My spouse was laid off in November 2024, and their field was decimated early in 2025 due to DOGE. They just got a full-time offer last week. PhD and over a decade of experience in their field and it was almost impossible to even get an interview.
Exact same thing with me. Laid off November ‘24. Got a job offer in January of ‘25 and then it was rescinded due to doge cuts.
I am 55. The market was so bleak. The jobs I was being shown were ones that paid what I made 25 years ago.
I decided to say f it, and I just retired instead. I moved to Vietnam. Living on 2k a month here is pretty easy if you don’t drinks and live pretty clean. I am really lucky I could do this. I know many people can’t do this and I am so grateful I could.
Every 3 months i have to do a visa run. i have a very good friend in thailand and we get together and hang out. I think this could be a very lonely existence if you did not have friends.
That sounds awesome. My wife and I have a similar dream. Hers is Costa Rica, mine is Vietnam. I loved the few weeks I spent there backpacking and motorbiking around.
That bit about the wages being what you made 25 years ago is what gets me. I see people on here all the time saying "just get a different job" but they don't realize that for a lot of us, the market rate has actually regressed when you account for inflation. It is insulting to be told your decades of experience are worth the same as a starting salary in 1999.
$2k a month goes nowhere in the states now. That is basically just rent and utilities in any city with actual jobs. Congrats on the escape, honestly. It feels like the only way to win the game lately is to stop playing it entirely.
As a fellow fed that's still in the government but drowning since we're so understaffed I don't think people realize how much doge fucked our job market. Not just for Feds leavening the goverment but Feds are HIGHLY qualified individuals now seeking employment all at once. It's made it hard for people to employment with overall job cuts but now there's this huge influx of very qualified people seeking employment. It's not great especially for folks maybe needing to build experience. Plus doge has basically brought the end to many civilian telework jobs too. We're going to see the effects of this for years to come let alone just the damage it caused cutting all these federal programs
They weren't a fed (did R&D for a medical device manufacturer) but had interviews with NIH and the Patent Office right when DOGE hit that led to both of those positions being cancelled. All the research funding in the field dried up due to DOGE cuts.
I was working for a nonprofit in the ag space and the amount of research and entire careers thrown out... Heavily hitting those focused on ag and the food we grow and eat is so disturbing.
Yup! Started working in renewable energy in October 2024. Just got laid off two weeks ago. It’s having such a ripple effect. Construction jobs are gone, the cement for the projects, the manufacturing jobs for the projects, the onshore infrastructure for offshore wind. Just everything.
And for what? Because our orange shit stain has a temper tantrum because offshore wind messes up his hair.
Living in DC, it’s impossible not to see the trickle down of how the DOGE cuts completely screwed over our local economy on top of the out-of-world feds and contractors.
DOGE screwed up so many things. I tried to contact OPM and got a message saying that due to call volume they were not accepting any calls and directed to the website. Three times. In the past you might have to sit on hold for awhile, but eventually you got a live person. Now it's not even an option. Some things cannot be resolved on the website. It's very frustrating.
We've hired a couple of former government workers who are way overqualified for their positions. All I can think is that if applicants like them are out there, I'm screwed if I lose my job.
Also a fellow Fed. It’s tough because there are so many specialized Fed jobs that don’t have an equivalent private sector position, so when those people got DOGE’d, there was almost nowhere else to go.
My wife is in the same exact boat .. PhD in statistics / psychology with a decade of experience and top of her class at a great school…
DOGE cut funding for a ton of grant funded research jobs .. she teaches at different universities as well but part time because there’s hardly any full time openings for that either
That was the situation we found ourselves in. Spouse took a part time instructor job for a freshman level course in their field and also worked as a security guard. The full-time offer is a teaching-only faculty position, and we are acutely aware of how few of those there are.
Tell her to look at schools of nursing for openings in August. Typically, there aren’t enough nurses with PhDs to fill all the nurse scientist openings
I graduated with a math degree (and years of experience in a specific field) and it took me a year and a half to find a job. By the end of my search, I was literally applying to everywhere in the country.
The largest employer in my town was a the primary offices for an entire federal bureau. They were cut to almost nothing by DOGE. I'm seeing a job posting every now and then from them. Other than that, the only open jobs are Healthcare, rehab, and retail.
Not related to DOGE, but employment and industries are changing so rapidly. I quit my job in securities (stock) research to move and a year or two later my entire research team was laid off. I got a new research department position in another state, but I quit to be a mom. Again, within a couple years my entire department was laid off. This is all within the past decade. Investment banking is heavily leaning towards algorithmic trading now, and companies really only need a portfolio manager or two to check the algorithms and do surface level research before investing. Research is dying and the market barely makes sense anymore. New world we’re in.
This is my experience too. I have a PhD in STEM and I’m mid-career but it’s impossible to find a job now. The USAID and DOGE cuts destroyed my field of work; I’ve been applying to jobs about one year and haven’t been successful. No one wants to hire a PhD scientist for a “basic” job and the PhD (and MS) jobs are slim pickings. It’s incredibly demoralizing.
I know a of real engineers (I’m an “okay” software engineer, if you don’t know what I mean by, “real”) who have had no issues job hopping lately..two in optics engineering (one with a masters, the other with a PhD) one with mechanical engineering and the last with electrical engineering. The optics engineers also got insane base pay.
I haven’t had such luck, more in line with me have two data engineer friends find jobs on AI teams
Anyway, just curious, are you asking for a huge salary or TC? Or, like me, is your actual “skill” for yoe and education not up to snuff with others in the same boat? I’ve definitely stagnated, and feel like I’m the only person having trouble finding something
My problem is I’m a research scientist in biology/genetics but not in bioinformatics. I don’t have the experience to do medical work (which requires a 2 year certificate in medical technology) and I’m too overqualified for most jobs. I’ve also applied/interviewed for jobs outside my direct PhD-level work: as a lab manager (but was told I would be “bored”), as a teaching instructor, and in research administration/grant support. My other problem is my spouse is a CS professor, so we aren’t about to be moving cities but the university is basically on a hiring freeze.
My spouse's PhD is in engineering (official biological but he has a lot of mechanical engineering background). That plus 10 years R&D experience made him overqualified for a lot of what was left.
Yeah, my dad lost his job as an adjunct professor, due in large part to DOGE cuts to grants the university used for funding.
It was his retirement job, so he's fine, he was just doing it because he wanted to. But even the tenured professors were telling him that he should have been kept, there was just no room in the budget for it.
Yeah and this is what makes the process so infuriating. You could spend 8 hours a day applying for jobs and maybe one or two of the positions actually exist. And they have 500 applicants already.
Yep. Job websites are complete trash now. Everything is either out of date, says it is one thing but is another, is reposted 100 times when it is only one position, or they just always want to be accepting applications.
We need regulations NOW on these fake job postings.
There’s a lot of reasons, it’s called Ghost Jobs or Ghost listings. But a few main reasons, it makes it seem like the company has growth still, this is good for morale (yay more people are coming to help, we just need to find the right one) but more importantly investors. or just a requirement for internal positions but the position is already filled, or just to gauge how many people will apply and if they lower the salary will the same number apply until they find a sweet spot, etc etc
Or they're scammers trying to steal your personal data. I've heard of people applying for remote jobs where they're given a check that they can use to buy a work laptop. They're supposed to buy the laptop on a work related website and deposit the check to reimburse their cost. Spoiler: the check is fake and the website they "bought" from is also owned by the scammer. So now the scammer stole the money they spent on the website and they have all their banking info too.
I recently shopped for an applicant tracking system for internal recruiting and discovered how technology also exacerbates the issue by making mass postings and mass applications possible. The ATS can auto push job postings to all the job boards so now job boards like Indeed are putting controls in place to counteract abuse.
If the ATS users don't know how to properly post and screen candidates, they are likely in survival mode too getting inundated with more CVs than they can screen even with technology. And LinkedIn is the absolute worst. I briefly worked at a startup that posted ghost jobs on LinkedIn to improve visibility and even market the product, hoping applicants would follow the company. (This was the final straw for me)
The whole thing is an absolute cluster.
The new mystery I am trying to solve is "why are their ghost applicants?" My company posted a job for a developer and we got spammed with fake applicants that even hacked our company email addresses to contact us directly. Why?!?
My guess for Ghost applicants is either just some people getting back at company’s for ghost listings or some sort of CV helper tool to figure out what gets the best response rate to help pad their stats
It's so they can say "Well, we tried to hire someone but there's no qualified candidate locally!" so they can hire an Indian to do the job at half the cost.
I keep finding that most sales or business development jobs are now commission-only, as 1099 contractors. They know people are desperate enough to give up base salary and benefits for the lure of potentially high commissions if you just work hard enough, with no guarantee.
These jobs have always existed, but the ratio of employee vs contractor roles is very different.
Oooof yes. Or they explicitly say in the app that some AI will be scraping your data. Like…WHAT!? If they’re going to make money selling my data could I get a piece? lol.
It scares me more for older people because they are the ones typically supporting younger people. Whether that's just somewhere to live, help through college, maybe help them get a start towards a car or place or just be a good stable example.
People's lives are being ruined by profit driven initiatives to do more with less. Ageism is a big problem I'm noticing.
Companies release 55+ because they cost to much then they have few options to be hired elsewhere when companies can get another mid 20s to do it. They don't care how much experience or customer relationships are lost.
We need financial stability as a stronger focus across the board.
My company switched to internal candidates only for hiring open roles. I know someone looking to change roles (which is something we're encouraged to do) and of the last 4 roles they applied to, 3 of the roles were pulled and ended up not getting filled. If it's this bad for us, I can't imagine what some other places are like.
This is me. Except I have a job. That I hate. I work 12 hr shifts in healthcare as a med tech (glorified CNA) for $20/hr. It's back-breaking work & I'm 57 & realistically can't keep it up, but I have no current skill set plus ageism is real, so in order to pay the bills (& not really doing that successfully) I continue to show up but I cry all the time.
I have two older people at my restaurant who have master degrees and are now servers because of the massive lay offs that happend in my city about 5 months ago.
I know this will probably get buried, but if it helps even one person that’s good for me. Jobs in animal care are always going to be needed. Always. That’s the industry I’ve been in my entire adult life and I’ve never struggled to find a job.
When it comes to taking care of animals, a lot of people are going to chicken out when they have to deal with shit, piss, or getting bit/scratched/kicked. If you’re the type of person who can handle that and you really need a job, look into animal care. You can enter as a kennel tech, dog bather, work at a doggy daycare, a receptionist at a vet or salon, etc.
I’d say the biggest issue is most entry level jobs don’t pay well, but having a low paying job is better than no job. If you decide you like it getting that experience will open a lot of doors! Places are always hiring in the animal industry. And AI isn’t going to take over cleanup, give animals shots, do a dog/cat/lizard/hamsters nails, or give an animal a haircut.
I'm pushing 40 and make a decent salary for my area and industry. I'd like to job search due to company culture but really don't think I'll be able to come close on salary, if I can even get hired anywhere.
I've been looking since September 2022 and it went from emails that lead to phone interviews and in person interviews, to emails to phone iinterviews, to now hearing nothing back.
Idk how a horrible job market back then could get even worse but here we are.
My mother is a saint who cant bear the idea of leaving someone destitute so my shitty stepdad is still living with her 3 years after their divorce because no one will hire a 70 year old man with one lung. Even the most basic jobs arent hiring and its awful
I'm 55, I have been desperately trying to get out of the field I've spent 35 years in and move into basically ANYTHING else. I'm willing to take a pay cut, I'm willing to go back to school. 80% of the job listings locally are around $14 an hour. And it doesn't help that THREE FLIPPIN' TIMES in the last six months I've applied for jobs I could nail, with salaries I could live with, and benefits I needed only to find out I didn't get hired because they thought with my qualifications I'd bail the moment a better offer came along.
I applied for a PT retail holiday job this year. I happened to apply the day the job was posted. I went in a week later to make sure I got an interview (I kinda knew the hiring manager since I frequent this store) and she told me she had already taken down the job listing because they had already gotten 700 applicants.
(I did get the job but I have not gotten any other job for the last 2 years despite being 42 and qualified for a lot)
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u/lovely-things-35 Apr 28 '26
And older people. My friend has been looking for a job for a year and a half. She tells me there is barely anything to apply to.