Meet the former federal workers documenting their unemployment online
The big picture: Washington's job market has become uber-competitive as swaths of laid-off feds vie for the same positions.
And employers nationwide have slowed hiring to the lowest rate since March 2020.
Meanwhile, young workers across the country are increasingly sharing their layoffs via viral social media posts — in some cases, the actual moment they're let go.
State of play: Some locals are sharing their experiences being fired by the government or their subsequent job searches, while others are documenting the new paths they've taken after the federal shakeup.
Zoom in: Victoria Chege, 25, got over a million views on the TikTok she posted in February, in which she does her makeup as she details her layoff from the Department of Health and Human Services, where she worked as an analyst.
Since then, she's posted TikToks sharing resources for fired federal employees and updates on the job market, as well as pivoted to making content commenting on political news.
Chege has moved back in with her parents in Northern Virginia as she job hunts — she estimates she's applied to over 100 positions and only received a couple of first-round interviews.
But sharing her experience has helped her mental health. "I was doing it so other people don't feel alone," she says of her TikTok. "[But] it's definitely helping me not to feel alone."
Nicole DeCastro, 34, has had a similar experience while documenting her unemployment on Instagram and TikTok after being let go from her USAID program officer job in March.
Her posts about the competitiveness of the employment landscape and how she spends her days working as a fitness instructor while job hunting are filled with comments from viewers in similar boats.
"It's cathartic to put out what I'm going through and see how other people are feeling the same way," says DeCastro, who also estimates she's applied to over 100 jobs, but only received a few interviews. "There's some sense of community in that."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Axios
12 minutes ago
- Axios
Scoop: Katie Miller leaves Musk full-time, launches podcast
Katie Miller, a fiercely loyal aide in both Trump administrations, revealed to Axios that she has left her full-time work for Elon Musk — and today will launch a podcast, "The Katie Miller Podcast," aimed at conservative women. Why it matters: Miller, 33, had behind-the-scenes sway as an adviser to Musk at the height of his DOGE muscle. She left government with him at the end of May, but now is an entrepreneur building her own brand. "For MAGA and President Trump's legacy to grow long-term, we must talk to conservative women," Miller told us. Miller took on a few investors to launch the show, which will drop each Monday. She has a contract production staff and a studio set in the living room of her Washington-area home. Zoom in: In an introductory episode, the Florida native says her podcast will cover "lifestyle, what's going on, real honest conversations — none of the bullsh*t." She says she'll host "politicians, business leaders, celebrities, musicians, artists, scientists — you name it." For her opening episodes, Miller interviewed Vice President Vance on Wednesday in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, boxing legend Mike Tyson in Palm Beach, and former ESPN broadcaster Sage Steele. Miller said in an interview that her husband, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, is "incredibly supportive" of her new enterprise, and has even pitched in to wrangle guests. The backstory: Miller, who also worked in the Senate, was a special government employee at the beginning of this Trump term, then went to work directly for Musk. "I'm incredibly grateful to President Trump and Elon for the ability to enact lasting change," she told Axios. "We got a lot done. ... We reshaped how the federal bureaucracy views government spending." Asked about her relationship with Musk since his breakup with Trump, she replied: "I hope Elon is a listener to the podcast and I hope to have him as a guest one day." Between the lines: With so many MAGA podcast audiences skewing male, Miller says in her intro that there hasn't been "a place for conservative women to gather online. There isn't a place for a mom like me, mom of three young kids — 4, 3 and almost 2 — and a wife, and trying to do a career, eat healthy, work out." Miller said she doesn't plan to focus on politics, noting that there's "no conservative answer to 'Call Her Daddy,'" the culture-heavy blockbuster podcast hosted by Alex Cooper. "There isn't a place for a mom like me to get lifestyle information, news, laugh with our friends, gossip about what's going on in the world from our perspective," she added. She said her pod will be "about women, for women — with men, too, talking about what matters to women."
Business Insider
2 hours ago
- Business Insider
The rise of Friend Socialism
Tired: still being on your family phone plan well into your 30s. Wired: hopping onto a plan with your chosen family — your friends. You still get the financial advantage of sharing a joint subscription without the embarrassment of your mom floating the cost of your excessive TikTok habit. Let's assume your friends are trustworthy enough to keep up on their part of the monthly payment, of course. Americans are drowning in subscriptions. From phone plans to streaming services, fitness apps, and media, consumers are performing what feels like a constant balancing act of sign-ups (and cancellations). While many of these services are quite affordable on their own, the costs can add up pretty fast — the average US consumer pays for about five video subscriptions a month. You realize that between Netflix, Peacock, Paramount+, HBO Max, and whatever else, you probably just should have gone with a cable package. So, people figure out all sorts of ways to game the system. They stop and start free trials and share passwords among loved ones. Or they go on — and stay on — family plans with their parents, children, etc. Some people are defining family in a broader sense to divvy up costs. They're hopping onto family plans for their cellphones, music streaming, or video content with friends, acquaintances, and even strangers, sometimes bending the rules of the terms of service in the process, other times just being a little liberal in the interpretation of family. "Word-of-mouth is a very powerful acquisition channel, and you could think of this as an extended free trial for all the freeloaders," says Daniel McCarthy, an associate marketing professor at the University of Maryland. More Americans are remaining single and childless. Doing life on your own, while the right choice for many people, can also increase costs. The " singles tax" means there's no significant other to split rent with or help shoulder the burden of a vacation hotel room. Even for people who are coupled up and in family units, the rising cost of living is making all sorts of purchases more challenging. Some people are turning to a version of what I'll call "friend socialism" to make the smaller stuff more affordable. Don't want to pay full price for that Spotify subscription? No worries. Hop on a family plan with your college roommates. Yes, you may have to all list the same address instead of the different ones you live at now, but it's not like there's the Spotify Police asking you and your homeboys for DNA samples. Getting off the family plan is seen as a milestone in the road to adulthood, but many people, because of costs and inertia, stay on. In one recent survey, about one in five American adults said they were still on their parents' phone plans, and while that proportion has gone down slightly over the past few years, one in three people still said their parents paid for some or all of their phone bill. But while they're typically marketed as "family" plans, there's often nothing in the fine print that says they have to be with your relatives. T-Mobile and AT&T, for example, openly state that they can include family and friends. Some people are opting in accordingly. As Nicole Nikolich and her roommate got further into their 20s and increasingly independent, they decided to join forces on a phone plan. "I was just like, we will literally save so much money if we just do this together," she says. Nikolich, an artist who lives in Pennsylvania, jokes that she's the "mom" of the plan, since it's all under her name. At the end of the month, her roommate — who has since moved out — just sends over a Venmo for her portion, and she's since added on her partner, too. "It's been smooth sailing for years," she says. The only hiccup was when one of them lost a phone, and they had to do a group trip to the store together to get it replaced. She would keep adding more people if it saved her money, but she thinks they've maxed out the savings they'd get with multiple lines. "If someone needed it, I would add them," she says, "as long as it was one of my more responsible friends." Rose Petargue, who lives in Missouri, doesn't personally know the people she shares her Nintendo Switch Online subscription with. She offered up the extra slots on her family plan on Reddit a while back, and now she shares her account with a few strangers who took her up on it. One of them lives in Turkey, another in the Caribbean. She doesn't charge them for it — the subscription, which runs her $79.99 a year, isn't expensive for her, and she thinks maybe it's something they couldn't afford on their own. The individual plans cost from $19.99 to $49.99. "There's a community aspect to a lot of games, and it kind of occurred to me that there are some people who can't access that portion of the gameplay," she says. There's really no risk to her, she says. Maybe if one of them "behaved badly" and Nintendo banned their account, but even then, she doesn't think it would affect her. She just adds their emails to the account and that's that. These types of arrangements aren't always foolproof. Friendships always risk being strained whenever money comes into play. One coworker tells me they've heard through the grapevine that their ex-partner stopped kicking in their portion of a group phone plan with friends. Everyone else in the arrangement makes more money, so the ex argues that the rest can afford to support them. I've had a YouTube TV subscription with friends added on as family for years. As it's gotten pricier over time, going from $35 a month when I started it back in 2018 to $82.99 now, I've been tempted to ask people to start contributing, but it also makes me feel like a jerk. Diane Brown, in New England, has no such qualms about feeling like a jerk when she deletes friends from the Peloton account she shares with them. She's largely happy to give out her password to people — her daughter, her sisters, her in-laws, and her friends — as long as they create their own user account, 20 of which can be made on her subscription. But every once in a while, she'll check in to make sure they're still using it, and if they aren't, she axes them and doesn't say anything. Given the $44 cost of the monthly subscription, Brown says she doesn't "feel badly about sharing it." It sounds like the scheme worked out for Peloton, too: One of the friends Brown shared the account with liked it so much she wound up buying her own bike. From a corporate perspective, it would probably be ideal that everyone pays full price for their phone plan or streaming subscription and calls it a day. But the calculation isn't as straightforward as it may seem. "It really depends on the company in question, the stage that they're in, and the lock-in that they have with subscribers," McCarthy says. Account sharing may be a way to get people in the door. That's part of how Netflix took hold; it allowed widespread password sharing as a way to get people hooked. It eventually cracked down on password sharing, but only once the company was making $33 billion a year and once it was sure viewers would be motivated enough to open up new subscriptions of their own. "It's a useful strategy to build usage, understanding and habit formation," says Robbie Kellman Baxter, a consultant for subscription-based companies, in an email. Allowing for account sharing may make a platform or service stickier and improve customer retention. If you and your three best friends are on a shared Verizon phone plan, are you really going to undertake the effort to switch everyone to AT&T? If you pull the plug, you're pulling the plug on five people. Despite their original promise to free viewers from ads, more and more paid platforms are tossing advertising in the mix, meaning eyeballs may be more important than subscription fees. A good chunk of revenue in ad-supported plans comes from advertising, and it's better for business if multiple people are getting hit with a bunch of ads than a single person being exposed to them. "That's made the subscription much more about engagement and view hours as opposed to, 'Is this person going to mail in the check?'" McCarthy says. "It's much less like the gym model, where the best gym member pays their fee but never goes into the gym. Now, suddenly, it's about going in all the time." Sharing the wealth, accounts-wise, is a way for people to save money as prices get higher and subscriptions multiply. To be sure, companies such as Netflix and Disney are cracking down on friend socialism for a reason. Robert Fishman, a senior research analyst at MoffettNathanson, tells me it's become an "increasing point of concern from the media companies to make sure they're getting the appropriate subscription dollars from different households." In an April survey from Pew Research Center, 26% of US streaming users said they used someone else's password, including 47% of the 18-to-29 group. "Looking backwards, the traditional media companies had to find the right balance of trying to have as many people as possible engaged in their content," he says. "But it's more recently shifted to ensuring that they're getting paid for that viewership." From a consumer perspective, it's hard to feel too guilty about playing it a little fast and loose on account sharing. Businesses are the ones who siloed content off and monetized every little thing in the first place. In turn, people find ways to fudge. Perhaps the terms of service on a subscription specify everyone has to be in a family or live in the same household, but it turns out as long as you all are in the same-ish geographic area — or just input the same address — it works just fine. Some groups develop elaborate plans for taking out and sharing various subscriptions, involving spreadsheets and coordination. Others keep it pretty simple. One colleague tells me she and her husband share a YouTube Premium subscription with a bunch of other friends. The company allows up to six accounts total on the plan, and they're all supposed to be in the same household, but YouTube apparently isn't checking. All they have to do is send over their portion to the original account holder once a year. Sharing the wealth, accounts-wise, is a way for people to save money as prices get higher and subscriptions multiply. Across groups of friends, it's a way to ease the financial burden and, sometimes, it can be a little fun, too. The only way everyone can discuss " Love Island USA" in the group chat is if they've all got access to Peacock. I share my Peloton account with a friend, and I like taking a peek to see what workouts she has (or hasn't) been up to. On a more serious note, not everyone has a family to share the family plan with, for a variety of reasons. Or, they'd just rather not wrangle their dad into an Apple Music subscription when he doesn't even have an iPhone, or has only listened to the same Bob Seger CD on a loop in his car for a decade. Some companies are coming around to that. A spokesperson for AT&T tells me they know families can "mean a lot of different things," whether the traditional understanding or not. "We are perfectly fine with customers joining our multi-line and family plans, no matter how they're related (blood, marriage, friends, co-workers, neighbors, roommates, etc.)," they say. AT&T has gone as far as to launch a payment tool to make it easier for people to split their plan costs. People may not be able to share their mortgage cost with the friend who lives across the country, but they can add them to their Strava subscription. The "family plan" can mean whatever family you choose.
CNBC
3 hours ago
- CNBC
How Meta could challenge Apple and Google to become the AI king on our devices
Apple and Alphabet 's Google are often seen as the potential big players in a world where people interact with advanced AI assistant on their phones and other devices — especially as the technology gets more personalized. But there's another name that's perhaps overlooked and that's Meta , according to Clare Pleydell-Bouverie, the co-head of the Global Innovation Team at Liontrust Asset Management. "It's a battle right now in Big Tech to be the UI (user interface) for AI, and Meta actually has an extraordinary distribution advantage here, because they're in the pocket of 3.48 billion users," Pleydell-Bouverie told CNBC in an interview this week. Meta's daily active users across its apps averaged 3.48 billion in June, the firm said in its recent second-quarter earnings statemen. "They already have our attention, and that is something that a lot of companies do not have," Pleydell-Bouverie added. Meta has been aggressively repositioning itself as a key AI company rather than a social media company. The tech giant continues to spend billions of dollars on AI infrastructure such as data centers and chips and is offering huge pay checks for top talent . In June, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta Superintelligence Labs , a division that will spearhead the company's AI efforts. So far, Meta's AI efforts have focused on using the technology to improve the way it serves ads to users and to boost engagement across its apps like Facebook and Instagram. But the company has made a major play for consumers with its own chatbot called Meta AI which is integrated products like WhatsApp and Instagram. Meta's AI play Competition in the consumer AI sector is heating up with a focus on chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and Google Gemini among others. Pleydell-Bouverie's conviction about Meta AI comes from her view about the company's important data set across its family of apps. Meta's ability to tap into its extensive data set across its family of apps is one of the main factors supporting Pleydell-Bouverie's conviction about the firm being a frontrunner in the sector. "We all know that proprietary data is one of the most important assets to own when it comes to creating an AI product or service, but not all data assets are created equal. Meta has the communication and social-media post data of 3.4 billion users. This is some of the most personal – and importantly – up-to-date forms of data on consumers that exists," she said. "The key is that Meta's platforms are increasingly where personal real-time data is stored and gets transacted." This is where Meta has a key advantage to deliver more "personalized AI," Pleydell-Bouverie said. "The battle to be the UI for AI hinges on being able to deliver personalized AI," she added. AI and the smartphone One challenge facing Meta is to what extent it can stand out from the crowd in a world of established operating systems which are run by other big tech companies. There is also a debate about how people will interact with AI agents. Given the dominance of the smartphone, it's still seen as a key device for users to access to these AI tools. Meta's apps like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are among the most popular apps in the world. But as users turn to AI agents on their devices, the developers of operating systems may have a slight advantage. "The problem Meta has is it does not own a platform like Microsoft or Apple does – it is a collection of apps that are hosted on others' operating systems. As such, it is far easier for Google, Apple and Microsoft to push its AI tools to users in a way that Meta simply can't," Ben Barringer, global technology analyst at Quilter Cheviot, told CNBC by email. Another prevailing view is that as AI becomes more personal, it will learn from people's habits on their devices, including how users interact with apps on their smartphone and other usage patterns. Operating systems developers have a clear advantage here too. "The challenge in the consumer space that Meta has compared to Apple or Google is the idea of personal intelligence. This means that you need to understand the individual's data information and tailor the AI to that," Ian Fogg, tech industry analyst at CCS Insight, told CNBC in an interview. "If you're on a device as part of an operating system, which is what Gemini is or whatever Apple does, you have a clear advantage there." Investors have grown increasingly concerned with Apple's lack of AI strategy and the move of its former design chief Jony Ive to OpenAI, which is working on devices that could rival the iPhone giant. The future operating system While companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google dominate operating systems across consumer products, Pleydell-Bouverie sees the status quo being shaken up. "The OS of the future is essentially going to be the OS of agential AI, which bears no similarity to being the OS of traditional apps," she said. Agentic or agential AI refers to the idea chatbots will become more useful and carry out tasks on a user's behalf like a digital assistant. This may go some way to explain why Facebook rebranded as Meta in 2021 with a focus on the so-called "metaverse," a digital world where avatars socialize, play and shop together. This could be accessed by Meta's virtual reality headsets or via a web browser. The concept has not taken off and Meta's Reality Labs division continues to lose billions of dollars per quarter. But for Quilter Cheviot's Barringer, it's an attempt by Meta to create its own OS. "This is partly why Zuckerberg wants to develop the Metaverse, so that the company has that platform where its own products are in front of its customers, rather than having to be found," Barringer said.
