Over the Cliff — A Job Hunter’s Tale

The further back you scroll, the stranger the story gets. My favourite infosec job board has a little feature that lets you browse every old posting—a temporal archaeological dig. Q4 of 2016 sits at the top of that dig like a buried city: over a hundred postings, a small flood of opportunity. Fast‑forward to Q4 of 2022 and the sediment has compacted down to a few dozen. By Q4 of 2023 the river has slowed to six. Q4 of 2024? Five. And as I’m writing this, Q4 of 2025 has only managed three.

At some point the decline stops looking like a cycle and starts looking like a cliff. You stop feeling like you’re tracking trends and start feeling like you’re watching a time‑lapse of slow collapse—less “winter seasonality,” more “ecosystem dying off.” When you’re job hunting long enough, you start to remember what the landscape used to look like. The contrast hits you in the teeth.

But the numbers alone aren’t the whole picture. It gets even starker when you zoom out to the people behind the listings. Tech giants shed thousands of workers at a time, press‑release style, and it’s easy to miss how distorted the scale is. When a company employs a quarter million people globally, laying off five thousand in North America barely ripples the surface. For the company it’s a quarterly adjustment. For the people living here, it’s another reminder that this side of the market keeps shrinking while the global machine rolls on.

And that gap—what the world is doing versus what we’re living through locally—is where the real tension sits. I keep seeing headlines reassuring everyone that the tech sector is “recovering,” that global hiring is ticking upward, that innovation metrics are back on track. Maybe all that is true in aggregate, but aggregates don’t pay rent. A job market can be statistically healthy and personally brutal. North America feels like the place the train used to stop at but now just passes through.

A lot of people don’t talk about the psychic weight of this shift. There’s a kind of unspoken grief in realizing that the career ladders we were told to climb have been quietly pulled away. It’s not dramatic or cinematic. It’s the dull thud of checking the same job board for the sixth time that day and seeing nothing new. It’s the slow recalibration of expectations—switching from “where do I want to work next?” to “what’s even left?”

And that’s the uncomfortable truth we’re living in: globally, things still move. They churn, adapt, and reshape themselves. But here at home the gears feel seized. The opportunities aren’t flowing like they used to, and the pathways we all counted on keep narrowing. This isn’t the bursting of a bubble so much as the air slowly leaking out of one.

Globalization isn’t reversing. AI isn’t going back in the box. Those of us caught in the contraction either adapt—skill up, shift sideways, learn to navigate the new terrain—or risk being ground down by the same forces that once lifted us. Adaptation isn’t heroic; it’s survival. A lot of us are improvising our careers one uncomfortable step at a time.

The numbers aren’t abstract anymore. They’re the weather we’re standing in. And the sky doesn’t look like it’s clearing just yet.