Top Economists Agree That Gen Z's Hiring Nightmare Is Real
- Reference: 0179473378
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/09/22/2118247/top-economists-agree-that-gen-zs-hiring-nightmare-is-real
- Source link:
> The dramatic rise in unemployment among Americans under 25 -- especially recent graduates -- has become one of the [1]most troubling [2]economic headlines [3]of 2025 . Recent insights from economists, central bankers, and labor market analysts signal that this appears to be a uniquely American challenge, underpinned by a "no hire, no fire" economy rather than solely by the rapid ascent of artificial intelligence.
>
> For many Gen Z workers, the struggle to land a job can feel isolating and fuel self-doubt. But that frustration recently got some high-level validation: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell echoed economists' concerns about the cooling labor market, telling reporters at his regular press conference following the Federal Open Market Committee that it's an "interesting labor market" right now, adding that "kids coming out of college and younger people, minorities, are having a hard time finding jobs." Noting a low job finding rate, along with a low redundancy rate, he said, "you've got a low firing, low hiring environment." and [4]noting that it's harder than ever for young jobseekers to break in .
>
> While recent months have been dubbed by Deutsche Bank "the summer AI turned ugly," and some major studies find AI adoption disrupting some entry-level roles, Powell was less sure. AI "may be part of the story," but he insisted the main drivers are a broadly slowed economy and hiring restraint. Top economists at Goldman Sachs and UBS tackled the subject soon after and found Powell to be mostly on the money. This isn't an AI story, at least not yet.
"The U.S. labor market experience is peculiar," said Paul Donovan, UBS Chief Economist. "Young Euro area workers have a record low unemployment rate. In the UK, the young persons' unemployment rate has fallen steadily. Employment participation by young Japanese workers is near all-time highs. It seems highly implausible that AI uniquely hurts the employment prospects of younger US workers."
"It might be tempting to blame technology... Machines, robots, or computers replacing humans is an ever-popular dystopian scenario." Donovan concludes that the U.S. pattern "more convincingly fits a broader hiring freeze narrative, affecting new entrants to the workforce."
Goldman Sachs economist Pierfrancesco Mei said last Thursday that "finding a job takes longer in a low-turnover labor market." He argued that "job reallocation," or the pace at which new jobs are created and existing ones destroyed, has been on the decline since the late 1990s... "almost all the variation in turnover since the Great Recession mostly falls on younger workers" and is taking place as "churn." Goldman found that in 2019, it took a young unemployed worker about 10 weeks to find a new job in a low-churn state; now that's 12 weeks on average.
[1] https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/0423228/theres-50-fewer-young-employees-at-tech-companies-now-than-two-years-ago
[2] https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/09/17/2142221/gen-z-leads-biggest-drop-in-fico-scores-since-financial-crisis
[3] https://slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/1235210/the-new-american-hustle-dividends-over-day-jobs
[4] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/top-economists-jerome-powell-agree-123000061.html
I've hired Gen Zers, and I am not impressed. (Score:4, Insightful)
They tend to be scared to try new things, un-interested in being at work on time or even during standard hours, entitled, and have no interest in paying their dues, often expecting a salary that is more appropriate for someone with 10 years of experience. "I don't want to build stuff" I was told by a recent mechanical engineering grad. "I want to design stuff". Hey kid, you will be a far better engineer in the long run if you learn how to build stuff for a few years, especially if the parts are poorly designed. You will quickly learns what works and what doesn't.
Re:I've hired Gen Zers, and I am not impressed. (Score:5, Interesting)
For a minute there I thought you were talking about Millennials, since all of these very things were said about them when they were just entering the work force.
As I recall, the very same things were said about Gen-X too.
I don't know if it goes much further back than this, though there is an interesting quote from a famous old guy named "Socrates" that goes like: "The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
Kids these days....
Re: (Score:3)
> ... there is an interesting quote from a famous old guy named "Socrates" that goes like ...
Not as interesting as his other quote, "I drank what?"
(From [1]Real Genius [wikipedia.org].)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Genius
Re:I've hired Gen Zers, and I am not impressed. (Score:4, Interesting)
I suspect they were all correct. Most people have to experience life for a while before they learn the value of doing things in a way proven to be effective. The only thing they were wrong about is that the current youth were much more annoying than the youth of when they were a youth. They might even be right that they were different, and in denial about the value of their experience.
Re: (Score:2)
I beg to diff. 25 years ago when I started in the work force, you didn't call out sick without a doctors note and a no call no show was essentially going to get you fired unless you had a extremely good reason. No one behaved that way but now, it's an every day occurrence.
It's not just Gen Z that has lowered work ethic. I've watched these changes over at 25 years and it's really sad. Even older workers pull this shit now. I guess it's partly a reaction to being treated as disposable by employers.
I don't kno
Let me translate for everyone (Score:4, Insightful)
"I hired a bunch of kids fresh out of school for roughly half the money I used to pay adjusted for inflation and even though they have six roommates and drive Uber on the weekends I expect them to be just as productive as a guy with 40 years of experience that I am paying on the old union pay scales who owns his home outright and is getting ready to retire"
Maybe you should look in a mirror and ask who really is the entitled fuck here.
Re: (Score:2)
> I expect them to be just as productive as a guy with 40 years of experience ...
Who also has 40 years of accumulated code to pull from.
Re: (Score:3)
Jesus Christ I didn't think the people around here were that young.
Lots of people. I don't know how to explain this to you but there's this thing called the passage of time... I think Einstein invented it. Or maybe it was Newton.
Go look up when the Atari 800 computer was first released. Christ there were people writing mainframe code back then. Computers aren't really new. Yeah somebody with that much experiences getting ready to retire. Why the fuck do you think I said getting ready to retire in my
Re: (Score:3)
> ... have no interest in paying their dues, often expecting a salary that is more appropriate for someone with 10 years of experience.
This was a few years ago, so not exactly Gen-Z, but a similar situation. I was helping a very recent hire, just out of university, with a project and he asked when he would get promoted from a Junior to Senior Software Engineer. I told him, among other things, when he didn't need a senior engineer to help him with his work.
It took him two weeks to complete his task, even with my on-request guidance. When he was done, he thanked me for all the help and remarked that I had always been ready with an answ
Re: (Score:2)
Always the same fake excuse. THIS is what is causing the mess. People have complained in the same insightless fashion about the younger generations for thousands of years. All this serves is to elevate the complainers and make them feel good about themselves without any rational basis or actual accomplishment on their side.
Here is the actual reality: Hire young people and let them find out how things work and get better at things. If you do not, I really hope your organization just dies because it is nothin
predictions (Score:1)
"young people dont want to work, stupid, lazy, woke etc. therefore we the boomers and gen Xers dont actually have to do anything for anyone because we the wealthiest get to judge the younger generations. dont need to support them building by homes or wages or wealth inqueality or anything at all because we are the best. its definitely not a matter of chance that we were borne into the wealthiest society on earth early on to grab all that wealth and theres no way this can have commupance because soon we wi
production vs consumption (Score:3)
Production equals consumption in an ideal economy. Both are bound by finite time. If production increases, consumption must increase, too. Ergo, time spent on production must fall, which is what happened during the last two depressionary eras. 1873-1897 and 1930-1940
[1]https://www.scry.llc/2024/12/2... [scry.llc]
This phenomenon can be modeled with two linear equations.
Conditions
Assume we want Production = Consumption. (P = C)
Linear Equations
P Hours + C Hours = Konstant (16 hours if we measure by day).
(P Hours) X (Rate of P) = (C Hours) X (Rate of C)
Example by week: (40 hours) x (Rp) = (72 hours) x (Rc)
As Rp increases, P Hours must decline to maintain equilibrium.
[2]https://www.scry.llc/2025/01/2... [scry.llc]
[1] https://www.scry.llc/2024/12/27/work-week/
[2] https://www.scry.llc/2025/01/27/equilibrium/
It's Trump (Score:5, Interesting)
We hadn't fully recovered from the damage his mishandling of covid did (as a reminder Obama had two pandemics under his administration neither of which made it to our shores).
We go through this in cycles where every 8 years we get obsessed with some stupid moral panic and we elect Republicans and then they destroy everything because that's pretty much all they can do.
Then the Democrats come in and fix as much as they can and it's never enough because the Republicans are actively sabotaging them but they at least gets enough fixed that we can go about our lives just in a slightly lower quality. Hooray for the Contract with America, Google it if you don't know.
The problem is Biden had just barely gotten us a soft landing despite Jerome Powell gunning for three and a half million layoffs that he never got.
We needed at least another four years to begin to get back on track and we didn't get it. On top of that you've got AI Plus the other 50 years of factory automation and miscellaneous process improvement we all just pretend didn't happen.
This is not sustainable. The Republican party knows that and it's why they are moving to end elections. If America keeps having elections it's only a matter of time before we elect another FDR and have a new new deal.
And the billionaires aren't going to let that happen this time. They are anxious to become trillionaires.
Re:It's Trump (Score:4, Interesting)
> We go through this in cycles where every 8 years we get obsessed with some stupid moral panic and we elect Republicans and then they destroy everything because that's pretty much all they can do.
> Then the Democrats come in and fix as much as they can and it's never enough because the Republicans are actively sabotaging them but they at least gets enough fixed that we can go about our lives just in a slightly lower quality.
You forgot the part where the fixing is often more painful than the breaking - like tax hikes vs cuts - which makes people unhappy, especially in the moment, because many have the memory and attention span of a goldfish and have forgotten how we all got there and they're disinterested in the future.
To illustrate your comment about Republicans / "Conservatives", think about how they lost their collective minds about trans athletes, then consider there are only 10 (ten) trans U.S. college athletes, out of 500,000. From [1]Trans Women in Sports: Facts Over Fear [sf.gov]:
> Trans people are estimated to make up 1-2% of the population of the United States; however, trans people make up less than less than 0.002% (10/500,000) of US college athletes, and even fewer of recent Olympians (0.001%) identify as trans.
Got to hand it to them; it got people riled up though and some of those voted on that issue. Unfortunately, that says more about the voters than the politicians, and it's not necessarily good.
[1] https://www.sf.gov/trans-women-in-sports-facts-over-fear
You are once again responding to a bot (Score:2)
That chops up bits and pieces of my old posts adding usually little bits of nastiness in there to try and... Honestly I don't know what they're doing I think they're just training in llm the poison the well.
What it looks like they are doing is they are trying to build a chatbot that will impersonate people and get them in trouble with mods. The thing I don't understand is this isn't the kind of website where that happens. Thinking about it they are probably doing it for other websites and this is just w
Re: (Score:2)
If you're referring to me, I'm not a bot; I just have that in my name -- from about 1998 - as an homage to Farscape slang "fahrbot" and the various Futurama robots "-bot". -- Cheers, Rick
Re: (Score:2)
> from the damage his mishandling of covid did (as a reminder Obama had two pandemics under his administration neither of which made it to our shores).
It's the implication that Obama would have prevented Covid that gets me. Are you imagining him showing up at that Wuhan wet market with cans of Lysol or something? Also isn't Operation Warp Speed one of the things liberals think Trump did right?
Look, there's just so many things to complain about that you don't need "Trump didn't stop Covid enough". You can let that one go.
Re: (Score:1)
Covid was in the West for months before "The Pandemic" was declared. Very few people noticed it because old, sick people dying of respiratory disease is normal.
Trump's original plan to tell old, sick people to stay home while the rest of us caught it was the correct one. Instead the government wrecked the economy, got a lot of old, sick people dead, destroyed the social contract and most of us caught it in the end anyway.
Look I think the one thing we can both agree on (Score:2)
Is that Trump fucks kids and you voted for a kid fucker.
So while it's true that Trump fucks kids it's also true that you voted for a kitty fucker. Which is weird because most people wouldn't do that. Well I mean I guess 77 million people would but half of them were stupid.
And you don't strike me as the stupid half you strike me as the willingly voting for a kid fucker half.
Re: (Score:2)
Indeed. But it is not AI or the same problems would happen in Europe. They do not. Yes, there is some stupid firings here as well, but companies still understand that young people are their future and that not hiring them is suicide.
Well, I guess the US has to go through a full Republican-caused collapse before the dumb masses get that the "leaders" there are not their friends. But beware, fascism can last a long time before it inevitably collapses.
Holy shit this thread attracted to boomers (Score:4, Insightful)
I am genuinely appalled and impressed at the same time by the outpouring of old men yelling at clouds energy here.
It's like none of you have children or if you do you didn't bother raising them.
Here in the real world people under 30 are working their asses off much harder than our generation did. They are expected to come out of school fully trained for specific jobs but they are also expected to take the kind of low pay that someone without that training would accept. And that's before we talk about adjusting for inflation
My kid regularly puts in 50 hours a week and up. In college they not only had the same workload that I did but they also had a ton of additional courses on top of a ton of on-the-job training classes that had to be paid for. They came out of college ready to work with basically a full Year's worth of direct working experience and they still got paid like shit.
It's been about 5 years and they are only just now at the point where they can reliably support themselves at their income level. With a roommate of course.
This is where the college degree in an in-demand field. I can't imagine what it's like hitting the job market right now. And adjusted for inflation they're making about 75% of what their grandparents made in the exact same career but with less education.
I know facts aren't going to change anyone's mind. You're just going to get your dose of right-wing propaganda.
I would love to have one of you fuckers explain to me why you like right wing propaganda so much though. It's weird but I know it entertains you I just don't understand why. I mean I guess it's similar to how I like anime and people who don't like anime can't understand why I like anime but still. I can at least put into words the reasons I like anime like that I enjoy animation, that I like things that are whimsical and fun, that my color blindness makes anime look especially attractive because I can see the bright primary colors used and that I'm more than a little childish when it comes to my entertainment. Although I do draw the line at lolis and Isekai Mary Sue slop. Which is a pity because if I liked isekai there's a virtually unlimited amount of it but Jesus I don't understand how anyone watches that stuff.
But I have never once seen a right winger put into words why they are so entertained by right wing content. Honestly though I'm not even sure they understand that they are. I only became aware of it when a guy who was in the process of being pipelined into the right wing mentioned that he was entertained by Fox News and I thought it was the weirdest fucking thing I ever heard in my life. Anyway at this point I'm just ranting because God knows I'm not going to get through to any of you. What's the phrase you love so much? Set in your ways. That's going to end real well for you when your 401k goes bankrupt in a few years because it gets loaded with bad Tesla stock and Trump coin. Better start picking out your favorite flavor of cat food. And is a backup you better pick one of the dry brands too
Re: (Score:3)
> I would love to have one of you fuckers explain to me why you like right wing propaganda so much though.
I would guess it's because so much of it simply blames problems on others and/or make others the "bad guys" and that's *way* more palatable. The right is more like "you're the problem for us", where the left is more like "we're all part of the problem" (and "the solution"). The former is easier and latter harder. In the case of MAGA specifically, it really seems to be a party of exclusion - with the test being if you're currently "MAGA enough" and an ever-narrowing definition of what that is. Just $0.0
You know I would think that (Score:2)
But I've known people who aren't assholes that gravitate towards right wing media. I mean it's only knew them as friends I hung out with not like really close friends or family but still I knew them well enough and usually the asshole right wingers revealed themselves pretty quickly because sooner or later they're going to say something mildly racist.
I don't think they are that kind of jerk I think it's just there's something a certain class of people find entertaining about right-wing media that I don'
The Fascist in the room (Score:5, Interesting)
The company I work for is heavily international - we crossed the 50% mark a few years back, and now a majority of our revenue comes from non-US countries.
Our parent company is almost entirely US-only.
We're hiring a lot world-wide, and a tiny amount domestically. Our parent is laying people off left and right.
We're also postponing domestic projects. International ones are full-steam ahead.
And the single-biggest reason is no exec can make any significant plans without serious risk of the President of the US doing something bone-headed that blows it up. The risk that some admin hanger-on will come up with a regulatory extortion scheme targeting big announcements is too great. Even if you're not directly targeted, they just flip various regulatory switches randomly, just as they've been doing for the past 8 months. Coked up fascists doing policy is just not good for business, yo.
If you think I'm exaggerating, you try finishing a project budget this month. ( [1]Hint [slashdot.org].) To be clear this is not complaining about the fee - the constant changes that render yesterday's work irrelevant is the problem.
[1] https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/09/22/1329201/jpmorgan-says-100k-prices-out-h-1b-as-indian-it-giants-may-accelerate-offshoring-with-remote-delivery-already-proven-at-scale
Re: (Score:3)
Indeed. The problem is not that everything economic he orange criminal does is stupid. That would be survivable.
The massive, massive problem is that he is very unstable, has no strategy and changes things all the time with obviously no planning and no thinking ahead and no lead time. He just wants to keep his admirers enthralled so it is some new bad and disruptive idea every week, sometimes every day. Hence economic planning becomes completely impossible. There is no more reliable way to long-term kill a m
12 weeks instead of 10 (Score:2)
From the summary and aritcle:
> In 2019, it took a young unemployed worker about 10 weeks to find a new job in a low-churn state, now that’s 12 weeks on average.
So, not exactly great, but two weeks longer to find a job (from 10 to 12) is "deep freeze"? Maybe a little headline hype going on here.
Re: (Score:2)
Nice denial you have there. The whole thing is a little more complex than this one number and far worse.
Re: (Score:2)
In what way precisely is it "far worse"? I got my number from the article (and the statement is quoted in the summary). What's your evidence that it's not correct, but worse? If you're going to dispute the article, fine, but at least back it up with something other than your opinion!
Re: (Score:2)
You are not looking for an answer. You just look for leverage to push the hallucination you have already decided on being the "truth".
Re: (Score:2)
So my quote from the article was a hallucination?
Why did you even bother to respond to my statement, if you had nothing useful to say about it?
Are you saying that the 12-week number is incorrect?
If you can't explain in what way I'm wrong, I have no idea what it is that you're trying to convince me (or anyone else) of. What *is* the truth that I'm not seeing?
Trump (Score:2)
What better time, then, to making importing H1Bs extremely expensive.
Re: (Score:2)
I guarantee there will be exemptions and carve outs if you kiss sufficient ass.
Re: (Score:1)
This sounds like an oddly specific example...
Re: (Score:2)
Sorry, someone 24/25 was given the heave-ho from where I'm currently working a couple weeks ago for this very reason (well, it was the proverbial straw that busted the back).
But, generally speaking, a lot of youngsters I've been working with have been getting the broom for similar reasons. And it's not as something as new and sexy as AI that's responsible, just the regular-ol' being a terrible worker with a terrible attitude. It continues not to be great for job security, go figure...
Re: (Score:2)
I use to think this kind of behavior was just limited to my kind of job (retail, grocery) but having talked to many different people in many different professions, no show no call and constant sick calls are par for the course with these folks.
I recall complaining to one of my customers about the lack of work ethic and she told me the same thing happens at her work. She's a nurse that deliveries babies and she has fellow nurses no call no show. I was baffled. How does ANYONE no call no show in this day and
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, there was never an irresponsible young person before this generation.
I think I see the problem with the job market (Score:3, Insightful)
Right-wing /. trollposts are now being written by generative AI instead of bitter angry men who received the full benefits of the New deal and great society and completely ignore that and pretend they are self-made bootstrapping randian Supermen.
I have a proposal. Why don't all those Randian Supermen bugger off to Galt's Gulch and leave the rest of us to wither away and die in socialism. You know like the Netherlands and Canada and France and Germany and...
Re: (Score:2)
Until that day comes, if you take money from these bitter old men on their way to Galt's Gulch in exchange for -- y'know -- doing stuff, I recommend you do it, or they'll stop giving you money (so bitter, these old men)
Then when we're living in our national socialist utopia, we can all have a good laugh about those dark days when we had to toil for our daily bread. But in the meantime...
There's no such thing (Score:1)
As ethical consumption under capitalism. Go look up that phrase.
Or if that's too advanced for you, and I suspect it is, just look up this comic, [1]https://www.reddit.com/r/Peter... [reddit.com]
Also, okay Boomer.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PeterExplainsTheJoke/comments/159h9zn/what_does_this_mean_and_what_is_the_joke/
Re: (Score:2)
> Right-wing /. trollposts are now being written by generative AI
Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
Re: (Score:2)
By all means please explain what in my post I don't actually believe or adhere to.
Being harsh to assholes does not a troll make. A troll is just trying to stir up trouble.
News flash genius we already have trouble I'm just pointing it out and I'm not being nice about it.
But it looks like I hurt your precious little right-wing fee fees. What's funny is you're just aching for the day when you can shoot and kill me on a whim. Every one of you right wing son of a bitches is. It's your one and only dr
Re: (Score:2)
> When your employer tells you something needs to be done
On one hand, you're right. You are absolutely describing the dominant paradigm. This is reality for most humans, and has been for most of history.
On the other hand, that's shit. If we continue to accept that, then that's what we will continue to have.
On the gripping hand, allowing the dickheads at the top of the ziggurat to eat all of our resources is unsustainable, so it won't continue indefinitely. At some point the whole thing collapses and goes full cannibal. And all we have to change to get there is no
Re: (Score:2)
> On the other hand, that's shit. If we continue to accept that, then that's what we will continue to have.
While I absolutely agree there are management who are like babies wanting everything yesterday, there are real situations where things need to be done NOW.
You need to distinguish between the two if you want to keep you job.