Speaker 1: 0:00

Should I get a camera too, though?

Speaker 2: 0:02

No, you don't need a camera. We're going to talk over each other, it's totally optional.

Speaker 1: 0:07

It would just take a lot more time to put on clothes and stuff, so that's good.

Speaker 2: 0:11

Yeah, keep the clothes off. That's my suggestion.

Speaker 3: 0:17

I was about to ask are you working naked?

Speaker 1: 0:23

I plead the fifth as I don't wish to incriminate myself.

Speaker 3: 0:30

I mean that's totally fair, right? Does the workplace policy around clothing and what you wear to work count when you're working remote?

Speaker 1: 0:41

that was a great segue to today's topic.

Speaker 3: 0:44

Let's move on real quick when you're working remote. That was a great segue to today's topic.

Speaker 2: 0:48

Let's move on real quick. Hey, welcome back to Corporate Strategy Podcast. I'm in an email.

Speaker 3: 0:58

I'm recording.

Speaker 1: 1:01

And I'm not naked.

Speaker 3: 1:01

Actually neither am I?

Speaker 2: 1:04

Oh, what a were about to make the the next embarrassing story on. Is it me or is it corporate rejoining us from the world of bourgeoisie capitalism correspondence. We welcome back our one of our absolute favorites, mr alistair streppo. Thanks for joining us today, alex.

Speaker 1: 1:23

Yep, thanks for having me.

Speaker 2: 1:25

Hey, we need you Because Clark and I's intelligence level is not ready to comprehend the topic that was requested of us. A month ago From Chief Pod. Topic, officer Squidboy posted an article about how the job market is frozen. Now I read said article and found it very interesting. I would encourage all of our listeners to do the same, but we should probably just open up with the concept for all the freshers or maybe people who aren't familiar with frozen jobs and, alex, I figure you know better than anyone to lead us in.

Speaker 1: 2:01

Yeah, I mean, well, there's frozen jobs and there's ghost jobs. Those are two different things, right. A frozen job would be like a job that actually exists but it's not going to get hired for, and then a ghost job, in theory, is a job that actually doesn't really exist and is being posted right Just to well. We can talk about the reasons, right, but yeah, so in theory they're different. In practice they're effectively the same thing in terms of what it means to people looking for work. So, yeah, so the end result is kind of the same as what you're saying Like I'm, I'm picturing both.

Speaker 3: 2:33

Both means people aren't getting hired.

Speaker 1: 2:36

That's correct, and not only that, but it both means that people are potentially wasting time getting their hopes up and uh, and you know they could be doing better things with their, with their days, right.

Speaker 3: 2:47

so makes sense and what.

Speaker 2: 2:50

What I found interesting in reading this article was specifically the rebound effect that seems to have happened between the great resignation and today. Uh, and the the article author kind of goes on to say like the great resignation started this movement that really put power back into the job applicant's hands.

Speaker 3: 3:15

Oh no.

Speaker 1: 3:17

Is he having trouble? So it's not me right.

Speaker 3: 3:20

No, I think it's him. He just disappeared, for anybody that's listening. Yeah, bruce just totally disappeared and now he's back.

Speaker 2: 3:30

Did someone hang me up on the call?

Speaker 1: 3:33

I did not no.

Speaker 3: 3:34

I was totally hands off. I was hands off keyboard. I was hands off mouse. It was not me.

Speaker 1: 3:38

But it could be the naked bear in the room.

Speaker 2: 3:42

Oh, I mean, that would do it, that would do it. Craig in his birthday bear suit. Sorry about that. No idea what just happened, just forcefully disconnected because apparently I didn't give Craig enough attention.

Speaker 1: 3:57

Tariffs on podcasting equipment.

Speaker 2: 3:59

Knew it, knew it was coming, saw this coming from a mile away. It's only going to hurt the corporate strategy bottom line. We're already given so much money, now we gotta give so much more thanks, thanks, tariffs uh, I don't even I did. Basically, things good for worker, big shift, big shift recently. Things not so good for worker anymore. They, uh the article even said like um, this is the first time that a majority of like applicants that have like college degrees are just not even getting past the filter phase. So like they're saying it's at an all time low for filtering through college grad type roles. So why is let's get to the just? Why is this happening? I have theories and feelings, but I'm very emotional. So, alex, I feel like you can give us the reasoning, reasoning I mean.

Speaker 1: 4:48

You know it's supply and demand, right, so it just like everything else, and so labor. You have to apply supply demand curves to labor just like you would to anything else, right? So the supply of labor is the available pool of folks looking for work. The demand side would be employers looking to hire people with a set of skills right to fill certain roles that they have, and so if the need to hire new talent goes down and the supply stays the same, then the cost of the labor goes down right, down right. Additionally, if the demand drops significantly, then potentially there will be a set of labor supply.

Speaker 1: 5:29

You know people looking for work that can't find work at any price because there just aren't enough roles to fill for all of them. And so the first step is just what you? I think there was a graph in that article that showed that during the great resignation you were going to make more money if you went looking for a job somewhere else, whereas now it's starting to circle back to, in general, it's about parity. I don't know that it's going to dip where staying at a company means you make more money in the long term, but at a minimum it's very close to parity now and that's just a strong indicator that the demand for employment for laborers of any type has gone down, and that's likely tied to macroeconomic things which we can talk about if you want. But yep, that's kind of the quick version of that.

Speaker 2: 6:19

I love getting yeah, I mean, when we can get macro. I love a good. Oh good, now Clark's gone. Okay, so this is not.

Speaker 1: 6:28

Oh no, it's going to come for me too.

Speaker 2: 6:30

It's coming for everybody. You will all be kicked from this call.

Speaker 3: 6:34

I don't understand what just happened. Why was I kicked from this call? I just showed up and said I was waiting in the room and I could just click join. I'm like what do you mean? I didn't do anything.

Speaker 2: 6:48

Every time we try to get to the what in the questioning Big Corporate kicks us out of the call.

Speaker 3: 6:56

Oh my goodness.

Speaker 1: 6:58

So we need a conspiracy theory channel now. Apparently that's where you're going.

Speaker 2: 7:01

This is definitely yes. I think this is the work of big corpo trying not to get it. Because here's my loaded question that I really think everyone is trying to get to the bottom of is this is this actually just corporations taking the power back in their own hands? Like, is this a way of like basically saying we did all this big hiring post COVID, lots of jobs, the great resignation occurred, people had choice of where they wanted to work, it was all remote, and now there's this job markets frozen, there's all these weird ghost jobs, which I do want to talk more about. But in actuality, is it just corporate basically taking the power back and the control back?

Speaker 1: 7:41

So I mean probably ultimately right. So there's going to be, like, different reasons why this is happening. Some of them are benign or accidental or incidental, and others may be nefarious. Right, I will.

Speaker 1: 7:53

I think it's worth touching on the great hiring that you talked about during COVID, because I thought about that and to me it's almost like corporations were hoarding toilet paper, but in this case it was talented workers. Now the difference, of course, is that if you hoard toilet paper, it's a one-time expense to go out and buy all the toilet paper you can at Costco and whatever else you're going to buy, but if you're hiring employees, that's an ongoing expense. So the closer analogy would be, like they said right after COVID they're like look, we know that the technology is the future. That's where the big money is. We're getting a ton of money invested into us to hire better talent. Let's go out and buy all the subscriptions, basically. So I'm going to buy all the streamers because we've got nothing else to do during the pandemic.

Speaker 1: 8:38

Well, now what has happened? Right, a lot of folks have cut the you know back on their streaming content. Right, they don't need that many streamers because, hey, I'm back at work, I'm busy, I'm going out, and so maybe I don't need all 17 streaming services and so I can cut back. Well, corporations are kind of doing the same thing, right? They're like look, I hired thinking that I needed to have this talent, especially because there was a bidding war going on for the best talent and you've talked about this before right, the 80-20 rule, all that stuff or whatever. Like the people who do all the work, you know, think about it.

Speaker 1: 9:10

Right, exactly the Pareto principle. Well, that means that there's a certain amount of those, you know, one to five or whatever it is percentage of people that are doing all the work out there in the job market. If I'm a company with a lot of dollars, I want to hire as many of those people as I can hire, right and so. But now the situation has changed, right, and we understand a little bit better what the longer term economic situation is looking like, especially given the current nature of uncertainty, and that that uncertainty is going to continue for a prolonged period of time. And so that's what's changing the calculus.

Speaker 2: 9:49

They even mentioned in the article itself. It was basically like it's a wait and see. A lot of companies are currently in a. They had a phrase for it and I can't find it as I'm frantically rereading it, but it was kind of like uh, let's see what happens in 25. That started to percolate in november and it's obviously in execution today, but their hesitancy to hire and spend more, I assume, will be curbed even further by some of the economic changes that are occurring. As of recording of this podcast, april 7th 2025 2025.

Speaker 1: 10:21

Yeah, and I think you know a question for both of you, right, bruce and Clark, because I think both of you have are in or have been in this situation. Right? Have you ever been in a hiring, you know, motion where you said, look, this is the right person, this is the right person, I want to fill this position. I'm going to make them an offer and then they don't get hired for a week, for two weeks, for a month, right? I mean, I'm sure you've seen that, I know I've seen that as a candidate, where I'm talking to the manager and they're not ghosting me. They're still talking to me and they're like we are still trying to hire you for this role.

Speaker 1: 10:59

It's what we want you to. You know, we want you here, we want you to be doing this, but right now HR is dragging their feet or the business hasn't allocated the funds for the role, or whatever. It is Right. But you know, I'm assuming that's happened to you Right At some point, especially Clark, I would assume, given that he's at a bigger corporation, that's probably happened, right.

Speaker 3: 11:23

Yeah, absolutely. I think we've even had situations where we found extremely good candidates that have gone through and I felt terrible about this, but this did happen. They went through like four different interviews and we're all were on the same page of like, yeah, yeah, let's absolutely do it. And then we went on freeze and the corporation's like, hey, we're freezing all hiring for the next two months. I'm like we're going to lose this person. Like this person's really good. What do you mean? We're going on a freeze, but it's because of the shifting priorities that were happening at the time. It was post-COVID, so it wasn't like anything you know surrounding COVID. It just was due to I don't know if it was the fiscal calendar, the reassessment, looking at who was being hired or which departments were the most critical, but it absolutely sucked because this person was awesome and they ended up finding another job which, hopefully, is working out for them.

Speaker 1: 12:01

Hopefully it is working out for them. But ultimately what I'm getting at is like so I, like I say we go through this right on a spectrum of they're doing nothing wrong, and this is, I think, the best example of where there's a quote unquote ghost job, because it may not actually be a ghost job or a frozen job, and it's probably something like this, right? So if we're going to give the corporations the benefit of the doubt, this is like maybe the most benign or non-insidious reason why a job may be frozen or a ghost job. Right, if you progress on down the spectrum. Right. Then there is the idea that, man, I want to have a bench ready to go of people that I know I can hire in, especially if it's a high turnover role, and so maybe I'm going to just keep a job posted so that I constantly have people applying, so I can constantly interview them, and it's not because I plan on wasting their time, it's because I do probably want to hire at some point, and I don't know when. So I need to be ready to hire when I have a position come open, and that's not as nice as the first one, but it's still not completely evil either, because they still have the intent to hire, right, the intent to hire is still there, and then you can progress on down more insidious ones, right?

Speaker 1: 13:17

So another one could be that they're posting this job in an effort to collect information. So if you apply to a job, what are you giving them? You're giving them your resume, right, as part of that process, and so now they learn a lot about you, and not only that, so they learn about the job market as a whole, because they learn who's applying for this job, what's their level of education, what's the level of experience. So what can I expect if I ever do need to hire? And also, how's my competition doing? If you're in an industry I happen to be in an industry where there's like four, five predominant players, right, it's very clear who they are, everybody knows them, and so if I go looking for a job and a competitor comes across my resume, they get to understand hey, what's going on at Alex's company, right? And if I'm one of a dozen people, right, and so they could be collecting that information, right.

Speaker 1: 14:07

And then the most evil is where there's never going to be a job and they don't care about the competition. But they're a data broker and they're literally trying to mine your information to be able to sell your information on or market directly to you. And the very last evil thing, it's probably not even the corporation's fault. Something that I've recently got in an email is scams, literally like cyber crimes of people saying, oh hey, about that job you applied for. It's like I didn't apply for a job report spam, you know, and so, uh, there's a huge spectrum of reasons that these things can be happening, from relatively benign to criminal and evil right so I definitely don't like the second half of that spectrum.

Speaker 2: 14:51

that's pretty crappy behavior. What can people look for to avoid that second half? And, like I do think that there's probably a way to ask the question like you know, when is this job looking to hire? To kind of avoid that second, not so nefarious case of like I'm trying to build a good bench, like I see value in that. But I also see that as like you should be upfront, like if possible, be upfront with the person and say, like you know, we don't have a direct hire date, or this might be months out, but we'd love to have more conversations, but maybe they're not up front about that. How do you ask that question without being nefarious?

Speaker 1: 15:37

to see that the hiring managers at my company tend to be upfront and I really appreciate that in terms of culture for my company. But I would argue the number one thing you could do in general overall, just constantly is always build your network so that you can talk to people who are at the companies you're applying for, and a lot of times you're not even looking for a recommendation, you just want a barometer of how real is this thing? Right, where are we in the process? And having an inside person that's going to be able to feed you some of that information, because realistically, the information they'd be feeding you back is not like proprietary information or anything like that. It's not giving away company secrets, it's just helping them understand where in the bureaucracy they are.

Speaker 1: 16:14

And so networking is your number one tool for finding a job. Always, always, always, like it's the one through 10, like number one way to get a job is to network. Um, every single job I've gotten basically in the past I don't know how long has I've gotten because of my network. This most recent job, a recruiter reached out, but the reason I got the job and I got an offer that I really welcomed is because my network was already at that company and spoke well of me, and so I was very fortunate for that. So, number one network, right?

Speaker 1: 16:45

Number two would be if you have nobody on the inside, then, yeah, try to ask probing questions. See, like, hey, can we set up some meetings so I can talk to folks on your team and get a vibe from them about what's going on and then gently ask questions that it would help you understand. Is this real or not? Right, like, hey, you know what's happened recently on your team that you guys are hiring, you know, did someone leave? Are you growing? Right, like, what's the reason? Did someone get promoted? Right, those are all legit questions anyway. Right, when you're just asking about company culture. But it can help inform hey, is this, is this real? Right, is this real?

Speaker 3: 17:22

Yeah, One way to ask that question to you that I've heard actually candidates ask me. They'll say, hey, is this a new role or is this one that's been open for a while?

Speaker 3: 17:34

Like is someone just vacating it and like that's a fair question, yeah, it's a great question, because it's like, oh, is this like brand new, you know what's the reason for it being new? And like that gets someone excited for kind of, hey, this new, you know space that's open for opportunity. But then it also lets you know no, actually the person left and say, okay, you know, you tell me why? Why do you think they they left? Why did why? Was this not a good fit for them? And they might not disclose all that, but it's a really good way to understand, know whether this role was recently vacated or whether it's a new opportunity.

Speaker 3: 17:59

And the only other thing I'd add to that too, is if you want to get a sense of what's going on the inside. I mean also look at, you know, certain anonymous forums, like blind, like it is always up to date. People are always posting about companies not every company, but a lot of big companies are on there and you can actually get a sense of, like, what is actually going on internally, cause it's all anonymous and so it's really cool to look at that, to be like, okay, what is actually going on, and hopefully get somebody who's probably a little more pessimistic to give you some honest answers.

Speaker 1: 18:27

So that last bit is important, though, right Cause you got to take blind with a huge grain of salt. That's that so I. You know, for me it always reminds me of like when I was in tech support, like, especially even when I was a manager in tech support, and my employees would get so down and it's like, man, our product stinks, and it's like, no, our product doesn't stink. You're seeing a subset of a subset of people interacting with our product on their worst day, and so, yeah, they're unhappy, but this is an anomaly, not the rule Right, not the rule right. And so, with blind, I would be mindful that the people who are most likely to post on blind are self-selected folks that are already ungruntled. You don't get a lot of gruntled folks hanging out on.

Speaker 2: 19:08

Blind is all I would say You've got to find a good balance of gruntle, just in general.

Speaker 3: 19:14

What would you say?

Speaker 2: 19:15

your gruntle percentage is general, what would you say your gruntal percentage is? I'm perfectly gruntal today and I love remembering that blind exists. I feel like it's always you, clark, that brings it up and I'm like, yeah, that website is here.

Speaker 3: 19:30

I really should look at it. Then you go on it and you're like, especially so. I haven't found it extremely useful when I'm not looking for work, but when I'm looking for work I actually really enjoy it because you kind of get a sense. You know what is this company like, what are people saying about it? To Alex's point, I think you really do have to take it with a grain of salt and realize these are probably the people on the higher level of the gruntal meter and you want to make sure that you keep that in mind when you're looking through it. But it's a great tool, you know, know just to understand the vibes of the company. What kind of roles are going on, interview help.

Speaker 3: 19:58

You know there's a lot of things of like oh yeah, this is the se level three second interview question that you're going to get. It's like okay, cool, this is good to know so I can start prepping for this interview. I want to go back. I got, I got a question, so I know obviously I'm an ai purist, apparently because I always bring it up on this podcast.

Speaker 2: 20:16

But I'm curious Every time I can't get through one without you, how much is AI affecting these freezes?

Speaker 3: 20:23

You know if people are truly able to be more productive. You know in so many different realms, you know in coding and marketing and everything like that how much is that affecting? Oh, we actually don't need to hire because our team is actually more productive. Obviously, I know adoption curve for something like this is going to take a really long time at big enterprises to truly get the value. But I am curious. We're in the biggest technological boom in our lifetimes, for sure, and so looking at that and then looking at what's going on with the presidency and all that going on as well, it's a weird contrast of things going on in our world right now, where technology is advancing so fast, making everybody so much more productive, but at the same time, you know companies can't hire like crazy to take advantage of those gains. So just curious on your thoughts.

Speaker 1: 21:08

Yeah, I would disagree in terms of my lifetime, because I, you know, was an adult in the nineties, right or approaching adulthood, and the 90s were pretty revolutionary in terms of technology. But having said that, I know that your question is about AI impacting productivity so that, in theory, the demand for employment goes down right. But the more sinister answer is that AI makes it easier to algorithmatize. The ghost job game is what's actually happening? Because AI is a good sidekick for now, but it's not replacing full-time workers at the moment. It's making them perhaps more productive, sure, but what it is good at is creating words. Right, that's literally generative.

Speaker 1: 21:57

Ai is making the next word, it's guessing the next word in a sentence, and so it's really good at figuring out hey, you should post a job every two and a half months with these requirements, and that's the best way to maximize your media attention that.

Speaker 1: 22:14

Hey, look, who's hiring, big Corpo is hiring. They've just opened up 5,000 new positions, and so AI can help you quickly deploy 5,000 ghost jobs to make it look like you're successful, which might be a really good thing to do. I don't know, a week before you report earnings and your stock price is about to go up or down, right, get ahead of the news cycle to go, you know, you know, up or down. Right, I get ahead of the news cycle, right. So ai is really good at tricking humans, in my opinion, in terms of making humans think that other humans are doing things, and and so I think that it is affecting frozen and ghost jobs, but not from the direction that you're thinking. I think it's making it easier to make more of this. You know crap effectively and put it on linkedin and put it on LinkedIn and put it on any other job site that might be out there, and that's, I think, the downside right now.

Speaker 3: 23:04

Well, that's terrible.

Speaker 2: 23:05

That hurts me. The best way I have found to make job descriptions is by using AI. I can only see how that can further facilitate Alex's point. It's very good at it, which is funny because I don't find it to be very good at a lot of things, but it's very good at doing job descriptions and making you know job description related assets and work.

Speaker 1: 23:30

So and if you think about that angle if your first interview is a chat interview or an email interview, right, it's really good at doing that, and so the person that it's making more efficient is the like, the sleazebag recruiter that doesn't actually have a job but needs to look busy because that's their metric, that they're being measured on hilarious.

Speaker 3: 23:58

Do you guys see the news about the, the guy who basically like hacked a bunch of interviews through like leak code by having a automated computer user and he cheated his way through every interview because no screen recorder could detect it and then he basically got kicked out of his school. I think it was like yale. He got kicked out of school for basically getting job offers at all these colleges and then exposing it and being like hey, I cheated on all these. Here's the software I built. If you want to use it too, here you go, and it basically avoids all of their kind of anti-AI cheating mechanisms and helped him get a ton of crazy job offers. And, yeah, I got booted from school.

Speaker 1: 24:30

Crazy, yeah, I got to say though, I'm not anti-AI. I want to be clear. I'm also I want to be on the record I'm not anti-recruiter either. I'm saying that those tools at the moment, if they're going to impact the ghost job, frozen job situation, they're more likely to impact it from the point of view of making the situation worse, not necessarily impacting the demand for laborers or skilled workers not necessarily impacting the demand for laborers or skilled workers.

Speaker 3: 25:01

Yeah, I say we. We fight the power and we just keep on ghost applying to jobs with not real people and we just take down their sites.

Speaker 1: 25:08

We should build that next.

Speaker 2: 25:09

Sure, I kind of like this idea about like this is kind of well, I mean. So. I mean here's the thing, right, like, if you do that, then it kind of defeats the purpose of the AI and you have to remove that piece from the equation and get back to a human being talking to human beings in order to figure out is this legit to scale towards the company? Because they're the ones that have the jobs, they're the ones that set the salary, there's ones that pay you at the end of the day, but, like, that little act of rebellion could be quite good if pulled off appropriately, to kind of fight back against this. My question is actually do things get better? And I don't mean in the AI front, I just mean in the hiring front in general. It definitely seems like and I just base this off my own metric of how many recruiters reach out to me, or look at my LinkedIn profile, which is significantly less than it was three years ago.

Speaker 3: 26:05

I was actually going to ask you post-check is it better or?

Speaker 2: 26:08

worse. It's bad. It's real bad.

Speaker 1: 26:12

My resume has never looked better.

Speaker 3: 26:15

Yeah, last six months for me, I've been getting reached out to. All the time. I had three this week. They were like hey, here's an opportunity, here's an opportunity. I'm like huh. That's why all this is really interesting, because I've had-.

Speaker 1: 26:24

Are they real?

Speaker 3: 26:25

That's a good question. I don't know and I have no interest in finding out.

Speaker 1: 26:30

Yeah, the only outreach I've gotten has been been very impersonal, obviously automated. And so I don't know if they're lazy recruiters, because I normally I will respond to recruiters who send me individualized messages. I always respond even if I'm not looking right. I just let them know, hey, I'm not looking. But if you're serious about that role, I can pass it on to my friends. They might be appropriately skilled for it as well. Happy to help you out. So anytime I get a, a real message, I respond to it like that. But of late I've gotten less and what I've gotten has been automated trash.

Speaker 3: 27:05

Interesting. So that just proves exactly what we're talking about.

Speaker 2: 27:08

Anyways, back to your question yeah, I mean, well, with that pulse check, is it going to get? I mean this this obviously certifies what the article says. You know, we've all three experienced the same thing the article saying that there's just less and less jobs out there for folks in corporate. Do we pull out of this, or is this the new normal going forward that people just have to get used to?

Speaker 1: 27:27

out of this? Or is this the new normal going forward that people just have to get used to? Yeah, I mean, it comes in cycles, right? So there's no reason we can't pull out of it in theory. In practice it's going to require a period of stability, all right, and right now we don't have that. I don't know when or if we'll have a period of stability again. I would assume we will again at some point in the long arc of history. Everything repeats, right, but for now I just don't see where the stability comes from, and until that happens it's just really hard to make predictions on a large scale. And so large scale hiring, like we saw during the pandemic. I don't see that happening anytime soon. It'll be far more tactical as opposed to strategic, I would argue.

Speaker 2: 28:06

Well, and I do feel like that's a little bit. Oh, go ahead, Clark.

Speaker 3: 28:10

No, no, I was going to go in a different direction, so if you want to wrap that, I'm going to go pick us somewhere else.

Speaker 2: 28:16

Okay. So I was going to say I think that the pandemic created a really bad false expectation for things, which probably didn't help either, because it was just open season Anyone could go anywhere, everything was remote, it was great. Open season Anyone could go anywhere. Everything was remote, it was great.

Speaker 2: 28:29

And then return to office happened for a lot of folks, or hybrid work happened, which very much locked down the ability to job freely anywhere. That was a little bit of a false set of expectations, I think, especially for a lot of people entering the workforce. That also was not normal at all and it does feel like the pendulum has swung completely in the opposite direction. But I would love to find a middle, a good middle, so we could actually know what that work looks like. But it just seems like in my history of working in corporate it's always been on the verge of a recession. The corporation we're at is going through some kind of merger, acquisition, separation, like I've never seen a normal year, and I would just love to know what a normal year looks like. But, clark, what's your point?

Speaker 3: 29:16

No, I think I'm right there with you. It does feel like, at least in the arc of our careers, it definitely has not been stable at any point, where it's like we're just riding this out, and I think it's just the system of our environment, the companies we were at, everything like that. But yeah, it certainly does feel that way. I was going to say how much of this is because people are starting their own businesses. They're just like screw corporate, I'm going to do my own thing and the reason I bring this up and I always go back to this.

Speaker 3: 29:42

But, alex, you told us about a really interesting channel, how money works and it basically they recently had an episode about like how poor people are starting businesses and corporations hate it, and I think the whole notion was around like small business loans are easier than ever to get and people are basically just going and starting businesses because now, with technology, they have the ability to do things they've never really been able to do before. So how much of this freeze is kind of the lower, I guess smaller businesses that are starting to actually boom in the amount of people creating them because they can't and they're kind of sick of corporate.

Speaker 1: 30:14

Yeah, if I had to guess, very nominal. And the reason is the vast majority of people are risk averse and starting a business is incredibly risky. So if I had to guess, it's a nominal impact in terms of the what normal looks like. I can tell you, um, I've been like filing a w-2 since 1994, so um, been a long time right, and I can tell you that this boom bust cycle thing has always been part of it, and so you know, you had the dot-com boom in the late 90s and then you had the bust right in the 2000, like 2001, 2000, 2001 bust. Then you had another big boom the real estate bubble, right, and that popped in 2007, 2008, right. And then you had a cycle, a very prolonged cycle prior to COVID, of very low interest rates, and that's what allowed a lot of startups to happen, right, because money was cheap and so you could borrow very cheaply. And so, if anything, what happened is you did get used to a normal, you just didn't realize it. But for the 2010s you had this quote unquote normal of either zero or close to zero interest rates, and growth was number one all the time, everywhere. And so, and additionally, at the same time, you had China producing cheaper and cheaper things that were constantly being fed to us. So consumerism was easier and getting high paying employment was easier on account of cheap money for corporations. And so COVID, through era monkey wrench and all of that, it just made things really weird for a while, like huge dip and then a huge growth, you know for for a while, and that led to a lot of inflation because of all the money that was being pumped into the system, and now we were starting to level off. And now we're getting another shock to the system with tariffs right, significant across the board.

Speaker 1: 32:08

Tariffs applied more or less indiscriminately, and I think that's the challenge. I think tariffs in and of themselves do have a place in the economy. I want to be clear. There's a reason that most nations had tariffs before Donald Trump even ran for office. So even before 2016, you had plenty of nations that had tariffs going on around the world. In fact, you had an organization, the World Trade Organization, the WTO that was built to help manage disputes about tariffs between nations, and so now we've since pulled out of that, and that was actually a bipartisan effort, believe it or not. That wasn't just Donald Trump. Biden approved this. Obama was already trying to pull out of it even before Donald Trump got elected.

Speaker 1: 32:46

And so, because we were having issues with China, dumping on us. And if you're not familiar with what I'm talking about, dumping is not like slang. I'm not saying like, oh, china was nagging us. Dumping is where you sell something for below the cost to produce it. So that's an economic, technical term. If you took macroeconomics in high school or college, you already know the term. But at any rate, we wanted to protest that because it's basically they were able to do it because the government was subsidizing their industries so heavily and so it created an unfair trade imbalance. But at any rate, that happened for a long time.

Speaker 1: 33:29

Corporate, from a corporate perspective that you grew up with, was that environment of constant, unlimited growth. Right now you're seeing a return to a more normal where, instead of 12 years of unprecedented growth, you have a cycle that's more, um, you know, three, three to five years where you're having boom and busts, which was the norm for decades prior to that unprecedented growth of the teens. So I mean, change is the only constant in life in general. But I would argue that the whiplash you're feeling right now you know that's something that you should probably get used to, because it's not unusual in the grand scheme of history and it's probably going to be the norm for a while.

Speaker 2: 34:08

So what do we need to look at when it comes to maximizing our ability to take advantage of the swings Like how do we know when we're out of the dump times and I don't mean that in the macroeconomic sense, but like in the toilet sense versus when it's time to go look for jobs, go apply, go hire, take advantage of this situation, go apply, go hire, take advantage of this situation.

Speaker 1: 34:30

Yeah, this is something where from that lens, specifically because I could talk about how to maximize from an investment point of view, like when to buy property, when to buy equities, all that stuff, but just from an employment point of view, I would argue that what you should always be doing is, like I said, number one, two, three, four, five grow your network Always, always, always, always, always. It is the number one way you're going to get a job. I just had a friend potentially interested in switching over to being a sales engineer and I said, hey, I can get you some FaceTime with some folks over here at my company, which normally speaking would be very difficult to do, just getting through the algorithm right. Not because my company is like bad or anything, but just in general it's hard to get through the automated systems right. So, network number one, always. Number two make yourself as hireable as possible. I think if you're specialized as a unitasker, you're going to be vulnerable if the unitask that you're good at becomes deprecated in some way, shape or form in the economy, and so having a wide array of skills is going to be valuable, being capable to learn quickly, right, that skill never goes away in terms of value. But I had friends for a long time. Like I said, I was in tech support for quite a few years and I remember people in tech support were always afraid their job was going to go away, but at the same time, they criticized me when I decided to go into sales to become a sales engineer.

Speaker 1: 35:57

They're like oh, that sounds so risky. Talk about risk-averse folks. That sounds so risky. And I'm like really you think it's risky, because how are they going to outsource my job to India? And you're worried about you being outsourced all the time. That's like the sword of Damocles hanging over your head that you're worried about. And I'm not worried about that.

Speaker 1: 36:16

Right, going into sales. And on top of that, if sales doesn't work out, what can I do? I can go back and get a tech support job, right, so it's not that big of a deal, right? If I become a manager, they're like, oh, managers are always the first to go. And it's like sure, but now I have management experience. Right, if I get into marketing? Right, All my sales engineering friends were like you're going to marketing, marketing is the first thing to go whenever there's a recession, right, and I said sure, but now I have experience doing this as well, and so if I need to get a job, I have so many outs right Versus if you're a uni tasker and the economy tanks in your role, I mean it could be very difficult to find employment again very quickly, whereas you know, the more flexible you are, the more likely you are to be able to bounce back quickly and the more options you're going to have in terms of promotion and other avenues of career advancement.

Speaker 3: 37:08

Yeah, makes sense. What would you say to, I guess, what would our recommendations be? Someone had to take something away of like well, I'm in this situation right now. I'm, you know, looking to exit either my current job, find a new job, I'm looking to exit, startup my own business for a while. What would the recommendation be? Is it like hold strong, you know, stay where you're at for a little while till things stabilize and then, you know, look at opportunity? Or is it always just keep your door open, keep on looking, and to your point earlier, you know you could be kind of wasting your time working for these opportunities that don't actually exist. What do you guys think?

Speaker 1: 37:42

I mean, I know for me. I say I personally choose to always bet on myself, and so I'm willing to go in for what on the surface appears to be a riskier proposition if it means advancement for me. Now, having said that, right, I do, it is a calculated risk, I do weigh the pros and cons and all that, but I would not let the macroeconomic conditions affect my microeconomic career decisions is what I would tell you. And so if you have a good opportunity, it doesn't matter what the economy is, and by good opportunity, what I mean is an opportunity that's going to grow your career or just make you happier, right Bet on yourself. Bet on yourself to be happier, bet on yourself to grow right, regardless of the macro state, is my personal advice.

Speaker 3: 38:32

I like that, yeah, so it's taking a hard look at. Yeah, what is your risk adversity what's your personal situation now and how much risk can you tolerate in making that decision? And, to your point, don't leave your sure thing unless it's a really bad situation, until you have kind of the next thing because that's going to hurt.

Speaker 1: 38:50

You don't leave your sure thing unless it's a really bad situation until you have kind of the next thing, because that's going to hurt.

Speaker 3: 38:52

You. Don't put yourself in a really bad spot.

Speaker 1: 38:54

Yeah, just look at it like you could wait right for a decade for the economy to be just right for you to take that leap, and then maybe that happens in 10 years. But you just waste the 10 years in an obviously not ideal situation. And so the one thing you have a limited supply of, any way you slice it, is time. You have infinite ability to expand your career in general within the frames of time, but time itself you can't get back. And so every day, every week, every month that goes by in a job you hate or in a job that's not taking advantage of everything you can bring to the table, would argue, is time wasted I love that flip that, flip that.

Speaker 3: 39:34

Some motivation right there yeah, I.

Speaker 2: 39:38

I also just wanted one double down. I'm gonna double the heck down on, uh, the. Don't be a unit tasker or a unit, a unit unit master of your, of your domain. What you should be is generalize. Generalize as much as you can in as many different sort of corporate ways as you can Love. That. It's worked for me, it's worked for Alex, it's worked for Clark. I think it's a very, very important tip. So I'm just saying it louder for the people in the back.

Speaker 2: 40:05

My actual tip would be one obviously, time is always the enemy enemy. You're only going to get older, time's going to pass if you're not getting paid. That's not a good thing. So go in with the reasonable expectations. We talked a lot on this podcast about cac culture, autonomy, challenge, compensation, right, like sometimes, compensation takes a hit for you to be at a place where you have the culture, the autonomy and the challenge that you like, but a few years or even a year at a place where you have the culture or the autonomy and the challenge that you like, but a few years or even a year at a place that maybe doesn't pay so well, is a good gap filler versus just looking and looking and looking and not bringing in any income, not building up any of your skills, not advancing yourself personally.

Speaker 2: 40:44

Don't be a choosing beggar. Right Like take what you can find. If you can find something good, and understand that better times will be around the corner and you can go for those jobs when they're there. But if you've got a better resume, it makes it so much easier for you to get in. So do not limit yourself today because of what you think you can get tomorrow. And also understand that, like, when times are bad, you know it's statistically bad for everyone, so you're not alone. Don are bad, you know it's statistically bad for everyone, so you're not alone. Don't feel like the universe is singling you out. Everyone is in this, this cycle together and you know, sometimes just open up to your network, ask the question, see if other people are feeling the same way you do, because I guarantee you're not alone great tips.

Speaker 3: 41:24

That's it, you know. Last words of wisdom, alex no, I just want.

Speaker 1: 41:28

Oh, one more thing I want to echo, because a triple down on what Bruce just said yeah, yeah, is this the triple down economic? The triple Triple down? I've taken a pay cut multiple times in my career to get to where I wanted to be. It's like sacrificing a pawn to take a queen right, and it's worked out for me at every time. Now it's not going to work out for everyone all the time, because your results may vary, blah, blah, blah. Legal disclaimer, right. But ultimately I have taken a pay cut a few times in my career and in every single instance it paid off significantly in the long run, both in terms of me liking what I do and just financially.

Speaker 1: 42:07

So I think so many times people worry about what they're losing versus what they can gain now. So I'll give you an example. Right, I know someone who was like, oh man, I'm going to have to earn a lot more money to give up the four day work week I have right now. They really like working for 10 hour shifts, right, and it's like, man, I'd have to get so much money to do that. And it's like, okay, look if, if this is like the hill, you're going to die on that four day work week means everything to your quality of life. I respect that. You should keep it, then, but like, don't ask me to talk you out of that.

Speaker 1: 42:39

Right, like I'm not, you know. Like no one is going to bend over backwards to make it so that like, hey, you're going to work five days but you're going to love it because we're giving you a million dollars more a year. Right, like you have to decide what's more important to you. Is it progression in a direction or is it keeping certain quality of life, balance, things that you have? And there's no right or wrong answer. By the way, the only way to figure out what the right answer is for you to figure out what the right answer is for you as an individual. So there isn't one clear cut, correct answer. But I would not worry about what I'm losing so much, as is what I would gain. Worth taking the dive? Right Like, worth taking the risk, and if the answer is yes, then I think you should take it seriously. That's what I would argue.

Speaker 2: 43:24

Couldn't have said it better, Even if I quadrupled down on it. I could try, but quad up.

Speaker 3: 43:33

I quad up in a soft manner. I'm not going to add anything to it, I'm just going to quad up to say I agree, is that legal?

Speaker 1: 43:40

I don't know, but for whatever reason, quadding up seems icky to me. I really don't like it. I don't like it.

Speaker 2: 43:47

I feel like you're going to get creatine if you're going to quad up, you know like, yeah, you're one step away from full-blown juicing.

Speaker 3: 43:52

Yeah Listen, I don't quadruple down, I quadruple up, quad up, leg day.

Speaker 2: 44:01

Never skip it. Oh boy, what happened? Well, you know, I think on that note it's not a better note to close it out on. So, uh, as always, thanks, squid boy, for bringing the topic. Uh, we don't have any memes this week, sadly. Uh, do shout outs, though, to alex again for bringing the absolute banger of a meme we got last week.

Speaker 1: 44:21

That was pure fire uh, I haven't listened to the episode to release today. Sorry, I gotta listen to it. No, don't. No, alex, I gotta, I gotta say this you're really gonna hate it, so don't listen.

Speaker 3: 44:28

I the episode that released today. Sorry, I got to listen to it, no, don't. No, alex, I got to say this You're really going to hate it, so don't listen to that part. I hope you're ready for disappointment. Just set your expectation level really, really low, please, and don't judge me after that's all.

Speaker 1: 44:40

I ask I'm just going to zoom ahead to the what do you meme?

Speaker 2: 44:51

I just want to hear you found nuggets of knowledge in this episode. Please make a meme of something alex said specifically and uh post it in that chat. Uh, we're still looking on. We're on the hunt for those embarrassing stories. So, uh, go to the is it mirror as a corporate channel and use forward, slash, confess and post your embarrassing stories there. And if you're wondering, well, how the heck do I do any of this? You got to join the discord open. Open up your show notes, click the link tree and inside of there, click join the Discord. Super simple. Couldn't make it any easier. If we tried, clark, what else is there to do?

Speaker 3: 45:19

Well, we're still at a funding podcast or funding podcast fundraiser to try to get Pepsi man. No one's bought a single baby onesie in a year and I'm really disappointed in everybody. You're having children, I know you are. Buy the baby onesie. I'm going to go in and buy a baby onesie for a friend who just had a baby, because someone needs to buy one and that's going to go towards Pepsi man. So you can go to our website, you can buy me a coffee. You can go to our store. You can get our merchandise. You can get have a child. Send somebody you love, even if they don't have a child, a baby onesie.

Speaker 2: 45:49

There's no better gift to arrive in the mail than an unmarked onesie for a child that says corporate strategy. It's a really great way to make the spouse feel.

Speaker 1: 46:01

We love Bruce and Clark, is that like the corporate equivalent of scentclowncom?

Speaker 3: 46:06

Yes, oh my God, yes, it is. That's incredible. That might. Yes, oh my God, yes, it is that's incredible.

Speaker 2: 46:11

That might be a good business idea. I'm just going to throw that one out there. If you want to support the show, you can do that. You can buy us a coffee, you can do that all on the link tree. And if you don't want to do any of these things, then all we ask is that you share the pod with your friends. That's really how we grow. Share it with the friends, join the Discord, join the conversation, because we're doing this for the love of helping others and the love of just doing it. So thanks, as always, for listening and do share broadly. Thanks one more time to our very special, always returning guest, mr Alex Estrepo. I just spit when I said your name. I'm so sorry, but I feel worse for the microphone. You're our Capitals correspondent. You're our rock, you're our stone. You keep us on track. Thank you, as always for joining us.

Speaker 1: 46:56

Alex, Happy to be here.

Speaker 3: 47:00

Sewn by hand. I learned something today, and I hope you did too.

Speaker 2: 47:03

Great, I learned something every day. I don't know if it's useful or not, but I do learn. It's one of the few skills I still have. You know what I think? That's it. We're going to pin tuple up this episode right out of here, but until next time I'm Bruce and I'm Clark and you're on mute We'll sex tuple you next week.