(Original) It seems the US economy is increasingly two sided or two tiered: the haves and the have-nots. But now, it seems the haves may have some trouble too.
(NBC News) From fast food to beverage giants, brands see rising income inequality among customers with subtile “Consumer brands are adjusting to a two-tiered economy as the new normal. Yet there are signs that even high-income customers are under pressure.” And may I quote one line there – “This suggests that even a well-paying job is no longer a reliable source of financial stability compared with owning assets like stocks and real estate.”
I recall Warren Buffett or Charlie Munger once said: if you don’t make money when you sleep, you will work until you die. That quote is applicable here.
The IT software engineer job market seems warmed up a little bit recently, from my observations. I am getting some emails from the recruiters, and they looked like real jobs or openings.
I think during the middle of last year (June 2024) I came across the software engineers job chart from (FRED) Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States, and the chart could be a bit misleading because the start date is Feb 2020. Basically, we can say it just showed the dramatic increase of software engineer jobs and subsequent declining of job openings due to the pandemic over-hiring earlier, big tech big cuts following Elon’s huge cut at Twitter post his acquisition.
I believe this hiring boom and bust trend is similar for the related area such as quality assurance (testing engineers), localization and translation, platform and dev ops engineering, product development and project management and so on.
Indeed and LinkedIn
In recent years, I mainly use Indeed and LinkedIn for job search: for my last 2 jobs (Mastercard and Ascension) I found them mainly through Indeed.com. I remember the days (year 2010) when I found my job at local craigslist, those days are long gone. I found my current job in year 2021 through a recruiter btw – I know the recruiter (recruiting company) through previous engagement (year 2011), and we kept that relationship over the years 🙂
A note on LinkedIn, LinkedIn has DESTROYED the job market (in 2024). I tend to agree – because LinkedIn aggregates a lot of jobs nowadays, and for one job especially the remote job, it’s quite easy for the recruiter to received hundreds of resumes in a day or two. For example, this staff software engineer job at GE Healthcare, I saw “(posted) 23 hours ago · 62 people clicked apply” right now (03-25-2025, 2:17 pm central). So this is a real problem. And I don’t know how to get around it – unless you know the recruiter or hiring manager.
Typical process (St. Louis based dev jobs)
Phone screen, technical screen and manager interview. Offer or being ghosted, or if they are nice, they will send you the rejection email. Note in STL we don’t do the leetcode stuff which is common among Silicon Valley, Seatle or Austin based tech companies. They needed those quizzes to filter out candidates – in a way it’s like the Gaokao in China.
Interview
There are usually two types of questions: behavior and technical. For behavior sometimes you can go to glassdoor.com and see if there are any. I guess we can do similar for technical questions too – but at the same time I think it’s probably more unpredictable.
Whatever the question you receive, try to be calm. Over the years I have interviewed at places, in rare cases the interviewer will have some sort of undesirable attitude – for example, I recall once at Tomson Reuters in year 2009, the guy commented towards the end – you are not the most ignorant person coming in in terms of technical knowledge 🙁
Occasionally you will meet some super nice people too: people with decency and true empathy. Once in New Jersey, I was interviewing at Ingersoll-Rand office all day, one interviewer said, let’s make it informal, so he took me walk around the cafeteria. It was winter, and we didn’t go outside.
Don’t be defensive, as much as practical obviously. Once my big boss at current place, asked me: it seems your tenure is not too long in this and the place, note the implied question here – are you a job hopper (I talked about this topic here too). More on job hopping for practical purposes, there are data to back up that for many people, salary or compensation increase is from “job hopping” (Forbes). A few of my job changes (not hopping 🙂 confirmed this trend too.
Some other tips
Background check
Don’t lie on your resume. At the same time, don’t stress over the background check. Sometimes at some old-fashioned companies or out of date places they will ask a question such as “have you ever involuntarily lose your job”: I would say No regardless the situation. Or ignore those places if they are truly “out of date“. Because you may feel out of places when you join them.
Usually, background check is a part of the pre-employment process, and you would need to give two weeks’ notice at the current place. That’s also sometimes people have stress – what if anything goes wrong with background check?
My experience with this is: as long as you don’t break laws, etc., you should be fine. It seems to me the background checking companies are mostly providing a service anyway, and in the process making some money. I have done quite a few background checking in last 5 years or so. In fact I did three (or 4) background checking in this school year: depends on how you count it.
First: the volunteer background check for the school district I volunteer. They have two background checks: one requires fingerprint (and I assume some sort of FBI database lookup) Missouri Automated Criminal History System (MACHS); another one is for Missouri educator sort of check called FCSR, stands for Family Care Safety Registry, this can be done online exclusively.
For Uber: it’s done fairly quickly. Cannot find the background checking company from my email now.
For Lyft: it seems they used checkr.
For my current job, I did background check via clariti (now a part of DISA Screen). Btw, I noticed they had a securityincident recently 🙁
Drug testing
This is required sometimes. Nowadays they usually only require urine sample. And you can go to a specimen collection place such as Quest Labs, or other special places such as occupational health clinics, etc. In the old days when I got my 1st job, I recall they will cut some of my hair for testing – those are more rigorous testing in my opinion. Anyway, don’t do illicit drugs, marijuana and/or cannabis included. I recall when I was working for coal mining companies: they even said the company can ask for urine sample anytime.
Reference check
It seems this is rarely done nowadays.
Microsoft Teams – multiple Microsoft office 365 accounts
I learned my lesson the hard way during real interview. I clicked on the Microsoft Teams link on the Chrome browser that I usually use. But I forgot that I recently used that browser for outlook (another email account, different email from the link I was clicking). And the Chrome browser gave me an error right away. So I copied the link, and open a new incognito window and pasted my link there, it prompt me with some new information. I was not sure what to do. So I opened Safari as I believe I haven’t used that browser for a while, and got information similar to the new Chrome incognito window (at least they are consistent), and I just clicked the link there and it worked.
Or it was always that way? It’s just I (dumb me) vastly underestimated some people’s stupidity. Or let’s blame the smartphones and the tech bros who helped this journey of “making us dumber” 🙂
Smartphone and Social Media
This is not a joke actually, because sometimes I joked too much and my kids usually think my “dad jokes” are not funny. Probably my wife doesn’t think highly some of my jokes either. There are research (google search) that says “social media” make people think less critically – if they were thinking critically before social media, I guess. Let me quite some results from Google search below.
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Search Labs | AI Overview Is social media making us stupid and less empathetic? – Peerbagh Yes, social media can make people less able to think critically and analytically, and it can also contribute to mental health issues.
Note with all the American exceptionalism (which in my mind, it’s a myth or overrated to say the least). I don’t think America is exceptional in terms of social media usage though – at the same time, the tech bros are raking in money from social media and overuse of big tech left and right:
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Zuckerberg’s FB/Instagram/Whatsapp;
Elon Musk’s X/Twitter (at least he hoped he could make more money from X, he did make tons of money from Tesla, with quite a bit government subsidies);
Jeff Bezos’ Amazon – earth’s biggest store, shop until you drop;
tech bros’ Google;
tech bros’ Apple;
and so on
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I do similar things on the Chinese social media platform WeChat and Red Note too 🙁 In other words, I believe overall we are all dumber because our eyes are glued to the phone or screen all the time (again if applicable, nothing personal).
Missouri aka the show money state
The outcome of recent lawsuit that awards Missouri $24 billion seems confirmed my worry. I was too simple, too naive. MO AG Andrew Bailey doesn’t seem to be a nice person, btw. As practical matters, this will just make the lives of Chinese people in Missouri a little bit harder. Because as a Chinese person who lived in the show money state since 1997, I know most people here cannot even tell the difference between Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese people and so on. I can’t either: when I met a Chinese couple back in January 2015 for my old daughter kindergarten registration, at first I thought they are Korean 🙂
I am expecting more “go back to your country” shenanigans 🙁
Tariff is another good example. It’s 100% shoot yourself on the foot – those who start the trade war. Here is a good example.
If a country wants to reduce trade deficit: the rational way is to reduce imports, or reduce consumption. Right: don’t buy the junks from Shein and Temu.
If a country wants to boost manufacturing sector, the country can do things such as educate young people on engineering and manufacturing, advocate and support manufacturing business (instead of doing the bitcoin and cryptos shit; or put 100% tariff on EVs from the country you don’t like), and soon. In either case though, tariffs for imports or subsidies for domestic manufacturing are interventions, in other words the Government is meddling in the market. What happens to the republicans free market narrative?
Yesterday, with the launch of Apple’s new iPhone 15, some people noticed that Apple released a new USB C to lightning adapter. And, it’s going to cost $29 dollars. Such a rip-off 🙂
USB C to Lightning adapter
However, few people touted that Apple kept the iPhone 15 price the same as iPhone 14, while at the same time slashing the iPhone 14 price. See the chart at the beginning of the post. And yours truly ran two survey on the interest in buying iPhone 15 last week too.
We all know the Fed is printing money like a drunk sailor, and with the pandemic relief in 2020, etc., there is much more money lying around. And it’s the major factor that’s responsible for the US inflation.
(Update 11-03-2025) Come across this Chinese blog post 被裁员是祸是福 -没准是柳岸花明又一村 and I agree. In English it’s called blessings disguised as curse 🙂
(Original) A touchy topic. I have been in the tech industry for almost 23 years, and I have seen my share of the layoffs. I saw the layoff very early in my career, and the most recent ones in last year or so amid the big tech post pandemic layoffs.
Layoffs are usually not pleasant. But putting emotions aside, I recall an older wise gentleman once told me: it’s not necessarily a bad thing, as it gives an opportunity for someone to look beyond the daily grinding, to reflect, to pivot or reposition and hopefully find something better or more suitable for someone (not exactly words, here someone is actually yours truly back in the early 2019).
Also sometimes the old timers (the good old employers) will ask in the employment history section during a job app: have you ever being involuntarily terminated from an employer? While I am not a lawyer (my wife is), but my legal advice here is: this is somewhat like the situation when I was in the US Consulate in Shanghai back in 1997, when the visa officer asked: what’s your plan after the graduate school? One thing I was 100% sure is: I was not going to say that I planned to stay in the US for good 🙂 I think an honest answer then is probably “I don’t know” or “I am not sure”. Remember in 1997 although the Hong Kong was returning to China, at the time the US was still way ahead of China, with the exception of the Chinese food here. There were a lots more economy developments in China compared to the US since then.
Two traumatic layoffs that left me impression
It was Oct 11, 2001, a month after the Sept 11, 2001. We knew the layoff is coming, after our company bought a rival company. The day came and it was not the 1st time I saw layoff, I think I saw a smaller layoff shortly after I joined the company in fall 2000. But Oct 11, 2021 is probably by far the worst in my career, we had 3 coworkers being let go on that morning. I worked closely with one of them, and the coworker cried or sobbed when the news broke. Her husband also worked at our team. Later the department manager rallied or tried to console the people who being left (we had about 30+ people, mostly devs). And we also learned the overlapping dev team at the acquired company were all let go. I recall there were quite a few ethnic Chinese people, who probably had similar background with me, but they may have came to the US a few years earlier than me. A side note amid all this is a QA engineer (test engineer) was laid off, and a few weeks ago during a townhall he asked question to the CEO about layoff 🙁 That day the company laid off about 18% of the people, and that’s probably 1,300 people.
Another case, while at the Mercy Health, we also knew the layoff was coming. And this time around we lost our QA engineer again (see the pattern here?), as well as an old engineer who cried / sobbed quite loud. I vowed to myself: never put myself into this kind of position when I reach his age (which is getting closer and closer, btw 🙂
My own share of layoffs
I had experienced 2 layoffs myself so far. Both times I was a bit surprised. But I think the second time it worked out for me better as my severance package is better, also due to the timing, it helped us bought our single family house at the right time before pandemic in summer 2019 (so here is another side benefit in addition to the career pivot).
The 1st time it was a bit sour taste. But I was not totally caught off guard either. I know one or two project leaders (they are more like team lead, not managers) didn’t like me. And I couldn’t do much to change the situation (the dynamics). The layoff came, the admin assistant was really nice actually. Looking back I think she is one of the few people who probably knew a few days in advance. I calmed down and negotiated a calm exit before my China trip then (year 2011, I had to email recruiters when I was in China, which is not ideal). I got a contractor position quickly after I came back from China. In this particular case, I actually learned that individual who said bad things about me before my manager(s) once got into a fist fight with another coworker there. I think looking from another angle, avoid toxic people at work place is a good idea 🙂 I do recall the evening in which I just lost my job, and I went to the Bread Co, thinking I would probably spend say $15 off my $40k savings: I may have seen a friend there, but I forgot exact who etc. I did couple interviews before the China trip, and no offer before my flight 🙁
Technically there was another case that I was laid off, in Nov 2013, very briefly. My contract job ended and they gave me 2 weeks notice via my recruiter. And I recall I saw a “Lord’s Prayer” in the weekend I learned the news, while at a friend’ friend home attending the 1st friend’ baby shower. That “layoff” left me a sour taste as well. But luckily I was interviewing before this and was able to quickly secure a new job offer in a few days.
Strategies
I think the most important thing to remember is never assume your job is there tomorrow. Because we have very little control. CEOs came and go, and little guys (or girls) like us can be let go really at any time. Never assume your work is so important that your boss or your company will keep you forever.
Along those lines, make sure you have the urgent savings account, which should at least cover 6 month of living cost: thinking mortgage / rent, grocery, gas, car payment (if applicable), and health insurance (remember if you pay out of your own pocket, it will not be cheap, as companies usually subsidize some cost aa a part of the benefit). This part is important because it gives you a peace of mind when you got the layoff. Note not every company offers generous severance package. The money you have will also help you have some breeze room when looking for new jobs.
Also get prepared. Always get your resume or LinkedIn profile updated. Test the market once a while. For coders (programmers, developers, software engineers), make sure you do some coding every day / week etc., don’t just sit there and do nothing. Learn something new if there is not much coding work. Nowadays there are so many online free resources for one to learn. In face, in terms of job market, for developers (software development engineers), the job market is usually pretty good. So as long as the developer knows something and can contribute, he/she usually won’t be in the job market for too long. I cannot say that for other positions in the IT job market, e.g., recruiter jobs are very much business (econ) cycle, so there is this famine and feast kind of situation. Similar can be said for the Quality Assurance (test engineer) and manager positions. I saw a director at the credit card got laid off, initially that individual worked for a contractor position as project manager, until eventually going back to similar position as before: took couple years.
But again here we need to be mindful that we are the ones who are responsible for our own careers: e.g., there is a manager position opening up at a software company or an IT shop, and someone hinted that you jumping at the opportunity. Remember what I just said: in terms of the job opportunities disparity between devs and managers, or architects for that matter. At one time of my career, I did become an architect as well, but I decided that was not for me longer term. I like to be closer to the coding.
Tips
Remember try not to be emotional. Also you are entitled to ask “why the layoff on me”? Although the answer is usually “the position is eliminated” or something similar. Remember the employer usually has better resources in terms of legal expertise or lawyered-up. In reality just like in the situation of “being dumped by your significant other”, there is usually signs or legit reasons whey it happened. Ideally you should know and not be caught totally off guard. And hopefully you were waiting for the severance package. For that my advice is not to sign anything on the spot. Just like an offer letter, you may want to bring it home, cool down, talk to someone, before signing anything official.
Also sometimes looking back the writing is on the wall or the hints are usually there. Like the two traumatic (large) layoffs I mentioned above. Get prepared before the actual layoff happens (again refer to the strategies above). No need to overly worry about the look the admin assistant gave you though, just be prepared when you work for someone or a company, you know in the USA the employment is at-will: meaning people can let you know anytime. This is quite different from the families. And don’t got tricked into thinking company’s sometimes misleading “we are families” kind of talk. We are in a employee / employer relationship, for now. We don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.
Last but not least, don’t use your company device for anything that’s in your private life. An example, your kids pictures, your family pictures, if you have company iPhone, try not to use it for those sort of things. And if you do, as a minimum try to make copies and delete the pictures on the phone before turning it in. You know the iPhone has settings that allow you to do that, and do it as needed. You never know what other people are going to do to the company devices that you turn in.
Psychological Impact
I don’t think this is trivial. I believe just like being dumped by your first significant other (boy friend/girl friend, husband/wife), this “being rejected by someone” feeling is usually hard, but at the same time it’s also quite common and normal. If you always got what you wanted, and were never rejected by someone, congrats 🙂 I think some of the websites will use the first name or name of your 1st boy friend or girl friend as an option (btw, this does not work very well in the Muslim countries, from what I heard). The reason for that is simple: people would almost never forget that name 🙂
Over the time though, we can overcome this “being rejected” feeling. It never goes away. But it can be controlled, and hopefully we can direct to something or some endeavor that we can use our passion there.
Another potential side effect, is the stigma associated with layoff, which is totally unnecessary – and I touched those good old companies’s specific question “have you ever involuntarily terminated from your job”? Again not legal advice just ignore those. Things don’t always work out as we liked. As long as we learn something and try not to make same mistake (again and again), we are making progress 🙂
Job Search
Last but not least, some job search observations / tips. Related to that, some may point out that although in the US, the employers cannot discriminate against applicants’ age, in reality though, this is still a factor and most employers in fact have preferences on employees’ age. I recall in the company I worked for 8 years, and I know a coworker worked there for 40+ years, and I heard he was laid off after I left (I resigned from that company in Nov 2008, yes it was during the financial crisis :-(. His layoff has nothing to do with my leaving, and I believe there is age factor there.
(Update 09-10-2023) Came across this video “One peril facing job-hunters? Being ghosted” at CBS Sunday Morning. This is actually quite common during a job search, from my experience. Don’t take it personally and move on.
(Update 09-20-2023)How Virtual Layoffs Became The New Normal For Workplaces. Btw, I just learned another contractor got laid off at my work place (my impression is current work place is pretty bad towards contractors, as I was at the other end of the table about 10 years ago, they did give me 2 weeks notice, so it softens the blow a bit). Talking about contractors or contingency workers in the IT and software industry, this is a very common way for an employers to add more people when needed, and get rid of them when not needed. Quite brutal in the sense of “job security” or “provide for family”. Something to keep in mind when jumping ships. || Also from SubStack: Layoff lessons: Four things I wish I knew.
(Update 12-18-2023) Came across this blog post from a former colleague, looks good. From my personal experience, healthcare is a tough industry to work.
Or American consumers. I did not realized that the consumer credit card debt skyrocketed recently until I saw a year at Twitter. This chart has about 4 years of data: both the credit card loan and personal savings. The source of data is from FRED (I think it stands for Fed Research Economic Data): I noticed this link is actually from St. Louis fed, not too far from where I live. This chart has about 20 years worth of data. Besides the long term overall trends: consumer debt goes up in last 20 years in general, savings rate were mostly flat except the two stimulus rounds during 2020 / 2021 pandemic. But from Mar 17, 2021, it seems the two curves went totally opposite directions, the debt went up, the savings went down.
This is not sustainable, if we use some common sense. Because the consumers will accumulate debt, a similar analogy is the US as a country owe money to foreign government in the form of treasury (or debt in the US dollar). This is bad too, because as we may know, the interest on those debt will go up and soon or later the US will hit the debt ceiling (a bit like consumer’ credit card limit).
The US has a lot of smart people, a decent political system, and market based economy. But the “shop until drop” mindset, and / or the over reliance on consumer spending is the achilles heel of the US economy.
I heard a lot of inflation talk among friends recently. I think the CPI data kinda confirms it. The gas and food prices went up a lot in recent months. Last time we saw $4 a gallon gasoline, it was about 2012 or 10 years ago. The answer to “whom to blame” question, like many things in this country, depends on “to whom” you ask this question. Once I saw a small Biden sticker at local Sam’s Club gas station, the point the sticker trying to convey is “the high gas price is all president Biden’s fault”. I think the real answer is more nuisance, and I think it’s largely supply and demand. For the crude oil, the Russia and Ukraine war, aka. Putin is to blame, because he started the war. But again this can get political quite easily. There are a lot of supporter of Putin in this world, unfortunately. Then there is the refinery cost. I think recently the refiners are adjusting from the winter to summer (they need to tune their refineries), and this cause some disruption and could reduce the output too. Diesel is in similar situation as gasoline. Note the crude oil, fuel cost etc is a part of cost for many other things such as fertilizers, transportations (cars, trucks, rails and airplanes) and so on. So there is the secondary effect (tangential effect) from the rising oil prices. Last but not least, inflation adjusted, the gas price seems flat in the US for last 40+ years.
Gasoline and diesel aside (and the war), other factors I can think of is the supply chain issue, and related China zero covid policy did not help here either. Then there is this labor shortage in the US due to pandemic, basically the people doing the physical labor were a bit hard to find especially in the early phase of pandemic due to various reasons: some people got Covid; some people got money from the government to stay at home for quite a while; at the same time the demand actually increased since pandemic, here is a good example at Starbucks. I saw similar situation at local Chipotle’s and Pot’s Belly. People are now used to order online via mobile phone.
Last and definitely not the least, the Federal Reserve. I think they have been accommodating the stock market for too long since 2008 financial crisis, and they did buy too much assets, printed too much money to prop up the economy artificially since March 2020 pandemic shutdown. Note the money was made way to the real economy via congress, via various rescue packages since March 2020 (both presidents), or President Biden’s infrastructure plan.
How to counter the inflation? For that I would borrow Warren Buffett’s idea. Blame someone else does not help in the real world, on the other hand, if we can make us more valuable to others, and live below the means, we will get desired outcome.
(Update: 09-11-2023) Yesterday I noticed the new Hilltop West development: My YouTube video when I walked by yesterday am, the Olivette City Website, and a Zillow link (and developer website, not much info there, by the way). Again I saw quite a few torn down and rebuilt in that neighborhood. The new house in the school district went up probably 50% in the last 3 years. For average wage earners, the salary didn’t go up that much. I recall in the good old days the rule of thumb was that we buy houses about 3 times our before-tax income. So in order to buy a $ 750k home, we need to earn about $ 250k (which is still quite a bit of money for the average worker salary in the St. Louis area).
(Update: 12-30-2021) I heard about this one, but the new 35 townhomes at Dielman and Olive Road are official. Here is the developer’s website. I took a short video here. As of 04-16-2023, I saw earth-moving equipment flattened the surface when I was driving by Olive Road passing the Dielman. (Update 04-01-2025) Looks like it’s going to be 33 units now – see my youtube video here. I am guessing price starts at $750k.
(Original) We can see a lots of new developments, both residential and commercials, at Olivette along the Olive road in last year or so.
Some of the bigger development projects I am aware of: are the Oliver (apartments and some retail), Olive Crossing at Olive and 170(apartments now opened as the Clover luxury apartment, hotels, retail and dining), and the Opus group olivette project. , one of the new neighbors in my neighborhood moved from the last project site (a single-family home sold to a developer and bought a new home in my neighborhood). We briefly discussed the trend of apartments over single-family houses (SFH) in the younger generation. I think it’s also a desire from the city and the developer as well. Maybe the apartments are more environmentally friendly compared to SFH. (Update 09-06-2023) It seems the apartment behind the Chevy Restaurant didn’t take off: all I can see right now is weeds and bushes in that empty lot 🙂
Reading Time: 2minutesWhat a week. Stock market indices dropped significantly in last 3 trading days of the week, following many events in the week.
1. Scott Brown won MA senate race
No one see this coming until recently. Looking back this is actually easy to understand. A few days before the Tuesday election, I was thinking, if Democrats want to keep the seat of Ted Kennedy, they should pick Vicki Kennedy. Similar outcome happened in 2002 Senate race in the Show-Me state, in which Gene Carnahan (the widow of Mel Carnahan) took the seat won by already deceased Mel. Note Gene was feature in the campaign ads leads to the election. Remember “don’t let fire go out” ad?
2. Bernanke confirmation in jeopardy
I think he should be confirmed. Some populists claims he was the arsonist who comes back to extinguish the fire. There is some truth, except I would add he was the cheerleader when Greenspan (the real arsonist) started the fire (by keeping the interest rate low, caused the US housing bubble). I would give Bernanke a second chance, after all the world and we all would be in a much worst shape if he did not put out the fire.
Reading Time: 2minutesthe link to publisher here. author: Nomi Prins, formerly Managing Director of Goldman
Also author interview by Vermont senator Bernie Sanders (I) at After Words (C-Span). There is a video link at the right. This book reminds something I read from Ruth’s Chris (Nasdaq:RUTH) 2008 annual report, Risk factors, bullet 5 (quoted below):
Turmoil in the financial services industry, volatility in securities trading markets and general economic downturns may adversely affect our ability to access the credit and capital markets to finance a portion of our working capital requirements and support our liquidity needs.
