There is something extremely strange and suspicious going on in this job market. I know and have seen A LOT of people out for 9-12 months and it isn't getting better for them, at all.<p>I have seen people BEGGING on LinkedIn as in: "My unemployment is maxed out, I am losing my house, I haven't interviewed in 9 months etc. Someone please, I don't even want a job, just send me a few hundred dollars so I can eat."<p>I have never seen actual despair like that in tech before. It is usually white men 40+. Have seen it several times. Even former Google employees (!).<p>In particular, its 35+ year old tech workers. There is literally no one coming to offer them remotely equivalent roles to what they had. And the current set of startups are optimized for "VERY highly qualified / very cheap market rate."<p>We are talking about "We want AI engineers with PHDs and plan to pay $170K for that."<p>This means there is a very shocking disconnect between the people looking (a lot of external facing, traditional software engineer types).<p>I hate to say it but I am not sure I believe the employment statistics are real, and am expecting those numbers to turn out to be false.<p>There are also hundreds of thousands of out of work former tech workers applying for same roles. A lot of them fake.<p>Something f*cked up is going on, everyone who is actually looking for work knows what I am talking about. Suspect employment stats are not just "enhanced" but drastically revised higher than reality, along with GDP.