Good News from the Job Market
“Learn to keep coding.”
You’ve probably heard the line that various politicians have thrown as a bone to people put out of work in the non-tech industries: “learn to code.”
Well, there’s good news for people who already do know how to code. When they get laid off, they find jobs quickly. And there’s even better news for people who have lost any kind of job, tech or non-tech.
A headline in Wednesday’s (print edition) Wall Street Journal says “Axed Tech Workers Find Jobs Quickly.” The title in the on-line version is slightly different: “Laid Off Tech Workers Quickly Find New Jobs.” The news story is by Sarah Chaney Cambon and Gwynn Guilford.
Here are the first 3 paragraphs:
Most laid off tech workers are finding jobs shortly after beginning their search, a new survey shows, as employers continue to scoop up workers in a tight labor market.
About 79% of workers recently hired after a tech-company layoff or termination landed their new job within three months of starting their search, according to a ZipRecruitersurvey of new hires. That was just below the 83% share of all laid-off workers who were re-employed in the same time frame.
Nearly four in 10 previously laid off tech workers found jobs less than a month after they began searching, ZipRecruiter found in the survey.
Of course, the odds are that a substantial percentage of workers laid off by tech firms are not coders. Nevertheless, it’s good news for those of us who think that being unemployed for a long time is corrosive to one’s psyche.
Notice also the last sentence of the second paragraph: Laid-off workers as a whole do even better.