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Comment by wavemode | Hacker News Reader

Software engineers are used to companies fighting over them. Now we're in a market where it's normal to have lots of experience yet be unemployed for months. So it's a shock for many (though not atypical when compared to plenty of other fields of knowledge work, as you note).

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How about ghost jobs? This is a newish phenomena and wonder if it affects other sectors than IT.

Very much a new-ish thing but quite pervasive. I see it all the time. Massive amounts of jobs are being posted to drive competition or to make the company look like they are growing, but there's no intention to hire anyone.

? ghost jobs have been a phenomenon for years.

Or the past? I wasn't around back then, but I've heard the 2001 recession was the same.

I got really lucky even if my comp was pretty mediocre for a number of years. But it was pretty much nuclear winter and many people (not just developers) left the tech industry.

Yeah, months between professional jobs has historically been completely normal if you couldn't interleave continue working and job searching. The meme (even if exaggerated) of rage-quitting a software job on Monday, sending out some emails, and having a few higher-paying offers by the end of the week is a complete aberration.

(Oh, and historically in many cases, it might also have involved moving across the country.)

I was talking to multiple people at an event fairly recently and there was general consensus that tech was in a "weird" place right now relative to the past decade or so.

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