HN Vibe Check: "Who's Given Up on Getting Hired?"
- Patrick Duggan
- Jan 9
- 2 min read
The Thread
"Ask HN: Who's given up on getting hired?"
No pitch. No hustle advice. Just engineers asking if anyone else has stopped trying.
The Numbers
2025 layoffs: 245,953 tech workers globally
2026 so far (9 days): 454 cuts — that's 57 per day
Job listings: Down 35% vs pre-pandemic
AI-linked layoffs: 69,840 positions eliminated citing AI/automation
The Vibe
It's not panic. It's something quieter.
The boom-bust cycle that defined tech careers for 30 years has flatlined into a holding pattern. Companies aren't hiring. They're not mass-firing either. They're just... waiting.
The people posting in that thread aren't angry. They're tired. They've done the LeetCode. They've networked. They've applied to 300 jobs and gotten 3 interviews and 0 offers. At some point, the math stops making sense.
What's Actually Happening
69,840 layoffs explicitly linked to AI adoption
But it's not robots taking jobs—it's one senior engineer doing the work of three juniors with Copilot
The "10x engineer" is now table stakes
ZIRP is over. Capital is expensive.
Companies that hired 5,000 people in 2021 have discovered they can run on 2,000
The positions aren't coming back
Hot: AI ethics, ML engineering, cybersecurity
Cold: Generic full-stack, project management, anything "coordinator"
The middle is hollowing out
The Honest Take
Every economic transition has casualties. The industrial revolution displaced millions. The internet killed entire industries. AI is doing the same, faster.
What makes this one different: the people being displaced are the ones who built the tools displacing them.
The senior engineer who spent 15 years mastering distributed systems is now competing with a junior who can prompt Claude to generate the same architecture in an afternoon. The value has shifted from knowing how to build things to knowing what to build.
What Works Now
Based on who's still getting hired:
Domain expertise + technical skills — The lawyer who can code. The doctor who understands ML. The security engineer who's been on the other side.
Infrastructure at scale — If you've run systems at 10M+ users, you're still in demand. The commodity skills are AI'd away; the edge cases are not.
Security — Turns out having someone who understands attack surface is more important when AI writes all your code.
The unglamorous — Healthcare IT, government contractors, legacy system maintenance. The systems nobody wants to touch still need touching.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Some of the people in that HN thread will never work in tech again. Not because they're bad engineers. Because the market they trained for no longer exists.
That's not pessimism. That's pattern recognition.
The question isn't whether AI will take your job. It's whether you're building skills AI can't replicate—yet.
Sources
Layoffs.fyi tracking data
Bureau of Labor Statistics Q4 2025
Challenger, Gray & Christmas layoff reports
HN thread (you know the one)
About DugganUSA: We publish free threat intelligence and occasionally existential career commentary. Our STIX feed won't help you get hired, but it might help you not get breached.
Her name is Renee Nicole Good.
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