What's wrong with the job market?
I was recently going through this Leetcode forum, and got to know that its not just about our college where the placement stats have depleted. It's the same everywhere. I've seen people from IITs, NITs, IIITs, BITS, and other top colleges, and they all are facing the same problems. The placement stats have gone down, and the reasons are not very clear. So let's start with what I can figure out of it, and oh, you can share your thoughts in the comments below.
1. Layoffs
The first organization to start the domino effect of layoffs was Twitter(now X), thanks to the narcissistic mindset of this guy.
Elon Musk, the guy.
Taking control over 60% of the overall share of X, he started firing people, and the reason was simple, he wanted to cut down the costs. And this is not just about X, but many other organizations have started doing the same, what was his personal opinion on these layoffs?
I'm not sure if you saw my tweet last week, but I'm serious about maximizing the happiness of my team at X and minimizing the amount of time they spend dealing with bullshit. I sometimes joke that we have a 2% overhead rule: if someone is spending more than 2% of their time on overhead, we fire them. I think this is generally a good rule for any organization to follow.
Directly blaming the incompetency of employees working at X. Now there are incompetent people getting hired every now and then.
Talking to this guy I met on Discord, SDE-3 @AWS, I got to know that every big tech giant has hired extensively in the past few years, large share of these people were not up to the mark. So why did they started over-hiring in the first place?
Easy answer. They are ambitious. But why invest so much into ambitions that you'll have to cut down costs in the future?
2. Pandemic
Since covid spread and lockdowns prevailed, profits of tech giants sky-rocketed, thanks to cost-cutting on closed offices and employees working from home. Bills worth millions were saved, and the profits were used to invest in new projects, and hiring new people.
The pandemic crashed economies, making people switch jobs, causing a turbulence in the market, so all these organizations were looking for a way out of this situation, and they found one soon, Layoffs. As if they were looking for the right time to do it. Well now, employees in the market are afraid. They are afraid of losing their jobs, and this is the reason why they are not switching jobs, which in turn is the reason why the market is not moving.
3. War
Taliban-Afghan-Pakistan, Russia-Ukraine, Hamas-Israel, China-Taiwan, and many more. The world is at war with oil prices rising, and this is not just about the countries, but also about the tech industry. Another reason why several economies went crashing down. France is burning, Africa is in chaos, all being major factors of why the world seems to be at halt.
4. Recession
Thanks to the above reasons, the global economy is at risk. UK suffered recession, Germany just got recovered from rising cash crisis. Seems like everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong, and the world is still recovering from it.
5. ChatGPT
One more reason to trigger the layoffs and lack of jobs is the rise of Artificial Intelligence. With the rise of generative AI models like ChatGPT, we can now write essays, articles, write code, write tests for the generated code, and even explain the code to human beings. It's not perfect, but it's getting there. Until then, employees are getting into new paradigms, and the market is getting saturated.
All the above factors have collectively contributed to the rise of unemployment, and the market is still recovering from it(seems like it). I'm not sure how long will it take, but it must get better with time.
For some, it seems like our batch (2024) is the unluckiest one, ever, or if our college is the worst. Just as it would have been in a perfect graduation nightmare. For me, its more like some Murphy's law getting true😂. But there's no time to loose hope mate.
Stand high and fight for it, for only the best shall survive.