most other businesses scorch the earth in pursuit of profit, why is there any surprise that talent can't be found? You selected and filtered against talent in the first place by the actions taken.

You can see this perfectly in the fact that for most companies, any gap in employment (not continuously employed, larger than 6mo), puts you at the bottom of a pile or straight to the waste-bin, regardless. False association says its because there is something wrong with the candidate, when in a downturn there may be nothing wrong. Its completely irrational when these people then say they can't find talent. The brain drain is real.

Incidentally, experience at companies outside your given sector is also considered another redflag as well, with a discard or waste-bin non-response. Perfectly competent candidates which your HR department, or 3rd-party pre-screener (AI), ignored, and that isn't even touching on all the protected class violations silently occurring in unenforceable ways, thanks to AI's black box characteristics (where age, gender, and other things are being used to decide).