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The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
- ohadron 4y agoInteresting. A few followup thoughts: - Can you share this analysis across a longer time span? - Maybe there's a way to normalize it to general activity on HN? It probably hasn't gone down, but it would be cleaner to do that.
- stinos 4y agoCan you share this analysis across a longer time span? For starters. There are so many possibilities here that any attempt to even think of a trend let alone what it's caused by, is wrong :) On the other hand: without knowing number of users, number of who's hring posts, when they were posted, location, ...: still really hard to give any sensible meaning to it. Just nice to look at.
- rinze 4y agoI'm running the script from January 2018. However, covid was really disruptive, so I don't know what we'll be able to see. Anyway, I'll paste a link to the plot when it's done. Edit: typo.
- rinze 4y agoHere it is: https://paquita.masto.host/@rinze/109954928934842396 https://paquita.masto.host/@rinze/109954928934842396. My "toots" auto-expire in a month, so if anyone wants to keep these plots, make a local copy.
- newbie578 4y agoThat's a nice way to visualize it. To me the best way to check the market conditions is to check your LinkedIn inbox. The number of recrutiers spamming with job offers has gone way down. I even had a situation where the recruiter who was supposed to hire me, got laid off during my final interview alongiside a big chunk of the company...
- the_only_law 4y agoI’m starting to wonder if I should have taken one of those 40% decreases income last year.
- mathieuh 4y agoI've actually had the opposite start happening this week, although that could just be a random blip. For a while I was only getting one or two per week, this week I've already had five.
- sanderjd 4y agoYep just wrote another comment about this; same thing for me, starting to get more pings again in the last few weeks after a 6-month lull.
- EarthIsHome 4y agoIt would be interesting to see the results of your script running on the "Who wants to be hired?" threads [0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34983765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34983765
- ArminRS 4y agoNot the author, but quickly ran a script over "Who wants to be hired?" from Jan-2021 to March-2023 and here is the resulting plot of the top-level comments (where indent="0"): https://www.arminbuilds.com/2021_01-2023_03_hired.png https://www.arminbuilds.com/2021_01-2023_03_hired.png
- samstave 4y agoSo I was perhaps the inventor of "who wants to be hired" (I had asked to be able to post that thread, and was told that I needed to wait two days... anyway someone ran with it, and I am happy that you have made this thread. I propose the following: WHO HAS BEEN HIRED and metrics on such.
- hammock 4y agoSeems to anticorrelate pretty well
- zX41ZdbW 4y agohttps://sql.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIHRvU3RhcnRPZk1vbnRoKHRpbWUpIEFTIGQsIHVuaXEoYnkpLCBjb3VudCgpIEZST00gaGFja2VybmV3cyBXSEVSRSBwYXJlbnQgSU4gKFNFTEVDVCBpZCBGUk9NIGhhY2tlcm5ld3MgV0hFUkUgdGl0bGUgSUxJS0UgJyV3YW50cyB0byBiZSBoaXJlZCUnKSBHUk9VUCBCWSBkIE9SREVSIEJZIGQ= https://sql.clickhouse.com/play?user=play#U0VMRUNUIHRvU3Rhcn...
- monero-xmr 4y agoWe have an expected attrition rate at my company across all departments. We normally lose about 10 people per quarter. This quarter the number of people leaving - zero.
- beebmam 4y agoI've seeing a higher than normal attrition rate. Unemployment rate among tech workers stays absurdly low, went down to 1.5% last month: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/economy/2023/02/07/tech-layoffs-2023-google-amazon/11135692002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/economy/2023/02/07/tech...
- analyst74 4y agoHow do they calculate this rate? I simply left the country after layoff, and most likely not counted in the numbers.
- ghaff 4y agoThe US BLS has 6 different unemployment measures. The one that's usually quoted is U-3 which means unemployed but seeking work. But if you left the country, I assume you're not counted in any unemployment measurement. (Though I also assume that's a sufficiently unusual edge case that it doesn't really move the needle on any of the statistics.)
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y agoIn the US, you're not "unemployed" if you don't have a job and you don't want one. I believe if you're a US citizen vacationing long-term in France because your work prospects aren't great at the moment - you'll still show up as not in the labor force in the labor force participation rate: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART But you won't show up in u-1 through u-6. > Discouraged workers (U-4, U-5, and U-6 measures) are persons who are not in the labor force, want and are available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months Source: https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm
- marginalia_nu 4y agoIt's peculiar how the remote jobs graph follows the total graph so closely? Wouldn't you expect to see more noise?
- debacle 4y agoReally what the graph shows is that the downturn in in-person positions has been minimal, but the downturn in remote work has been precipitous.
- tony_cannistra 4y agoThat's interesting. To me it actually looks like the opposite. The share of remote work eligible postings as a fraction of total postings seems to be higher than before?
- rinze 4y agoNo, they're following the same trend. Remote jobs are consistently 75 % - 80 %.
- ghaff 4y agoThat seems absurdly high if you're talking about fully remote.
- ml_basics 4y agoThere's probably a bias given that this is a website with global reach. For any company posting, almost all readers are not living nearby.
- furyofantares 4y agoWe're talking about advertising for jobs on Hacker News. Maybe there is just not much value to advertising location-specific jobs in these threads.
- 4y ago
- msoad 4y agoI am defiantly feeling it from the number of recruiters emailing me about various opportunities. It's nice because I'm never interested in any of these jobs. I always find my next job through my network anyways.
- sanderjd 4y agoAnecdotally, recruiter emails are back for me after a ~6 month lull. I'm not sure if it's a hopeful sign that both the bubble and the backlash are behind us and things are normalizing, or a bad sign that the over-hiring lesson hasn't been learned and there is more pain yet to come.
- yourapostasy 4y agoThis trues up with what I'm anecdotally seeing in my clients. RTO-3 days or even RTO-5 days is being pushed aggressively in some of them, and the general feeling amongst their rank and file is it is a stealth layoff (no severance for those leaving due to the policy switch is a big financial incentive for the companies). A big challenge I'm not seeing really addressed though is a lot of staff at my clients stepped up big time to do more with less during the pandemic and put in more than full time hours, reasoning that they'll just work during what normally would have been their commute time. That slack their companies enjoyed is now being yanked out of the ecosystem as many simply don't have more to give once they start commuting again. Quite a few put in even put in way more. I saw this organically happen both pre- and post-pandemic. Pre-pandemic, it was rare if a Slack or email I sent to client staff was answered off hours. During the latter half of the pandemic and post-pandemic with those in WFH situations, it became much more common as staff learned to communicate all the time during brief idling periods while going about their off hours days and evenings. I'm going to miss this low-latency communication, but it is what it is. If this is an actual secular trend instead of mere n=1 anecdata, then it will stack on the demographic trend baked in of ever-fewer workers for the next 20-odd years (assuming there is a baby boom in the next 3-4 years, which by current family and household formation statistical trends is still looking unlikely).
- livinglist 4y agoI’m fully remote atm and checks slack when I’m off work all the time. If I were to commute 50 mins each way, I wouldn’t be looking at slack after work for sure, hell even 10min commute will make me dislike my job, just thinking of having to get up early to walk my dog..
- Firmwarrior 4y agoyeah, I have a 10 minute commute right now, and I hate it I have to walk all the way across the building to a phone room every time I need to make a phone call, and the rooms are usually all full. Which means I have to hide in the mail room or walk a couple of blocks out to my car. The office is full of minor annoyances like broken elevators, full bathrooms, no coffee creamer, etc. It's super obnoxious. I'm trying not to be a spoiled /r/antiwork jerkbag here, but I really hate this job, haha.
- bfung 4y agoHey OP, I did something similar ~3 months ago you may find useful. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33773972 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33773972 Feel free to use the historical data, I haven’t had time to update for Jan and Feb 2023!
- haskellandchill 4y agoI did some application tests recently. I don't think I can even get an interview right now. Maybe if I tried python/node/javascript/ruby I could, but typed languages are tight competition for not many offerings. Update: Actually just got an interview so it's not so so bad.
- myth_drannon 4y agoHNTrends has data all the way from 2019. Last months have been the lowest ever. https://www.hntrends.com/2022/november.html https://www.hntrends.com/2022/november.html
- dirtybirdnj 4y agoThere's dozens of us!
- totetsu 4y agoIs this downturn affecting all regions at the moment or mostly just USA? I wonder how the overall HN comments are trending.. More people with free time to waste on HN or less people with a reason to slack off and waste time on HN..
- JohnFen 4y agoIt looks to me like, in the US, the downturn is limited to a specific subset of the tech space. Mostly the SV-style companies. The larger tech space, at least in the software engineering segment, appears to be largely unaffected. They even seem to be hiring at the same rate as normal.
- rootusrootus 4y agoAnecdote: I work for a mid-size (~5000 employees) non-SV software company (heavily focused on a particular industry). We have been steadily laying people off quietly. But almost no software engineers. At this point it's the usual -- QA, project managers, enterprise architects, things like that. Management likes to pretend they're basically useless, they're somewhat expensive, and it looks like an easy win to cut that out. But so far, developers are untouchable.
- ActionHank 4y agoMy theory around this is that they don't want to give competitors an edge or allow room for devs to go build a competing product.
- topherpalmtree 4y agoDo you get the sense it’s for profit padding or is there a downturn in business? If there is a downturn in business, is that downturn related to Covid measures at the consumer or business level?
- mecha_ghidorah 4y agoI work for a smaller company (< 200 employees) and it's similar. We are still hiring additional engineers but we've let go some project people as well as our scrum masters. Scrum masters at least do feel like they don't justify their salary to me really, it isn't as if the team leads don't have to be in all the meetings they run so may as well have the team leads run them
- jatins 4y agoAlmost a 70% decline since peak. Looks worse than I anticipated
- eljimmy 4y agoWould be more interesting to include the numbers prior to the pandemic (which had an abnormal surge in hiring).
- UncleOxidant 4y agoPresumably the right-most data point is from yesterday (3/1/23). Isn't there a potential flaw here in regards to that most recent data point? Whereas in previous months people had all month to post jobs to the monthly job posting thread, there has only been one day since the 3/1/23 job post thread was started. I think this script should be run on the last day of the month, not the first.
- rinze 4y agoYes, you're right. However, the trend during the last months is very clear.
- UncleOxidant 4y agoFrom January though February (the last month with complete data) the trend was up.
- time_to_smile 4y agoIt you really want to model this correctly (more than just, it looks like it's going down) you would need to adjust for seasonal factors as well. At least in this data it looks like February postings are always higher than January, but this year they are not as much higher as they normally would be.
- prh8 4y agoI'm curious to see a chart of the "who wants to be hired" threads
- intelVISA 4y agoA questionable place at the best of times..
- hn8305823 4y agoI'd love to see a study of trends of generic positive/negative words used across all HN article comments. That might be revealing of the "state of tech", though not necessarily specific to employment.
- 29athrowaway 4y agoLeftconomics at work.
- throwaway92838 4y ago[flagged]
- elif 4y agoI wonder if it correlates with a /general/ loss of traffic. Personally I find the comments section to be less accepting of more classes of opinions each year.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoI categorically reject this opinion.
- plonk 4y agoI think political statements like yours should be banned from HN. This is not what this site is about.
- Jensson 4y agoWhat is political about "categorically reject"?
- version_five 4y agoThe funniest part about a thread like the above is that it's virtually impossible to tell if a given comment was made as a joke
- 71a54xd 4y agoYep, it's not good. Been unemployed for about a month and the market is completely flooded. Either I'm not senior enough or I just suck - feelsbadman.
- topherpalmtree 4y agoWhat tech downturn?
- soneca 4y agoScript was probably run too early to be comparable to older posts, right? March Who is hiring thread is now close to 500 total comments (guessing around 20 of those are not job posts?)
- culopatin 4y agoCould it be that people don’t get much traction out of those posts and even if they have positions open they just don’t come back to post it there?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ricardobeat 4y agoI wish the data would go a bit further back. Pretty sure 200-300 job posts was normal around 2017-2018, with the industry doing just fine. The 1000 jobs per post in 2021 were an abnormality.
- fourthark 4y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999048 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34999048
- Seb-C 4y agoWhy does the data starts in 2021? Comparing with the situation before the pandemic is essential to make any conclusion... EDIT: The second link provides more insights: https://rinzewind.org/blog-en/2021/percentage-of-hacker-news-job-postings-that-mention-a-remote-option.html https://rinzewind.org/blog-en/2021/percentage-of-hacker-news... Most likely, there is just nothing to see, we are still in the process of being back to normal from the pandemic bubble. This chart paints a very dishonest picture.
- reportgunner 4y agoDo we really need a blog post to say "Number go down" ?