As Arias and other jobseekers can attest, the American labor market, red-hot for the past few years, has cooled. The job market is now in an unusual place: Jobholders are mostly secure, with layoffs low, historically speaking. Yet the pace of hiring has slowed, and landing a job has become harder. On Friday, the government will report on whether hiring slowed sharply again in August after a much-weaker-than-expected July job gain.

“If you have a job and you’re happy with that job and you want to hold onto that job, things are pretty good right now,” said Nick Bunker, economic research director for North America at the Indeed Hiring Lab. “But if you’re out of work or you have a job and you want to switch to a new one, things aren’t as rosy as they were a couple of years ago.’’

Since peaking in March 2022 as the economy accelerated out of the pandemic recession, the number of listed job openings has dropped by more than a third, according to the government’s latest monthly report on openings and hiring.

  • @pete_the_cat
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    3210 days ago

    with layoffs low

    🤣🤣🤣 Tell that to the million or so tech workers that have been laid off en massé the past year! My friend’s friend was a Senior Software Developer at Oracle for years and just got laid off a few days ago. Disney laid me off last year and I’m still looking for a job.

    • @stoly
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      410 days ago

      Software development is different. It’s an over saturated field and people in it get picked up quickly and dumped again just as quickly. Doing informatics or business IS is better because it’s stable and somewhat agnostic to position type.

      • @pete_the_cat
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        39 days ago

        Me and at least two more of my coworkers (we got laid off at the same time) weren’t software devs, we’re Linux Sys Admins/Engineers. No one is safe.