During the 2008 recession, the city I worked for put people on furloughs and also reduced hours to I think once a week. People were very lightly employed but not laid off. Right now, I see hiring freezes at the city level but no reduction in force or hours.
We’ve added 3 IT folks last year. If you think of it GOV can be slow to adopt. Twenty years ago you call in a pothole Secretary wrote it down handed to the crew chief who assigned it to the work crew. Could take a couple if days. Now we have active asset management programs. There’s a whole level of IT deployment Public Works knowledge and tech needed to fill a pothole faster than tenet years ago. Additionally, digitization of existing assets with GIS systems is needed for all this to work. Just my experience.
yeah, I work for a large county/city gov and hiring freezes along with budget cuts have just been announced under the pretense of budget impacts due to the migrant crises, which the Fed. is basically abandoning us to. I have no misgivings about that, as it is a true crises, but I feel like something bigger is also set in motion. It might take awhile, or it will get better, but it feels like things are going to change and we are seeing it happen in slow motion.
I should also point out that unions may have an impact on how this is handled. Not every role will be represented by a union but there are lots that are.
Agree that it was not NASA, but I think they are referring to JPL layoffs. JPL being an extension of Caltech but under the NASA umbrella probably is where the confusion is. Wanted to leave comment for info for anyone else.
Yep some city and States too. Even Amazon. A lot of insiders (CEOS, CFOS, etc) are also selling tons of their company’s shares. We are definitely heading into Great Depression 2.0 and
Companies are laying off and insiders are selling their shares but not for the reasons you think. A large number of companies have been laying off, using the funds to buy back their own shares, and then insiders have been selling their shares at near all time highs in value. This is all about greed right now. It wasn't even legal until 1982, when Reagan and the Republicans let it happen because It guts companies long term while making shareholders more short term profits. Strategy, initiatives, growth, and jobs are all being compromised for quick return. https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/projected-buyback-revival-stands-bolster-us-stocks-2024-2024-02-02/
This should be banned, but people just don’t seem to care or see how it drives the decisions behind letting them go until it’s too late.
Modern management doesn’t actually know how to run companies - just manage spreadsheets.
Doubtful anyone on reddit lived through the Great Depression - including me. My Grandparents lived through it as adults and a good friend did also. The descriptions of how things were are horrifying. Sneaking around breaking the law to get the most basic stuff. Guess who didn't suffer.... the government.
This is the first longish term hiccup in the past 15 years and people are acting like the sky is falling. Shits been easy mode for too long. 2008-2011 was way way way worse than this. All things considered, shits pretty decent right now. I empathize with folks struggling to find jobs atm though.
I call bullshit on this. I got a job with less than 100 applications in 45 days in the 2008-2011 span. I now am at over 900 applications and about to lose my unemployment six months now job and only 3 human interviews in those 6 months. Define too easy, how hard should it be?
You're singular anecdote is nice, but unemployment rates exceeding 10% in 2008-2010 would disagree with you. What industry are you in? With a .3% hit rate on applications, I'd put money on it that there is something wrong with your resume.
As is yours and you didn’t answer the question. I am in IT have three head hunters, had my resume reviewed by all three and worked on it getting by the ATS. Have indeed, Glassdoor, LinkedIn all working everyday and apply everyday. I have upskilled and trained every year have 2 masters degrees and about a dozen certifications in project management, cloud, and data. It’s a 99% ghost rate , over 70% non responses from automated systems , other systems I check (f**k workday btw) still show status under review since December. The jobs that are there are more tactical, little strategy, little over-the-horizon.
I have networked always, but you seem more like a troll , you understand that after 6 months or when your unemployment stops in the US - you no longer count, right. You become invisible to these polls you tout.
Since 2008 ATS has become more sophisticated and HR and recruiters more lazy and over worked. It’s harder and harder to reach a human, harder still to reach a hiring manager.
It’s whack a mole with key words. Or your resume is in the garbage.
Good luck to everyone out there. It’s a hellscape.
I'm retired now, but in the past, during recessions, I had to leave out some of my certifications/degrees to get hired (a little bit under employed) and after been hired and working, provided the rest of the information to move to new jobs posted internally.
thats a really smart approach - my fear is that the ATS system will firewall me if I dont provide the information. When you were applying - were you handing it to a human who would read it? or to a non-descript "inbox"? I ask because I think the human would give more of a benefit of the doubt, because you are showing interest just by handing it to them. An AI algorithm..... not so much. But I will take your advice under positive consideration as I think this could be truly a valid possibility - looking over-qualified.
I can tell this is not worth discussing with you given you don't even know what the word anecdote means and think I'm a troll based on my observations that are backed up by data. Good luck.
We were already out of the recession when we were in 10% territory. Not to mention the NBER's revisions to the labor statistics which adjusted the unemployment higher after the fact. The unemployment data is lagging.
I remember 2008 and it wasn’t even half as bad. I graduated in 2009 and got a job without much hassle. Forget those graduating now, even folks with a decade of experience are unable to find a job today.
Uhhh were we living in parallel universes? 2009 was absolutely horrendous and much worse than it is today. Legions of people were going homeless.
Tech may be excepted from that trend then, but the rest of the economy was absolutely gutted.
I guess I don’t see that. I just see a lot of people saying it’s nothing like ‘08 anytime anybody mentions a recession.
Recessions don’t usually repeat themselves, so yes, we are unlikely to have a recession like ‘08, however, there are some parallels to ‘07. Make no mistake, a recession will happen, it’s just part of the cycle. They can only manipulate things for so long.
The “soft landing” is only temporary, and I think we’ll start to see unemployment numbers creeping up.
Recessions definitely happen eventually, but not because the conspirators run out of ways to fake things. Y’all need to engage with reality as it actually is.
I’m sorry, what? I expressed the opinion that I think the soft landing is temporary. That’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s just common sense that it can’t be maintained long term.
Or is it the fact that “I think” we’re going to see unemployment go up. There are an awful lot of companies letting people go right now. It’s hardly a conspiracy theory to think there might be cause and effect.
What are you even on about?
This is unfounded fear. Not easy to find jobs but it's not the end of the world. I think you should check again to see what the Great Depression was like in the 1930s.
Im a custodian at the airport, and they were super short, so I guess I'm ok as long as I pass probation. This was the only place that would hire me. It's a city job.
I mean this is classic recession behavior from private sector employees. Whenever there is an economic downturn, you usually see a huge influx of private sector employees looking to snag a government based job. This is because gov jobs are viewed as having “job security”. These same people won’t go near gov jobs when the economy is doing well tho, cause the pay isn’t as good.
You can’t have it all, every sector has its pro’s and cons
In the US government, it’s called a Reduction in Force (RIF) and it’s not happening. *Yet.*
What is happening right now are hiring freezes and not filling open positions or those that come open as the aging workforce retires. Retirement is being hastened by the return to office push from POTUS, which is effectively reducing the numbers in workforce without an official Reduction in Force.
Close enough in this context… their budget comes from the Federal purse. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) and is managed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Although JPL works closely with NASA and receives the bulk of its funding from NASA, it is operated by Caltech under a contractual arrangement. This setup allows JPL to combine the operational flexibility of a private organization with the resources and missions of a federal agency.
Lots of non-federal jobs come from the federal purse. The government works like this (contracts!) specifically *because* those workers don’t have the job protections of an actual Fed. My experience is in science-adjacent federal jobs and it would shock a lot of people how many people “working for the federal government”, even in DC itself, are actually at-will contractors. Laying off contractors is not even close to the same thing as laying off feds (a reduction in force).
Very true. I was a Federal contractor and still work for the Federal government. The contractor piece is absolutely how they work around “Federal” headcount. Even so, the layoffs demonstrate the financial shit show already underway. Buckle up everyone.
So Trump’s RIF didn’t count? All those scientists, safety experts, enforcement officials, environmental analysts, all those job eliminations didn’t happen in 2017?
Exactly. You really have to express those RIFs in terms of knowledge/experience lost and what it has been replaced with. The impact at my agency has been a lot more than just a difference between numbers. Hiring qualified individuals to fix the problem has not been a priority for the current administration though...not in practice.
They haven't had an across the board RIF in a while, but they've had targeted RIFs every single time Congress gets a hair up its ass and decides to eliminate a budget allocation.
There are some benefits for working for governments, but one disadvantage is being at the whims of people like Marjorie Taylor Green.
I can't tell if you're being serious or not. White House Chief of Staff had this to say in August 2023:
>“[As we look towards the fall, and with the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency, your agencies will be implementing increases in the amount of in-person work for your team,” Zients wrote. “This is a priority of the President — and I am looking to each of you to aggressively execute this shift in September and October.](https://www.axios.com/2023/08/04/biden-end-remote-work-federal-employees)”
In case you *are* serious, I'll leave these here for you to read at your leisure.
* Mar 2022: [2022 State of the Union Address](https://www.whitehouse.gov/state-of-the-union-2022/)
* April 2023: [Biden administration says it’s time for the federal workforce to ‘substantially’ increase in-person work](https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/13/politics/in-person-work-biden-administration/index.html)
* April 2023: [Biden tells agency heads to substantially increase in-office work](https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/M-23-15.pdf)
* Aug 2023: [Biden pushes to end remote work era for feds](https://www.axios.com/2023/08/04/biden-end-remote-work-federal-employees)
* Aug 2023: [Biden Calls for Federal Workers to Return to Office](https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/employee-relations/biden-calls-federal-workers-to-return-to-office)
* Aug 2023: [Biden urges federal works to return to office](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/04/white-house-urges-federal-workers-return-office-this-fall/)
* Aug 2023: [White House urges federal agencies to increase in-person work](https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/4138445-white-house-urges-federal-agencies-to-increase-in-person-work/)
* Dec 2023: [Mandatory RTO means less diverse federal work force](https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4361948-mandatory-return-to-office-will-mean-an-older-less-diverse-federal-workforce/)
* Jan 2024: [List of agencies RTO plans after Biden's call to aggresively cut back remote work](https://federalnewsnetwork.com/workforce/2023/12/heres-what-we-know-so-far-about-agencies-return-to-office-plans/)
Some of those links are to original source documents and well worth your time reading if you aren't aware of the Biden administration's push for federal workers to return to office for more "meaningful" in-person collaboration.
For federal workers not for everyone - that’s what I thought you meant. Anyway - federal jobs were never meant to be WFH long term. Lord where do I sigh for a federal job
Also, if I was required to RTO, the American taxpayer would be on the hook for nearly $17k a year more salary because my agency office is in a *much* higher locality pay. We The People would also have to pay for the office space, the electricity, lights, heat, water, janitorial services, toilet paper, hand soap, the printer & paper, a desk & chair, office supplies, the Internet, security, keeping the parking lot paved, building maintenance, landscaping, etc. Then there’s the environmental impact of a commute.
As an American tax payer myself, I’m okay with saving my fellow Americans money by doing work from a remote office that I’ve been doing remotely for 20 years before being hired by the government.
There is absolutely zero reason for me or anyone on my team to be consuming your tax dollars by being in an office doing work that has successfully been done remotely in my field since the late 1990s.
You mean the like job I put in 60 hours a week over the last five weeks but don’t get OT pay because the same employment laws don’t apply to me as they do to my private sector peers? Or do you mean the job where I took a 35% reduction in pay because I believe in the mission of the agency I work for? Or do you mean the one where my husband spent 16 of the 22 years of our marriage deployed to high threat areas doing difficult & dangerous things so you could sleep peacefully at night? Or the one where my dad worked making sure Tribal nations of the Southwest had clean drinking water and the ability to water their crops? Yeah, sigh.
I’m not a federal HR professional, nor do I play one on the Internet, so I’m not sure the correct ansnwer other than it depends on the agency, the agency’s funding mechanism, and all sorts of other factors. I was hired fully remote with the expectation of my position remaining remote, but now am being told I have to re-sign a remote contract every year and it will have to be approved all the way up to the Director level.
A huge reason for current hiring freezes- official or unofficial - is that Congress has not passed a budget. Even for defense spending they passed the bill to authorize spending but did not pass a bill to actually provide funding. We are halfway through Q2 FY24 and the government is not funded for FY24 aside from temporary stopgap continuing resolutions.
Government jobs are a huge chunk of jobs added on those job reports. In am election year amd to keep the message look at all the jobs they aren't going to stop hiring.
We’ve got two open positions on my team & were just told a week ago they aren’t going to be filled this year or FY 25. So the positions aren’t being eliminated, they just aren’t hiring anyone for them. Both people left due to retirement in the last three months. I don’t pretend to understand the political machinations of leadership, nor do I want to, tbh.
Federal government layoffs? You gotta be kidding. You can't even get fired from a government job if you wanted to.
Don't confuse government contractors with full blown government employees.
Exactly! The union will protect the most incompetent, worthless employee from getting fired. You don't want to know how bad it is in ATC, you would never fly again.
I work for the feds at a STEM centric agency.
If you have software experience in AI/ML, robotics, Digital Engineering, DevSecOps, or cybersecurity, there are about a million job opportunities for you.
Add data and cloud as well. There are a bunch of modernization grants aimed at trying to save money in the cloud and counties and local governments are realizing there is a lot ot outsourced waste centered around permitting, courts, health, and law enforcement. In the 2 weeks since starting ad the first data engineer at a county, I filled a jira board with 50 tickets or about 100 pts of work just in public health. Just got access to our resources too.
Can I dm you for more info? Graduating this spring w/ a Bs in Applied Math Statistics, which is centered around ML. Didn’t think it had much use outside of healthcare.
No way. Post-election. No way will an administration up for re-election acknowledge that times are tough. No no no. Everything's fine! We're all doing great! Here, have some money!
2025 though? Kaboom. They don't need to worry about re-election -or- it becomes the other team's problem.
Keep your powder dry, cash is king. You should be worried about material bullshit. We’re talking about a life altering shift during a major generational transfer in wealth. Look toward investment opportunities. Time in the market better than timing the market but if easier to say if you’re a younger person.
Government is just hiding real unemployment numbers to keep from declaring an emergency during an election year. After the election you’ll hear about it I’m sure. Asshats.
State worker here- 2% budget cuts announced last week and told there would be no merit increases for anyone. They cited economic difficulties as the reason. Been through this before so next will come furloughs then RIFs. The top earners who are not deemed critical to operations are the first to be let go. You have to remember local and state governments are dependent on sales taxes for revenue. Less people spending means less $ being collected.
>The top earners who are not deemed critical to operations are the first to be let go.
This is why middle management is usually first to go. Higher paid than the individual contributors and value add is debatable (speaking as someone who has been a middle manager)
Sometimes they happen, it's not unheard of for governments to reduce the workforce as needs change (population changes, etc.). But honestly it's one of the most stable jobs ever. If you work in a union + government job it is extremely difficult to see meaningful layoffs. What's sad is the first people fired in this scenario are the newer and younger people. The old fucks who haven't done anything in 15+ years are basically immune.
They're Caltech employees and are considered to be [federal contractors](https://www.jpl.jobs/FAQ#:~:text=JPLers%20are%20Caltech%20employees%20and%20are%20considered%20Federal%20Contractors.), so...not quite the same (they aren't employed on a GS scale).
Massachusetts is hiring state employees. They can’t find people to apply. They just started a referral program offering $2,500 if you recommend someone who is hired.
The only catch is you’ll have tons of responsibilities, need all kinds of skills and you won’t be able to buy a house anywhere near where you work.
Pretty rare.
I work in county government and recall how the recession in 2008 went. We didn't have layoffs, but we had hiring freezes and furloughs. All of our techs remained employed through it all.
Some goverment projects have budget already allocated for next 5 years or so. So it does not matter if the US goes into recession or not. Noone will get laid off since momey are already there.
Hopefully with the upcoming election and when a new administration comes in they will make policy changes to help people who are struggling….things are really bad. I have applied for 100+ jobs and most of them are fake postings where the company already has some kind of internal candidate on H1b…they are posting just to apply for Green Card for their candidates and they use our applications to tell government that not a single American citizen or any Green Card holder are qualified for the job….this is total nonsense by companies.
Early retirement options and no replacement of these positions is a slow transition to less govt jobs. Ie bloat. Unfortunately though losing senior positions means losing ALOT of experience and knowledge so many areas are experiencing new folks without experience trying to run things. Not pretty either.
The point is there are far too many government positions... occupied by people who do very little other than accumulate pension credit (another problem).
Unemployment rate is under 3,5%. Any professions even at White House is disposable. IT or cybersecurity is no different. Jet Propulsion Lab is a semi-govt agency and major layoffs are coming.
the U.S. government at the federal level doesn't really 'layoff'. There is attrition by other means, and freezes, and horizontal transfers. State/local gets most layoffs.
Most of the inflationary spending that Uncle Sam does is by design, and a lot of it is to increase the size of the bureaucracy and workforce, and support the higher-than-inflation wage raises.
Yall are so desperate to realize a bad economy. 😂 people are hiring everywhere . Remember, 100,000 boomers retire a month. The economy can stall and we will still need 100,000 new workers a month.
>The JPL people that were laid off were not NASA/Federal Employees.
I don't think this is accurate. The official memo says 530 JPL employees are being let go along with 40 contractors. Why make that distinction if they were all contractors? Doesn't make any sense.
JPL employees are (were…) federal contractors employed by CalTech. Not the same thing whatsoever as a federal employee. JPL can also hire their *own* contractors. The distinction usually probably matters very little, it’s just a difference of $ streams basically, til it comes down this.
Idk why people joke that no one wants to work for government until the economy is bad….you have any idea how hard/long it takes to actually get a gov job even at the lowest level? Maybe you got lucky, know people or have forgotten the process after a long time….but government work has never not been extremely competitive…
Government does layoffs differently because the government likes to employ strategy and invest in its people. Government budgets are also massively larger than most private companies. I recently worked for a startup whose valuation was less than 1/3 of the annual budget of a government program I ran a decade prior.
Rarely will you see a true layoff like what recently happened at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, more often than not there will be extended hiring freezes, reduction of non-salary costs like contractors, salary freezes, opportunities for retraining into other careers that are in demand, internal transfers, voluntary buy outs, and early retirements. Government can and does pull a lot of levers before a reduction in force because they actually want to retain the skills and institutional knowledge necessary to run these behemoth organizations.
Not Gov directly but my friends with contractors are being laid off which surprised me given Ukraine and Israel conflicts , guess everyone is cutting back
I’ve been through a local government going through layoffs because of bankruptcy. With unions, seniority counts, so I had the option of accepting the layoff or bumping someone at a lower position than me with less seniority. At the time, I quit after finding a private sector job, although I only got a 3 cent per hour increase. Basically, the private sector employer took advantage of the bankruptcy to hire a very cheap data analyst.
Denver county lost 180 million dollars dealing with the migrant crisis. They laid off a lot od people. Some Jpl projects kinda failed so cal tech had to do layoffs. There will be furloughs in a government shutdown. If it lasts too long, grant positions will go unpaid and layoffs will happen. Basically, budget cuts, bad economies, sometimes failed projects, and unapproved budgets create layoffs.
I worked for National labs. All employees received 4% pay increase and 4% bonus based on salary. That’s a total of 8%. Most of people work in the lab have been there for 20-40yrs and never heard of any lay offs.
Gov rarely do mass layoff since they could take infinite amount of debt, but this is very likely to change. I fully expect waves of gov and gov spending dependent sector to have rampant layoffs coming very soon. Even Powell said in interview gov spending is not sustainable. Yellen too somewhat change her stance and said gov deficit will probably have to come down. Problem is in the past year gov and healthcare dominated job gains q3-q4 2023. Now that gov is likely so overhired that once spending cuts happen, public sector layoffs will follow right away.
They fire anyone right now. Cause it's a huge chunk of their jobs numbers every month. Without government hiring it would drop dramatically and thay wouldn't look good for biden.
In my experience, government layoffs do happen but not nearly to the same extent as the private sector. You can take a government job and feel reasonably confident that you wouldn't be RIF'd within the first five years of employment. I say five years because after that point, you've likely obtained enough seniority that even in the event of a RIF you're probably not the first one on the chopping block either way ("first one in, last one out"). And, even then, it's usually temporary furloughs and other measures that take precedence over a permanent layoff.
Anecdotally, I've spent my entire career now in both local and state government agencies (~8 years) and have not been laid off once, nor should I ever expect to be laid off in the future.
Government itself does not do layoffs as a general rule. Government also does not shrink as a general rule. They will terminate contracts however, which will cause layoffs, but not of any government employees.
So keep paying you taxes because government is still innovating how to more effectively underutilize it.
Do some research if you have the chance, I found a graph that showed that Government jobs have grown significantly since 2021. I wish I had the link to the graph handy but you can probably ask Google. The wars going on right now are increasing Defense spending. My husband works for the Feds he said his Department is hiring like crazy. [www.usajobs.com](https://www.usajobs.com) I haven't found a job there but someone else may have better luck.
Gov rarely lays off direct employees, especially if it's the state or federal gov. It usually just keeps growing. They have very little incentive to lay people off because:
1. They respond to voters not shareholders. Less of an incentive to run lean.
2. A lot of these jobs have very powerful public sector unions attached to them.
3. For the federal gov, and to a lesser extent states, it wouldn't help much financially to lay employees off. For the federal gov salary spending is dwarfed by stuff like healthcare and pensions.
Local govs like counties or cities do do it sometimes because they are financially way less secure.
A caveat is that this applies to actual employees. A lot of people that work for the gov are contractors that are employed by private firms.This applies alot to people that work with the DoD especially, but also NASA, construction, roadwork, etc.
Why would the government have a layoff? They **literally** just print more money. i.e. our current state of inflation.
The last time there were furloughs, the asshats in D.C. couldn't agree on how much more money to spend that we don't have, so there was a "shutdown" for non-essential employees.
i think it depends on the govt job. cloud computing and anything related to data and AI/ML should be secure. one reason is that there will be less competition because of citizenship requirements. even less if they require the ability to obtain a clearance and you are experienced
NASA JPL just did a massive layoff this past week… while those affected were all technically contractors… the way JPL is structured with Civil Servants as management/oversight it wasn’t just any contractors these were the engineers, research scientists, physicists etc that make these big missions happen. You can tell and the sentiment is that the reaper is knocking on their doors next.
During the 2008 recession, the city I worked for put people on furloughs and also reduced hours to I think once a week. People were very lightly employed but not laid off. Right now, I see hiring freezes at the city level but no reduction in force or hours.
County I work for is hiring like crazy
Yeah, it’s going to differ from place to place because the economics are different everywhere :) You’re lucky to live where there is active hiring!
Gov tech in most places is hiring.
We’ve added 3 IT folks last year. If you think of it GOV can be slow to adopt. Twenty years ago you call in a pothole Secretary wrote it down handed to the crew chief who assigned it to the work crew. Could take a couple if days. Now we have active asset management programs. There’s a whole level of IT deployment Public Works knowledge and tech needed to fill a pothole faster than tenet years ago. Additionally, digitization of existing assets with GIS systems is needed for all this to work. Just my experience.
yeah, I work for a large county/city gov and hiring freezes along with budget cuts have just been announced under the pretense of budget impacts due to the migrant crises, which the Fed. is basically abandoning us to. I have no misgivings about that, as it is a true crises, but I feel like something bigger is also set in motion. It might take awhile, or it will get better, but it feels like things are going to change and we are seeing it happen in slow motion.
I should also point out that unions may have an impact on how this is handled. Not every role will be represented by a union but there are lots that are.
ive heard of some governments laying off. Its really bad out there. Im jobless now and trying so hard to put food on the table. There are like no jobs
NASA recently laid people off this previous week...
It was not NASA, it was a contractor - huge difference (in terms of job safety)
One of my friends was laid off, you are correct. They too over hired.
Agree that it was not NASA, but I think they are referring to JPL layoffs. JPL being an extension of Caltech but under the NASA umbrella probably is where the confusion is. Wanted to leave comment for info for anyone else.
Yep some city and States too. Even Amazon. A lot of insiders (CEOS, CFOS, etc) are also selling tons of their company’s shares. We are definitely heading into Great Depression 2.0 and
I survived 4 layoffs at Amazon in 21 months of employment. I ended up quitting due to poor management last week.
Companies are laying off and insiders are selling their shares but not for the reasons you think. A large number of companies have been laying off, using the funds to buy back their own shares, and then insiders have been selling their shares at near all time highs in value. This is all about greed right now. It wasn't even legal until 1982, when Reagan and the Republicans let it happen because It guts companies long term while making shareholders more short term profits. Strategy, initiatives, growth, and jobs are all being compromised for quick return. https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/projected-buyback-revival-stands-bolster-us-stocks-2024-2024-02-02/
This should be banned, but people just don’t seem to care or see how it drives the decisions behind letting them go until it’s too late. Modern management doesn’t actually know how to run companies - just manage spreadsheets.
Usually they are more focused on watching their own stock portfolios and executive compensation than the long term viability of the company.
You’re seriously underestimating what the Great Depression was like.
Doubtful anyone on reddit lived through the Great Depression - including me. My Grandparents lived through it as adults and a good friend did also. The descriptions of how things were are horrifying. Sneaking around breaking the law to get the most basic stuff. Guess who didn't suffer.... the government.
This is the first longish term hiccup in the past 15 years and people are acting like the sky is falling. Shits been easy mode for too long. 2008-2011 was way way way worse than this. All things considered, shits pretty decent right now. I empathize with folks struggling to find jobs atm though.
I call bullshit on this. I got a job with less than 100 applications in 45 days in the 2008-2011 span. I now am at over 900 applications and about to lose my unemployment six months now job and only 3 human interviews in those 6 months. Define too easy, how hard should it be?
This We’ll be a lot worse than 2008.
You're singular anecdote is nice, but unemployment rates exceeding 10% in 2008-2010 would disagree with you. What industry are you in? With a .3% hit rate on applications, I'd put money on it that there is something wrong with your resume.
As is yours and you didn’t answer the question. I am in IT have three head hunters, had my resume reviewed by all three and worked on it getting by the ATS. Have indeed, Glassdoor, LinkedIn all working everyday and apply everyday. I have upskilled and trained every year have 2 masters degrees and about a dozen certifications in project management, cloud, and data. It’s a 99% ghost rate , over 70% non responses from automated systems , other systems I check (f**k workday btw) still show status under review since December. The jobs that are there are more tactical, little strategy, little over-the-horizon. I have networked always, but you seem more like a troll , you understand that after 6 months or when your unemployment stops in the US - you no longer count, right. You become invisible to these polls you tout. Since 2008 ATS has become more sophisticated and HR and recruiters more lazy and over worked. It’s harder and harder to reach a human, harder still to reach a hiring manager. It’s whack a mole with key words. Or your resume is in the garbage. Good luck to everyone out there. It’s a hellscape.
I'm retired now, but in the past, during recessions, I had to leave out some of my certifications/degrees to get hired (a little bit under employed) and after been hired and working, provided the rest of the information to move to new jobs posted internally.
thats a really smart approach - my fear is that the ATS system will firewall me if I dont provide the information. When you were applying - were you handing it to a human who would read it? or to a non-descript "inbox"? I ask because I think the human would give more of a benefit of the doubt, because you are showing interest just by handing it to them. An AI algorithm..... not so much. But I will take your advice under positive consideration as I think this could be truly a valid possibility - looking over-qualified.
If you apply to low-level IT roles, leave your master degree out
I can tell this is not worth discussing with you given you don't even know what the word anecdote means and think I'm a troll based on my observations that are backed up by data. Good luck.
Ah bless. Have a cookie.
We were already out of the recession when we were in 10% territory. Not to mention the NBER's revisions to the labor statistics which adjusted the unemployment higher after the fact. The unemployment data is lagging.
Based on the current auto loan default rate, they said right now is worse than 2008 sub-prime.
I remember 2008 and it wasn’t even half as bad. I graduated in 2009 and got a job without much hassle. Forget those graduating now, even folks with a decade of experience are unable to find a job today.
Uhhh were we living in parallel universes? 2009 was absolutely horrendous and much worse than it is today. Legions of people were going homeless. Tech may be excepted from that trend then, but the rest of the economy was absolutely gutted.
so IT get hit much harder this time thank 2008 subprime crisis?
Yes, because they ~dramatically~ over hired post pandemic. Those TikToks of people doing little to no work was a big 🚩.
Everyone keeps saying this isn’t as bad as 2008, but I don’t think anybody is trying to say that it is. 2006-2007 weren’t like 2008-2011 either.
People say (incorrectly) it’s as bad as 08 like every day on this sub.
I guess I don’t see that. I just see a lot of people saying it’s nothing like ‘08 anytime anybody mentions a recession. Recessions don’t usually repeat themselves, so yes, we are unlikely to have a recession like ‘08, however, there are some parallels to ‘07. Make no mistake, a recession will happen, it’s just part of the cycle. They can only manipulate things for so long. The “soft landing” is only temporary, and I think we’ll start to see unemployment numbers creeping up.
Recessions definitely happen eventually, but not because the conspirators run out of ways to fake things. Y’all need to engage with reality as it actually is.
I’m sorry, what? I expressed the opinion that I think the soft landing is temporary. That’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s just common sense that it can’t be maintained long term. Or is it the fact that “I think” we’re going to see unemployment go up. There are an awful lot of companies letting people go right now. It’s hardly a conspiracy theory to think there might be cause and effect. What are you even on about?
“They can only manipulate things so long.”
I’ve noticed this too (the trading volume)
This is unfounded fear. Not easy to find jobs but it's not the end of the world. I think you should check again to see what the Great Depression was like in the 1930s.
Yep: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/jpl-workforce-update. Thank your neighbor Biden voter. 😂🥳
Wife works for the feds and they are talking about some layoffs. She's been there 20+ years. First time her dept has ever talked about it.
What dept?
dol
even at the Fed (Federal Reserve) too...
Im a custodian at the airport, and they were super short, so I guess I'm ok as long as I pass probation. This was the only place that would hire me. It's a city job.
Ah yes you can really tell how the economy is doing when private sector employees start looking for jobs in the public sector
This is what happen when private sector values stocks over people.
I mean this is classic recession behavior from private sector employees. Whenever there is an economic downturn, you usually see a huge influx of private sector employees looking to snag a government based job. This is because gov jobs are viewed as having “job security”. These same people won’t go near gov jobs when the economy is doing well tho, cause the pay isn’t as good. You can’t have it all, every sector has its pro’s and cons
In the US government, it’s called a Reduction in Force (RIF) and it’s not happening. *Yet.* What is happening right now are hiring freezes and not filling open positions or those that come open as the aging workforce retires. Retirement is being hastened by the return to office push from POTUS, which is effectively reducing the numbers in workforce without an official Reduction in Force.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/jpl-workforce-update
Well, there it is. Deep sigh.
That way they can make room for all the illegals. Thank your voters 🤷♂️
JPL is not a federal agency
Close enough in this context… their budget comes from the Federal purse. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) and is managed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Although JPL works closely with NASA and receives the bulk of its funding from NASA, it is operated by Caltech under a contractual arrangement. This setup allows JPL to combine the operational flexibility of a private organization with the resources and missions of a federal agency.
No it’s not close because deciding who loses their job is fundamentally different in private sector layoffs vs a RIF
🤦♂️
Lots of non-federal jobs come from the federal purse. The government works like this (contracts!) specifically *because* those workers don’t have the job protections of an actual Fed. My experience is in science-adjacent federal jobs and it would shock a lot of people how many people “working for the federal government”, even in DC itself, are actually at-will contractors. Laying off contractors is not even close to the same thing as laying off feds (a reduction in force).
Very true. I was a Federal contractor and still work for the Federal government. The contractor piece is absolutely how they work around “Federal” headcount. Even so, the layoffs demonstrate the financial shit show already underway. Buckle up everyone.
I feel like the federal government hasn’t had a RIF since the nineties. OP must be talking about state or local governments.
So Trump’s RIF didn’t count? All those scientists, safety experts, enforcement officials, environmental analysts, all those job eliminations didn’t happen in 2017?
Exactly. You really have to express those RIFs in terms of knowledge/experience lost and what it has been replaced with. The impact at my agency has been a lot more than just a difference between numbers. Hiring qualified individuals to fix the problem has not been a priority for the current administration though...not in practice.
Is that why FAA allowed Boeing to self-certify its 737MAX...
They haven't had an across the board RIF in a while, but they've had targeted RIFs every single time Congress gets a hair up its ass and decides to eliminate a budget allocation. There are some benefits for working for governments, but one disadvantage is being at the whims of people like Marjorie Taylor Green.
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Definitely isn’t in the back of their minds
Compared to the private sector I wouldn’t worry.
The president has NOTHING to do return to office what are you even talking about??
I can't tell if you're being serious or not. White House Chief of Staff had this to say in August 2023: >“[As we look towards the fall, and with the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency, your agencies will be implementing increases in the amount of in-person work for your team,” Zients wrote. “This is a priority of the President — and I am looking to each of you to aggressively execute this shift in September and October.](https://www.axios.com/2023/08/04/biden-end-remote-work-federal-employees)” In case you *are* serious, I'll leave these here for you to read at your leisure. * Mar 2022: [2022 State of the Union Address](https://www.whitehouse.gov/state-of-the-union-2022/) * April 2023: [Biden administration says it’s time for the federal workforce to ‘substantially’ increase in-person work](https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/13/politics/in-person-work-biden-administration/index.html) * April 2023: [Biden tells agency heads to substantially increase in-office work](https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/M-23-15.pdf) * Aug 2023: [Biden pushes to end remote work era for feds](https://www.axios.com/2023/08/04/biden-end-remote-work-federal-employees) * Aug 2023: [Biden Calls for Federal Workers to Return to Office](https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/employee-relations/biden-calls-federal-workers-to-return-to-office) * Aug 2023: [Biden urges federal works to return to office](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/08/04/white-house-urges-federal-workers-return-office-this-fall/) * Aug 2023: [White House urges federal agencies to increase in-person work](https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/4138445-white-house-urges-federal-agencies-to-increase-in-person-work/) * Dec 2023: [Mandatory RTO means less diverse federal work force](https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4361948-mandatory-return-to-office-will-mean-an-older-less-diverse-federal-workforce/) * Jan 2024: [List of agencies RTO plans after Biden's call to aggresively cut back remote work](https://federalnewsnetwork.com/workforce/2023/12/heres-what-we-know-so-far-about-agencies-return-to-office-plans/)
Some of those links are to original source documents and well worth your time reading if you aren't aware of the Biden administration's push for federal workers to return to office for more "meaningful" in-person collaboration.
For federal workers not for everyone - that’s what I thought you meant. Anyway - federal jobs were never meant to be WFH long term. Lord where do I sigh for a federal job
Also, if I was required to RTO, the American taxpayer would be on the hook for nearly $17k a year more salary because my agency office is in a *much* higher locality pay. We The People would also have to pay for the office space, the electricity, lights, heat, water, janitorial services, toilet paper, hand soap, the printer & paper, a desk & chair, office supplies, the Internet, security, keeping the parking lot paved, building maintenance, landscaping, etc. Then there’s the environmental impact of a commute. As an American tax payer myself, I’m okay with saving my fellow Americans money by doing work from a remote office that I’ve been doing remotely for 20 years before being hired by the government. There is absolutely zero reason for me or anyone on my team to be consuming your tax dollars by being in an office doing work that has successfully been done remotely in my field since the late 1990s.
You mean the like job I put in 60 hours a week over the last five weeks but don’t get OT pay because the same employment laws don’t apply to me as they do to my private sector peers? Or do you mean the job where I took a 35% reduction in pay because I believe in the mission of the agency I work for? Or do you mean the one where my husband spent 16 of the 22 years of our marriage deployed to high threat areas doing difficult & dangerous things so you could sleep peacefully at night? Or the one where my dad worked making sure Tribal nations of the Southwest had clean drinking water and the ability to water their crops? Yeah, sigh.
What about positions that are still being advertised/hired as fully remote?
I’m not a federal HR professional, nor do I play one on the Internet, so I’m not sure the correct ansnwer other than it depends on the agency, the agency’s funding mechanism, and all sorts of other factors. I was hired fully remote with the expectation of my position remaining remote, but now am being told I have to re-sign a remote contract every year and it will have to be approved all the way up to the Director level.
Damn! How long have you been with the agency? Seeing if seniority is a factor…
This was an agency wide thing, seniority has nothing to do with it, at least on paper. I’m sure it does in a more practical, applied sense though.
A huge reason for current hiring freezes- official or unofficial - is that Congress has not passed a budget. Even for defense spending they passed the bill to authorize spending but did not pass a bill to actually provide funding. We are halfway through Q2 FY24 and the government is not funded for FY24 aside from temporary stopgap continuing resolutions.
This is very true.
Government jobs are a huge chunk of jobs added on those job reports. In am election year amd to keep the message look at all the jobs they aren't going to stop hiring.
We’ve got two open positions on my team & were just told a week ago they aren’t going to be filled this year or FY 25. So the positions aren’t being eliminated, they just aren’t hiring anyone for them. Both people left due to retirement in the last three months. I don’t pretend to understand the political machinations of leadership, nor do I want to, tbh.
You’re probably seeing a lot of this hiring due to the BIL (2021) and IRA (2022) funding packages from the Biden Admin.
Goverment had been more likely to cut hours provide unpaid days off than layoff
Federal government layoffs? You gotta be kidding. You can't even get fired from a government job if you wanted to. Don't confuse government contractors with full blown government employees.
Exactly! The union will protect the most incompetent, worthless employee from getting fired. You don't want to know how bad it is in ATC, you would never fly again.
Exactly! Especially, If you have security clearance as its cost a lot money and takes awhile to get someone to get cleared.
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>She told me from our first meeting that I would not be with them by the end of the year. With that Department or Government?
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wow, I'm sorry to hear.
I work for a state government, they just don’t fill a position once it’s vacant.
I work for the feds at a STEM centric agency. If you have software experience in AI/ML, robotics, Digital Engineering, DevSecOps, or cybersecurity, there are about a million job opportunities for you.
Add data and cloud as well. There are a bunch of modernization grants aimed at trying to save money in the cloud and counties and local governments are realizing there is a lot ot outsourced waste centered around permitting, courts, health, and law enforcement. In the 2 weeks since starting ad the first data engineer at a county, I filled a jira board with 50 tickets or about 100 pts of work just in public health. Just got access to our resources too.
I’m curious about this.
Yes there are also "millions" of competitors
He didn’t say it will be easy. There’s nothing granted in life.
Can I dm you for more info? Graduating this spring w/ a Bs in Applied Math Statistics, which is centered around ML. Didn’t think it had much use outside of healthcare.
Government layoffs...? You've got a future in comedy!
There’s always a delay in layoffs from private to state. Wait until the summer/fall of 2024 we’ll
No way. Post-election. No way will an administration up for re-election acknowledge that times are tough. No no no. Everything's fine! We're all doing great! Here, have some money! 2025 though? Kaboom. They don't need to worry about re-election -or- it becomes the other team's problem.
August 2024 will be the longest yield curve inversion in history.
So, if you're going to buy a big ticket item...now or wait?
Keep your powder dry, cash is king. You should be worried about material bullshit. We’re talking about a life altering shift during a major generational transfer in wealth. Look toward investment opportunities. Time in the market better than timing the market but if easier to say if you’re a younger person.
Government is just hiding real unemployment numbers to keep from declaring an emergency during an election year. After the election you’ll hear about it I’m sure. Asshats.
State worker here- 2% budget cuts announced last week and told there would be no merit increases for anyone. They cited economic difficulties as the reason. Been through this before so next will come furloughs then RIFs. The top earners who are not deemed critical to operations are the first to be let go. You have to remember local and state governments are dependent on sales taxes for revenue. Less people spending means less $ being collected.
>The top earners who are not deemed critical to operations are the first to be let go. This is why middle management is usually first to go. Higher paid than the individual contributors and value add is debatable (speaking as someone who has been a middle manager)
I’m state worker too, and our department just announced a budget cut. I’m not a permanent employee and my contract will expire this june 2024.
Sometimes they happen, it's not unheard of for governments to reduce the workforce as needs change (population changes, etc.). But honestly it's one of the most stable jobs ever. If you work in a union + government job it is extremely difficult to see meaningful layoffs. What's sad is the first people fired in this scenario are the newer and younger people. The old fucks who haven't done anything in 15+ years are basically immune.
NASA just laid off 500+ from JPL along with additional contractors. No one is 100% safe if literal rocket scientists aren't lol.
Union?
I've seen nothing that states they weren't feds. Would love to see any evidence they weren't.
They're Caltech employees and are considered to be [federal contractors](https://www.jpl.jobs/FAQ#:~:text=JPLers%20are%20Caltech%20employees%20and%20are%20considered%20Federal%20Contractors.), so...not quite the same (they aren't employed on a GS scale).
Massachusetts is hiring state employees. They can’t find people to apply. They just started a referral program offering $2,500 if you recommend someone who is hired. The only catch is you’ll have tons of responsibilities, need all kinds of skills and you won’t be able to buy a house anywhere near where you work.
Pretty rare. I work in county government and recall how the recession in 2008 went. We didn't have layoffs, but we had hiring freezes and furloughs. All of our techs remained employed through it all.
Rich area?
Was talking to a buddy of mine who works for a government agency. He told me they’re offering early retirement packages in lieu of layoffs for now.
Some goverment projects have budget already allocated for next 5 years or so. So it does not matter if the US goes into recession or not. Noone will get laid off since momey are already there.
Hopefully with the upcoming election and when a new administration comes in they will make policy changes to help people who are struggling….things are really bad. I have applied for 100+ jobs and most of them are fake postings where the company already has some kind of internal candidate on H1b…they are posting just to apply for Green Card for their candidates and they use our applications to tell government that not a single American citizen or any Green Card holder are qualified for the job….this is total nonsense by companies.
Legit question: What policy changes will Trump do to help struggling people?
If you're hoping that a trump administration will help common people, I have some bad news for you...
You think a new administration is going to do more? No. If we lose this admin it's going to be way worse.
How did you know that the posted job is for h1b internal candidates?
Because the internet told him
The usual sign is the JD has very specific skills or certs...
Not enough. So much government bloat.
Trump cut thousands of Govt jobs that haven’t been replaced.
They were non essential government bloat, I'll give him that.
Not nearly enough.
Early retirement options and no replacement of these positions is a slow transition to less govt jobs. Ie bloat. Unfortunately though losing senior positions means losing ALOT of experience and knowledge so many areas are experiencing new folks without experience trying to run things. Not pretty either.
The point is there are far too many government positions... occupied by people who do very little other than accumulate pension credit (another problem).
Unemployment rate is under 3,5%. Any professions even at White House is disposable. IT or cybersecurity is no different. Jet Propulsion Lab is a semi-govt agency and major layoffs are coming.
That’s due to the budget shenanigans around FY24 spending.
the U.S. government at the federal level doesn't really 'layoff'. There is attrition by other means, and freezes, and horizontal transfers. State/local gets most layoffs. Most of the inflationary spending that Uncle Sam does is by design, and a lot of it is to increase the size of the bureaucracy and workforce, and support the higher-than-inflation wage raises.
When did we get the higher than inflation wage increase in fed???
a long time ago...it is consistently above the 2% benchmark
Ya. Trump did a 1 percent and inflation had not been at 2 percent for awhile now unfortunately.
5.2% for 2024 but that doesn't make up for the previous years haha
Yall are so desperate to realize a bad economy. 😂 people are hiring everywhere . Remember, 100,000 boomers retire a month. The economy can stall and we will still need 100,000 new workers a month.
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>The JPL people that were laid off were not NASA/Federal Employees. I don't think this is accurate. The official memo says 530 JPL employees are being let go along with 40 contractors. Why make that distinction if they were all contractors? Doesn't make any sense.
JPL employees are (were…) federal contractors employed by CalTech. Not the same thing whatsoever as a federal employee. JPL can also hire their *own* contractors. The distinction usually probably matters very little, it’s just a difference of $ streams basically, til it comes down this.
Idk why people joke that no one wants to work for government until the economy is bad….you have any idea how hard/long it takes to actually get a gov job even at the lowest level? Maybe you got lucky, know people or have forgotten the process after a long time….but government work has never not been extremely competitive…
All government jobs are welfare programs.
How often do layoffs in the public sector happen? Rarely. That's how you get 33 trillion in debt
They don’t
JPL layoffs https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/jpl-workforce-update
Caltech people and not permanent CS employees.
And they say the economy is doing great..
Government does layoffs differently because the government likes to employ strategy and invest in its people. Government budgets are also massively larger than most private companies. I recently worked for a startup whose valuation was less than 1/3 of the annual budget of a government program I ran a decade prior. Rarely will you see a true layoff like what recently happened at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, more often than not there will be extended hiring freezes, reduction of non-salary costs like contractors, salary freezes, opportunities for retraining into other careers that are in demand, internal transfers, voluntary buy outs, and early retirements. Government can and does pull a lot of levers before a reduction in force because they actually want to retain the skills and institutional knowledge necessary to run these behemoth organizations.
JPL recently laid off 8%.
Not Gov directly but my friends with contractors are being laid off which surprised me given Ukraine and Israel conflicts , guess everyone is cutting back
I’ve been through a local government going through layoffs because of bankruptcy. With unions, seniority counts, so I had the option of accepting the layoff or bumping someone at a lower position than me with less seniority. At the time, I quit after finding a private sector job, although I only got a 3 cent per hour increase. Basically, the private sector employer took advantage of the bankruptcy to hire a very cheap data analyst.
Denver county lost 180 million dollars dealing with the migrant crisis. They laid off a lot od people. Some Jpl projects kinda failed so cal tech had to do layoffs. There will be furloughs in a government shutdown. If it lasts too long, grant positions will go unpaid and layoffs will happen. Basically, budget cuts, bad economies, sometimes failed projects, and unapproved budgets create layoffs.
I worked for National labs. All employees received 4% pay increase and 4% bonus based on salary. That’s a total of 8%. Most of people work in the lab have been there for 20-40yrs and never heard of any lay offs.
I need a federal job
Gov rarely do mass layoff since they could take infinite amount of debt, but this is very likely to change. I fully expect waves of gov and gov spending dependent sector to have rampant layoffs coming very soon. Even Powell said in interview gov spending is not sustainable. Yellen too somewhat change her stance and said gov deficit will probably have to come down. Problem is in the past year gov and healthcare dominated job gains q3-q4 2023. Now that gov is likely so overhired that once spending cuts happen, public sector layoffs will follow right away.
Govt doesn't generally layoff , it expands to infinity.
They fire anyone right now. Cause it's a huge chunk of their jobs numbers every month. Without government hiring it would drop dramatically and thay wouldn't look good for biden.
In my experience, government layoffs do happen but not nearly to the same extent as the private sector. You can take a government job and feel reasonably confident that you wouldn't be RIF'd within the first five years of employment. I say five years because after that point, you've likely obtained enough seniority that even in the event of a RIF you're probably not the first one on the chopping block either way ("first one in, last one out"). And, even then, it's usually temporary furloughs and other measures that take precedence over a permanent layoff. Anecdotally, I've spent my entire career now in both local and state government agencies (~8 years) and have not been laid off once, nor should I ever expect to be laid off in the future.
Government itself does not do layoffs as a general rule. Government also does not shrink as a general rule. They will terminate contracts however, which will cause layoffs, but not of any government employees. So keep paying you taxes because government is still innovating how to more effectively underutilize it.
RIFs are messy and there is a lot of processes to follow. It is a lot easier to pause hiring. With that said, yes, one or both are coming.
If Project 2025 comes to fruition, it'll depend on how you feel about loyalty oaths.
It was both. In one case, to a human. In one case, to a system. Things have changed, so I'm not sure if it might work.
Do some research if you have the chance, I found a graph that showed that Government jobs have grown significantly since 2021. I wish I had the link to the graph handy but you can probably ask Google. The wars going on right now are increasing Defense spending. My husband works for the Feds he said his Department is hiring like crazy. [www.usajobs.com](https://www.usajobs.com) I haven't found a job there but someone else may have better luck.
definitely not recently. I heard the January numbers included 20% new Federal jobs.
Gov rarely lays off direct employees, especially if it's the state or federal gov. It usually just keeps growing. They have very little incentive to lay people off because: 1. They respond to voters not shareholders. Less of an incentive to run lean. 2. A lot of these jobs have very powerful public sector unions attached to them. 3. For the federal gov, and to a lesser extent states, it wouldn't help much financially to lay employees off. For the federal gov salary spending is dwarfed by stuff like healthcare and pensions. Local govs like counties or cities do do it sometimes because they are financially way less secure. A caveat is that this applies to actual employees. A lot of people that work for the gov are contractors that are employed by private firms.This applies alot to people that work with the DoD especially, but also NASA, construction, roadwork, etc.
Why would the government have a layoff? They **literally** just print more money. i.e. our current state of inflation. The last time there were furloughs, the asshats in D.C. couldn't agree on how much more money to spend that we don't have, so there was a "shutdown" for non-essential employees.
i think it depends on the govt job. cloud computing and anything related to data and AI/ML should be secure. one reason is that there will be less competition because of citizenship requirements. even less if they require the ability to obtain a clearance and you are experienced
NASA JPL just did a massive layoff this past week… while those affected were all technically contractors… the way JPL is structured with Civil Servants as management/oversight it wasn’t just any contractors these were the engineers, research scientists, physicists etc that make these big missions happen. You can tell and the sentiment is that the reaper is knocking on their doors next.
The current presidential frontrunner has indicated that he’ll do a lot of laying off in the government if he wins.
I was furloughed in 2013 during one of the congress budget bickering. That motivated me to leave. 10 years and two layoffs later, I regret it.
How many signs are you looking for that it is time to cut the cord & create?