The job market crash didn't correlate at all with WFH, it correlated with the end of WFH and (more importantly) exactly lined up with the end of ZIRP.
Money was free, so a lot of people were paid out of thin air. When money stopped being free salaries actually had to come from somewhere, and there weren't enough somewheres to go around.
This is the correct answer. Tariffs are not why the job market is so awful. Maybe that will be true in the future, but the past two years of horrible terrible miserable state of the job market is not because of tariffs imposed a month ago.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who remembers all those posts on hn 2-3 years ago about how bad the job market is, right? It has only become worse.
I know a kid who interned at a job last summer. Graduated, applied to a full-time job at the company. He happened to know someone in HR who told him "we got over a thousand applications for this job req in one day."
How tariffs can be blamed for that kind of situation, which is happening all over the US and has been for literal _years_, defies logic.
I don't understand "money was free". I'm an employer. I need to pay salary, and those money are not free for me regardless of interest rates. Maybe on a scale of national economies you can say that, but it doesn't affect my situation at all.
It would be true if I could say "hire a person for $X, it will increase our net income by $X+$x", but it doesn't work like that at all. And for me it makes sense to skip candidates from SF Bay Area altogether, there are a lot of good candidates somewhere deep in Utah-s.
Money was free, so a lot of people were paid out of thin air. When money stopped being free salaries actually had to come from somewhere, and there weren't enough somewheres to go around.