Ime, it's doom and gloom for people in tech and other white collar industries, but people in other industries (especially skilled ones) have become fairly positive.
The loudest people on social media, especially forums like Reddit and HN, tend to skew towards people in the tech industry.
A lot of tech is probably colored by what was truly an exceptional decade or so in roughly the 2010s. Now, layoffs at larger tech companies are not an exceptional event, many companies have tightened up on expenses and hiring, and (even if not necessarily salaries) total compensation has probably taken a nosedive in many cases. (While housing prices are still very high in certain high profile areas.)
Yep. Even though I myself am in tech, my family background wasn't as affluent as other people in the industry.
As such, I feel a bit of Schadenfreude from people who lived with a golden spoon hyperventilating about what is by most standards a fairly normal tech market (or at least, used to be the norm before 2015-16)
I'd even say it's basically equivalent to the tech hiring market in ~2019 and 2018 when I was looking for jobs. Except offers are better (though no bidding wars like 2021)
I can see that. Idk when the unrealistic expectations started kicking off on HN and Reddit - maybe COVID?
But the market seems fairly normal scale of things outside of a couple large employers who tended to hire juniors at the expense of more experienced engineers (Google, Meta comes to mind, and some teams at Amazon), so this might be their first time in a market like this in their careers
Even tech is doing mostly fine. Layoff chatter is going to continue for Q1 but it'll settle down.
The real problem is that the haute precariat who work in the media are being battered by attention spans and ad blockers and ineffective paywalls and bad-news-burnout from the last few years. They're the ones that are most loudly dooming because they're mad that they are overwhelmingly children of the affluent who are doing worse than their parents. It's not like that for almost the entire rest of the country, but these people set the tone by setting the assumption. "Of course the economy is bad, my friend from Yale got laid off from her legal job at Google! Of course the economy is bad, my comedian friend from Choate has to move back in with their parents!" etc etc.
The loudest people on social media, especially forums like Reddit and HN, tend to skew towards people in the tech industry.