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.
I almost can't believe it's come to this, sometimes. But another part of me says that's just ego talking, and anyways plenty of others are also desperate for any and all scraps to feed themselves. Problems like mine aren't difficult to come by.
It seems better now than it was two years ago.
What's old is new again. Get those soft skills warmed up and go out and shake hands.
It can be far fewer if you have a focus/specialty and specific industries that you target.
No doubt though, it's a slog right now. My recent process was around 10 applications - which became 3 interviews - and the last 2 were offers, one that came via a recruiter. Even this is a marked increase in difficulty vs 4 years ago.
When the balance is not broadly possible, our system seems to favor "home prices must always go up", at least in the short term.
Its a disgrace that people deny the supply crunch we are in
As it is, NIMBYism is likely the biggest driver of rising costs of living, rising homelessness, rising municipal debt, and generational class divides.
It feels to me like a good faith counterargument to the YIMBY build more housing line of thought, so might be an interesting perspective
But population growth is the overwhelming factor in all of our sustainability issues.
But if you believe 3-4% is normal, then you’re probably waiting for rates to return to “normal.”
I think it’s a side effect of years of low interest rates… people are conditioned now to believe low is normal, and they want to hang on until we get back to that.
I was hoping rates would stay “high” for a while which I thought would soften the housing market so I could buy, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. Instead of prices dropping, inventory just dried up.
Shows how silly I am for thinking I could time the market.
If you think it will stay at 7%, that 3% loan you already have is a treasure to keep using for a decade or two.
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.
instead of what it should be: safety for your family.
I expect in the not to distant future, the only way someone will get to own a house is to inherent one.
Literally anywhere in the "bottom" 99% of the country by real estate costs?
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/americans-vi...
> 41% of Americans say the government should provide more assistance to people in need
> 30% say it's providing about the right amount
> 27% say it should provide less
41-57? If there are issues in America, it's because Americans want it that way.
If you're trapped in a job because of its health coverage, that's restricting mobility. People can' take the risk on changing jobs/locations or even something like starting their own businesses because of the would lose coverage and don't have the wealth to self-pay.
If you're working so many hours just to cover essentials like rent you just too exhausted to look for better work or take courses for a new profession.
If costs and prices rise way faster than your wages, then you start losing ground and do so at an ever increasing rate while those at the top who live on investments and passive income benefit because the value of their assets rise faster.
If opportunities for high paying jobs dry up because, for example, AI replaces those jobs.
If fees and interest on student debt keeps you locked down forever.
If all best and highest paying jobs just go to family members of the already rich through systemic nepotism.
The list goes on. I'm not which of these the American public voted for.
- people trapped in poorly paying jobs and/or jobs with terrible conditions by blocking or dismantling unions.
- locking people out of high paying jobs via network effects. Like nepotism in hollywood or firms only hiring from certain universities which you can only get into
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.
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.
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.
You can first build more homes - prices go down and more people come into the city and prices start going back up because of increased economic activity.
Yes. The entry point to ownership lies within a state of affordability.
> but the end goal is to improve utility of land
For who? If it's anyone other than typical wage earners, this goal competes with home ownership by pressuring ownership costs upward and away from affordability.
For context, home purchases are mostly (if not fully) impossible for typical wage earners.
There's no good reason to expect homes to magically appreciate.
If you want prices to drop in popular areas then we have to make it easy for people to actually build houses and increase supply in popular areas. Of course giving homeowners a say about whether housing is allowed to be built near them, of course they are going to vote against it because they have an incentive to keep prices high.
I was in the Midwest recently and it was wild to see a block of high density houses in the middle of farmland. Houses that look exactly the same, shoved onto tiny lots with little gap between them, and surrounded by miles of corn.
These are obviously attractive to developers as they are maximized profit vehicles, but the downsides to everyone else are enormous.
In my opinion, we need to build housing above stores, so communities can actually work. Build a town, not a subdivision. What’s the point of a $50k home if you have to spend two hours a day driving to make it work?
(1) Make housing easier to build.
(2) Receive sufficient housing supply.
Even if you make it easier to build houses, there is a market for the capital that housing developers access. Currently, that market also assumes that prices will go up (or at least not go down). Thus, once we go far enough past the point where existing prices are higher than the return on new housing, even all of our dream reforms may not lead to a flood of new housing starts.
I want to be clear: loosening zoning, reforming regulations, and so forth, are all still worth doing. It is better than nothing. But if the result is a shock of supply, the financing for new homes from the biggest players will dry up. That doesn't make a solution impossible, but it does complicate it.
https://www.propertyunder50k.com/list_view.php?show_set_aler...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/14/us-housing-markets-falling-p...
I think this is a large reason behind the polarization in America today. We aren't all facing the same aspect of this imbalance.
I was hoping that the work-from-home movement was going to help with this, but RTO seems to be in full swing. So, I think our best bet would be to stop incentivizing the concentration of job creation. Absent a fix, we will have to wait a few decades for the imbalance to even out.
Could pay people well but half as much and have nice office in Colorado mountains, Vermont, or somewhere else beautiful…
Of course, startups rarely seem interested in saving money…
Maybe the more fundamental problem is that in big city America, it's easy for existing homeowners to band together to forbid any further housing stock from being built.
See Silicon Valley: amazing concentration of high-paying jobs, laughably low population density.
We should be living in a time of ease, where the whole planet is sustained with all of us only working a few hours a week. Instead most people are fighting for scraps barely able to afford rent.
It won't continue like this forever. The line doesn't always go up.
But instead we have a tiny minority of people who control more and more capital. This has well-known and terrible consequences for society from almost every angle. What I don't understand is why the .1% don't want to step aside and let someone else have a turn. It's funny that our bodies have stomachs, so we know when we've eaten "enough". But money doesn't get stored in the body.
The unenployment rate is quite low. There are complaints you can make about the economy but the model of money you laid out is completely wrong.
>All the money has been hoovered into the stock market.
I think you might misunderstand what the stock market is. Or perhaps you misunderstand what what stocks are? When you purchase stock, it doesn't get locked in a vault, with your name written next to it, and the number of shares it got you on that day. That money goes to the company, and they use that to finance their operations (and ideally, further growth). That financing may go directly to salaries, or even if it goes to services, those services are paid to someone who pays salaries.
If your claim is instead that "all" of that money, or some meaningful majority of that money, is going to electricity and AI silicon, I would invite you to do some basic math on the companies involved.
Anecdotally, I know a few engineers with 10+ YOE in NYC, Seattle, and California, all with actual FAANG or FAANG adjacent work experience, who couldn’t find jobs. One of whom even took a minimum wage job, and another who nearly did the same as well.
Maybe the tax code change is kicking off an industry revival?
If tier3 companies are paying $540k-$1.5m for staff in 2025, then I assume the market is turned around.
Can you elaborate? People don’t do well in the interview and say they could do it if they had AI with them? Or…?
Edit: Sorry, I missed “using AI during the interviews to cheat”.
After a few months on the job, he hadn't done any meaningful work. His responses to support tickets were clearly written by an LLM and offered only the most generic (and therefore unhelpful) support. He was eventually let go, and deservedly so.
Instead, high rates plus economic uncertainty has reduced supply significantly because no one wants to sell.
Maybe lower rates will make prices even more unaffordable, which would make this a low period by comparison, but if you look at home price to income numbers, they’re still near record highs.
Maybe it means: if you think the line is always going up and to the right, today is the best day to buy, but that’s a weird way for me to think of a house, which I still kind of see as a consumable good rather than an investment vehicle.
We shouldn’t mind if home ownership becomes costly if more economic activity results out of it. More economic activity means more money in the hands of wage earners (just that proportionally more money is spent on housing which is okay).
I did not. 25% of US households make under $40/yr.
(based on 2022 data that 25% of all US households make ~$35k/yr or less. +10% for minorities.)
When you purchase stock, your money goes to the seller of that stock. That's what makes a "market". The stock market isn't a bunch of companies selling their stock to the public.
I incorrectly explained what I meant, and broadly speaking, what I wrote is incorrect.
However, I stand by my statement that "all" of the money is not going to electricity or AI silicon.
Only if the current insanity around zoning and regulation persists. In many real estate markets, it's literally illegal to increase the supply of housing; in others, price controls make it unappealing to invest in increasing the supply of housing.
I don't know what kind of toxicity is unique to the Anglophone world that exacerbates this problem, but at some point we just need to rip off the band-aid, tell existing homeowners to cry more, and just build, build, build. There's no inherent reason why the price of houses should so far exceed income in this vast country.
You are right, but there is always a but :)
Seems right now the "good jobs" are only being create around a few mega cities. DC, NY, SF and a few others. DC stalled a bit I think due to DOGE. In a lot of those areas NIMBH is big. So if you build like crazy in many "fly over" states, where is is plenty of land, at best the builders will not make a profit. But probably the houses will stay empty.
As with everything else, politicians will not make the hard decisions due to fear.
I use to be against term-limits, but the last 25 years proved me wrong :(
Absolutely zero interest in sharing walls with people again... or participating in building the next Company City. Bidding against colleagues is enough to make the bosses laugh.
So, behave like a dragon. Hoard coins and, eventually/occasionally, fly. Maybe burn some stuff.
There is no substitute for an on-site round.
You could very easily live in a big city and work a job to save up 50k or a down payment for a 50k mortgage and then buy one of these cheap houses to live in. But most people don’t want to do that. They want nice weather and fun things to do, access to a good job market, and good schools. But the reason why those houses are 50k is just because of simple supply and demand. There is very little demand to live in Louisiana or West Virginia and tons of demand to live in the Bay Area or Seattle. If you increase supply, eventually prices will fall and accessibility will increase.
Also these areas have poor education systems for kids.
That said, especially in a tough labor market, finding a job is like dating, and the vibes matter a lot. While you control your side of the vibe, you don't control the other side. Technical people especially often don't want to think about the interpersonal factors, but they are a real part of the process.
Several rejections by multiple groups. I'm pretty sure I won't get an interview from there for a while. I've not been interviewed by the same group for more than one position. Continually getting rejected and failing to achieve more than one interview per group is not what I call working.
> That said, especially in a tough labor market, finding a job is like dating, and the vibes matter a lot.
Thus, it makes perfect sense to just throw your resume at everything that moves. Vibes seem to matter more than fit. I interviewed at another place where one of the interviewers just had a week or two worth of tech experience. They were somehow a test lead. They couldn't answer a single question about testers interact with developers or how they test. I'm sure I was labeled as problematic because of my questioning even though I had zero knowledge of the lack of experience until after a few questions. The person they hired had zero experience outside of university classes. No internships. No personal projects. The position wasn't listed as a junior position.
> Technical people especially often don't want to think about the interpersonal factors, but they are a real part of the process.
It's the only aspect I've been thinking about for over a year. The "technical interview" is often a joke so I can't help but think they are using it as a hidden "vibe" interview.
I think it's really hard to do one without improving the other. They're inextricably linked. I only like to focus on the first one because it's easier and the ROI is higher.
He landed the local job first by going to a career fair that I randomly discovered on Twitter. Affected the whole trajectory of our life.
With hundreds to thousands of people spamming every job posting under the sun the second it is posted, just getting your credentials read by a human is a major barrier right now that career fairs help alleviate.
Typically, attending companies are listed (or you can ask an organizer for a list). Do some quick searching and type up a summary.
Company name. What they do. 1-2 questions. Emphasis on companies you've never heard of!
You'd be amazed how many doors open when you walk up to a recruiter for a small, specialized company and know exactly who they are and what market they're in. (Remember: that poor person has probably spent all day explaining that to everyone else)
I don't think people quite wrap their head around the fact that the US population love their cars and their huge subdivisions. A massive percentage of the US have no desire for walkable cities.
It is a bizarre alien thought to me, too, but it has become very clear to me.
Or the people living in them might be retired, or work from home, or work on local farms. Whatever the case, they're not driving a long way for work.
I would really love to see a billionaire tackle this. There's loads of empty, or nearly empty, space in this country. Heck, take over a town if you really want! Sink a few million dollars into kickstarting small-scale urbanism.
I'm not usually much of a billionaire-hater, but today's lot for the most part seems to be uninspired, when it comes to projects like this.
This is part of the housing supply mystery. It's not very profitable to build housing when you are punished for building upwards and making good use of the land
This is why the only solution we see are maximized profit vehicles. The qualities that would make someone want to create a lovely place to live exclude them from making billions of dollars in the first place.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't
So, while interest rates are at historical 'norms', affordability is not.
Otherwise, it's one asset holder selling to another asset holder, usually at ever increasing prices. So yes, a lot of money is simply sitting in the stock market.
Now, some does come back in the form of share buybacks and dividends. That being said, the average dividend yield is significantly less than the long-run average (it's less than 2 percent right now, long term average is above 3%).
The pressure on buyers, at least in the past couple of decades, is that the increase in the supply of housing has not been at all commensurate with the increase in population. That, combined with a great increase in the money supply, makes for tremendous upward pressure on real estate prices.
Sellers generally aren't in a rush except in times of economic crises, especially paired with a period of overleveraging running up to it; i.e. the GFC. Economic softening appears to be in the works at the moment, so buyers should get a little reprieve soon, but since there isn't the same overleveraged buyers all rushing for the exits like in 2008, a similar crash is unlikely.
https://eyeonhousing.org/2020/01/a-decade-of-home-building-t...
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/its-the-land-stupid-how-t...
What we have is a general shortfall of prosperity. Housing is affected by money supply in an outsized way. Prices are at least partly going up because our economy is stagnant, and wages are going down in real terms as credit continues expanding to keep the wheels from coming off.
> It doesn't make sense if you need both incomes to survive. It just pushes the total fertility rate down faster when prospective parents realize they cannot afford childcare nor one parent to remain at home.
In the context of this thread, there are not enough houses for demand, that is why they are expensive, but if an administration beats on the economy hard enough, causing job destruction and increased unemployment, those who cannot continue to afford to service their mortgages will be forced to sell. This would contribute to real estate price softening. Child care costs will never come down (as I assert in my other comment) because the government refuses to subsidize it and there are labor shortages, with childcare providers unable to find staff for the childcare wages on offer. Labor shortages will persist well into the future due to prime working age population compression due to structural demographics. Citations for this are in my comment you linked to, but I can provide as many as you would like.
> It's funny that our bodies have stomachs, so we know when we've eaten "enough".
Humorously on topic, GLP-1s patch the reward center in your brain and say “enough is enough.” If only there was a similar protocol for wealth and power.
All the billionaires are equal parts clearly miserable people, and also terrifying and psychopathic. I assume they didn't start out that way, but there's also probably a personality that just has a need to run up the score.
I think if capitalism had a kill screen, that you get to and then you have to go do something else for a while, both the billionaires and the rest of us would all be happier and healthier.
There are going to be losers in this. No avoiding it.
Humans take time to be produced.