26 ms·
Was there a tech-hiring bubble? Job postings data suggest so
- barrenko 4y agoJob ads are a marketing function in IT.
- vlixfernandez 4y agoI think all the layoffs at big tech also say so
- zx8080 4y agoOfftopic, but Back-blocking is such an antipattern.
- wil421 4y agoWhat do you mean? Blocking the back feature on your browser? If that’s the case I had no issue going back on iOS Safari.
- voxelghost 4y agoConfirmed also no problem in chrome on Windows
- zx8080 4y agoIn case accidentally clicking inside the chart, back does not work anymore. Iframe, I suppose.
- gniv 4y agoCan somebody explain what's happening? If I just scroll a bit, then try to go back I get another graph. Then if I try again to go back it works. It's probably accidental, but I'm curious what is causing this behavior.
- alephnerd 4y agoGlad to see there's a singular dataset showing something that I had a hunch happened
- wil421 4y agoThey mention not having BLS but I’d love to see a comparison between Indeed and BLS. The only jobs I see from my current employer are entry level anybody can apply jobs, very basic help desk and retail.
- alephnerd 4y agoI feel BLS is a bit of a lossy dataset imo - their classification for professions is a bit meh (CIS for all types of Software adjacent roles for example). USCIS Datasets might be useful as a proxy but aprochryally white collar immigration to the US basically tanked from 2020 onwards due to a mix of COVID restrictions and xenophobia so I'm not sure if such a proxy would be useful in the 2020-2023 timeframe compared to anytime between 2010-2020z
- kypro 4y agoSo weird describing it as a bubble – did they forget the economy was shut down and companies could literally only do business online? If you look at the rate online sales growth during the pandemic if anything it's a surprise that tech-hiring wasn't even more elevated.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dmix 4y agoEvery mass layoff article posted on HN (Microsoft, Google, Meta, etc) had people posting comments showing the staff counts sometimes doubled in size in a few years prior then reduced by 1/5th (or less) of the pre-growth number via a layoff. A bubble would typically cannibalized all the growth, not a small subset. I can see how an overeager company who bought into their short term growth numbers as long term realities might overhire during unexpected growth when you don't really know what the upper limit is. A short term (relative) explosion in demand growth can put businesses in a difficult spot where they can't handle the growth presently and they don't know if the 10% increase will turn into 20%. Hiring is a longer term investment you can't just turn on/off since on-boarding and training is a big investment, and humans are involved, so there's a fundamental timeline disconnect. There's also the flood of capital from the public markets. Even before COVID tech stocks increased quite a bit. This is pretty different than a "bubble" which is a completely fake boom that explodes 100% then falls back to zero when people realize it's bullshit. This is more like a boom that goes from +20% to +10%. Which yes still ultimately left a sizeable group in the crosshairs.
- abeppu 4y ago... but aren't job postings a poor measure of actual hiring? Once you reach the point of not being able to hire the people you want in a timely manner, you can create _lots_ of postings, on different channels, at different levels of seniority, with different kinds of focus, etc, as a desperate and ineffective measure of getting some qualified applicants in your pipe.
- csa 4y agoExactly. I’m fairly certain that there were quite a few job postings that were one of the following: - one of several for the same position, framed in different ways (as parent reply suggested) - fishing for a unicorn candidate who undervalued themselves - absolute fantasy… no one who was qualified for the job would take it with that company for what they were offering I think that some of this may have been used as an illusion to project growth where there was none.
- linuxftw 4y ago> - absolute fantasy… no one who was qualified for the job would take it with that company for what they were offering This is what we call the 'I can't find any qualified domestic candidates, so I need to sponsor an immigrant' hiring strategy.
- itqwertz 4y agoDon’t forget the diversity boost from this strategy!
- Gimpei 4y agoBut that would always be the case and wouldn’t explain the pandemic bounce. You need there to be a sudden relative increase in this type of behavior at the beginning of the pandemic.
- csa 4y ago> You need there to be a sudden relative increase in this type of behavior at the beginning of the pandemic. 1. Increased funds available to VC due to low interest rates and hot tech companies. 2. Many tech companies having a pandemic-fueled field day. 3. VCs pushing startups to hire aggressively to meet current demand (smart) and prepare themselves for the remote work, tech revolution paradigm shift (smart in moderation, less smart when leaned into too aggressively).
- rvz 4y agoThe tech layoffs from 2022 also gave us this indication without waiting for this data months later to tell us so as I said before [0]. By the time the official figures are released, you are already too late. No point in waiting for them in the first place. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33185591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33185591
- yellowapple 4y agoThat's a weirdly-specific conclusion to make when even the article's own graph shows that general job postings stagnated at the same time programmer and broader IT postings stagnated. Tech jobs declined sooner, but it looks as if general job postings are starting to decline as well. It's becoming increasingly apparent that we're either on the verge of a recession or already in one. This is more than a particular job sector being a bubble; the whole economy is arguably a bubble.
- paulpauper 4y agoIt seems like there is a recession every year if you look hard enough for it or depending on how you define it. Put "us economy recession 20*" into google for any year, and you will get results
- theknocker 4y ago[dead]
- tenpies 4y ago> the whole economy is arguably a bubble. No, you're not suppose to notice. I mean just last week there was another "tweak" to the CPI calculation[1], but we still came in absurdly hot at 6% YoY. It's about the 4th change in two quarters if I'm remembering correctly. --- [1] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/notices/2023/methodology-changes-2023.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/notices/2023/methodology-changes-202...
- marcosdumay 4y agoOnly one of the changes on that page is actually relevant, and it's 6 months old.
- NhanH 4y agoThe biggest change is on the homepage itself: > Starting with January 2023 data, BLS updated weights annually for the Consumer Price Index based on a single calendar year of data, using consumer expenditure data from 2021. This reflects a change from prior practice of updating weights biennially using 2 years of expenditure data.
- softwaredoug 4y agoI wonder if we’ll go through an irrational counter bubble. Where the prevailing wisdom will say “don’t hire too many devs, they create trouble with their activism” and “look at what <startup> did with 10 people” and “with copilot/ChatGPT we don’t need hardly any devs”
- nemo44x 4y agoThere is a lot of talk about Google as the role model of what not to do. Their employee base became a center of activism that bullied the management around. Not much came of it at the time because the company continued to generate tons of cash. But now everyone is seeing how mismanaged Google has been and likely distracted. It’s not the devs fault but rather bringing in too many people that believe the workplace is a political place.
- makeitdouble 4y ago> too many people that believe the workplace is a political place. I heard a kid ask what politics was all about. It's an interesting question for anyone to stop and think about. Everyone will come up with their own conclusions, but I personally would ask what in a workplace is _not_ political ? From hiring practices, environmental impact, customer/community management (minorities, disabled people, freedom of speech etc.), social mission, where the funds come from, where the lobbying money goes...your argument could be that employee should ignore everything a company does except what they are explicitly ordered to care about, but that doesn't look like what we socially expect from employees and people will be personally affected by how their company behaves as a whole. I'm not arguing for extreme activism everywhere you work, but saying the workplace is free of politics goes way too far on the other extreme.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- wyclif 4y ago[flagged]
- seizethecheese 4y agoThis is not very informative as it only goes back to the beginning of the pandemic. How far did this grow outside of normal bounds? We can’t know. All we do know is that nop postings round-tripped from the beginning of the pandemic. This isn’t surprising, a lot of things did that. For what it’s worth, I looked deeper in FRED and it doesn’t appear there’s longer term data on this anywhere.
- freitzkriesler2 4y agoThere was in 2022. With the fed tightening things are different. If you're a good swe you'll always find work.
- tomandrews88 4y agoThere was. But it’ll be hard for tech people to admit that, hence the negative comments here
- oofta-boofta 4y agoI think it doesn't nearly tell the story though, the tech market is highly stratified and specialized. Was there an over-hiring of sales people, hr, middle managers, and underqualified engineers? Yeah, definitely. I saw bartenders becoming "tech recruiters" or "front end engineers" overnight with no formal technical education. I'm not a credentialist, but I am a realist, and the safer bet is someone w/a BS in CS to most companies. Is there still massive demand for experienced and qualified engineers? Absolutely. I'm cautiously optimistic about the future of tech, there is a massive flee to value that usually accompanies turmoil in the markets and it' time that tech focused more on value.
- tick_tock_tick 4y agoMaybe; maybe not. We've heard time the pay and perks are gone for good this time several times and it's never stuck so we'll see.
- matt3210 4y agoAre embedded or firmware positions included? They are often ignored in these kinds of studies
- mc32 4y agoMaybe, but don't you think they would be a small group compared to the others?
- UncleOxidant 4y agoIt would be interesting to see some stats on the types of engineers that have been laid off in recent months, unfortunately, I don't think there's any data that really breaks it down to that level of granularity.
- matt3210 4y agoWith 10 years, I recently had to pick from 5 companies to work for on both coasts and Texas. The demand has always been super high
- walrus01 4y agoSomething I saw with a chart shows that despite massive layoffs recently total Microsoft headcount has only just returned to pre COVID-19 levels. On a long term trend from 2008 to present it's still a significant increase.
- phendrenad2 4y agoWhen we talk about tech hiring we often focus on demand and don't think about supply. The number of IT/software graduates has been steadily increasing as well. And they have to work somewhere. If there are no jobs these new grads can "flip burgers" or something, but more likely they'll find someone willing to hire them to crank out code. Of course the cause and effect are intertwined. More code means more apps get made, which means more investors think the market will keep going up, which makes them invest. That's the "bubble". I've been coding for 10 years. The coding profession has been a thing for maybe 40 years. The industry still hasn't worked out how to plan for these labor shortage and surplus cycles.
- throwaway4837 4y ago> And they have to work somewhere. If there are no jobs these new grads can "flip burgers" or something, but more likely they'll find someone willing to hire them to crank out code. If there are no jobs, then how? The market doesn't have to use up the entire supply of skilled workers. It's not going to create jobs just to give people jobs.
- dmn322 4y agoThere’s 2 ways this could go: 1) create enough of a safety net or give people enough cash that they can start businesses taking advantage of the increased productivity of ai 2) austerity: let them get fired from jobs in failing industries with no safety net, they will not have the opportunity to create businesses, and they will work in crappy tedious jobs a robot or ai could easily do, but because companies can afford cheap humans and they don’t have capital for robots, they will hire people desperate to do anything to keep their family from homelessness. Which one do you think we’re going to do?
- ihatepython 4y ago3) Reinstitute the military draft for the upcoming war so that the unemployed now have a purpose in life
- theknocker 4y ago[dead]
- rr808 4y agoOf course it was a bubble 2021 was nuts. People with just a few years experience were getting senior jobs earning hundreds of thousands of dollars, then leaving soon after to a new job earning even more. All the while WFH doing so sweet FA. I've never seen anything like that job market.
- jrochkind1 4y ago"FA"?
- ipnon 4y ago“Fuck all”? I don’t know. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Sweet%20FA https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Sweet%20FA
- dpc050505 4y agofuck all
- inasio 4y agoFuck all (i.e. nothing at all), maybe?
- wyclif 4y ago"RR808" is roof repair glue, but maybe the OP is from the UK.
- bbbnnnmmmkjkj 4y agoOh ha interesting not sure where that came from but assumed it would have been a Hawaii thing
- ihatepython 4y agoForensic Accounting?
- quickthrower2 4y ago
- jmyeet 4y agoThere is a ton of noise in data like this. Also, large companies don't hire the same way and for the same reason as smaller companies. 1. A lot of job postings are fake. They are meant to keep recruuting pipelines open. There can be a long delay between posting an ad, getting applicants, filtering them, doing phone screens, doing interviews, doing team-matching, extending an offer, negotiating that offer, having it accepted and that candidate start. It can easily take months. You may start recruiting before you have a position to fill. Or you may hire proactively; 2. You can't discount the effect of visa job postings. This is where you have to "prove" you can't fill a job with a US resident or citizen. One thing you have to do is post a job. There's a whole cottage industry in posting these jobs in obscure places (eg newspapers, caulk boards in obscure places in an office) and in finding legally valid way to reject applicants. 3. Smaller companies will have positions to fill. Larger companies have hiring targets and budgets, fill positiosn and then figure out what to do with them. 4. Part of all the above is large companies definitely over-hire as normal practice in case people are needed for something and to deny those people to other employers. What we're seeing now is a reduction in that over-hiring buffer plus some virtue signaling layoffs all while having a useful opportunity to attack labor costs. It's a double bonus.
- ulfw 4y agoThat's nice. But doesn't help those of us who lost their jobs with lots of experience and actual previous work ('not just sitting around/overhired') and now can't find anything. The odd thing is that it's not (just) these recent "overhires" getting laid off but lot of us more experienced employees as we are more expensive.
- matt3210 4y agoThey save more in the current executive bonus cycle by firing you and keeping the person who does 1/10th the work
- blackwateragent 4y agoWith FAANG on your resume, it's just a matter of time before you land something.
- technick 4y agoMy inbox has a different story for you.
- jojobas 4y agoA lot of people got hired just because investors would love it. They never had much in terms of ability, they just got attracted by ludicrous wages and went through a stupid boot camp or two. It's like a gold rush tapering off, except anybody could be a gold miner. Cafe owners are rubbing their hands.
- ar9av 4y agoTech companies have done a lot of aggressive hiring expecting a rise in business, but with the economic downturn coming, the business opportunity is dwindling .so they have to cut cost. And ofcourse as the corporate logic goes, instead of reducing pay or withholding certain benefits of the top paid executives, it's the lower paid employees who are Expendables and hence on the firing line first.
- galaxyLogic 4y agoI read somewhere Google etc. over-hired just to keep programmers from being hired by their competition.
- shapefrog 4y agoYou got baited by click bait.
- dehrmann 4y agoPostings don't necessarily correspond to hires, but where did all these people come from?! I can't imagine there were that many more CS grads around that time, or that a lot of CS grads were immediately going to a different job after graduation.
- theusus 4y agoThere was a big hiring bubble from 2021 until mid of 2022. Now it's really hard to find a job since everyone has frozen their hiring.
- Mandatum 4y agoHard to find a job in FAANG or other unicorns. Regular companies are hiring, funded startups are hiring, government and public sector is hiring. There won't be any bread lines.
- thomasfromcdnjs 4y agoI've definitely noticed an uptick in JSON Resumes being generated.
- throwawaaarrgh 4y agoThere was a tech bubble, period. Still is. Lots of tech with inflated value, driving massive hiring that would never result in enough value to justify the jobs. I know multiple companies hiring for teams with dead or dying projects. They hire anyway because if they don't they'd have to explain to the higher ups how the projects those higher ups green lit are useless. They need more people to make it seem like the stupid shit they're doing will generate revenue, when they know it never will. Keep the gravy train going as long as possible. Most of it was/is around other bubbles, like the crypto bubble, AI bubble, B2B bubble. Crazy ad spends have been making it worse. The pandemic inflated some sectors and deflated others, but mostly tech was fine while other industries floundered.
- senttoschool 4y agoI'm not convinced that we are in an AI bubble. In June 2007, Apple released the iPhone. Its stock price was $4.45 adjusted at that time. A year later, it was $6.50. 15 years later, it's now $153. We might be at the "$6.50 point" for AI.
- throwawaaarrgh 4y agoThe iPhone is a real product, though. AI is more like an automated fortune teller. Just because your fortune sounds really convincing doesn't mean you should use it to buy lottery tickets.
- cuteboy19 4y agoWhat separates iphones from gpt4 as a service? Both are sold, both are products.
- fhd2 4y agoI'd say a fundamental expansion in how much people use computers is what made smartphones a big shift. Maybe conversational generative AI will have the same effects, though I'm not too sure about that, people already use computers a lot.
- black_13 4y ago[dead]
- nextlevelwizard 4y agoPeople were appalled by the Twitter firings, but seriously, how many people does it take to run old, established, (micro)blogging platform? I don't know the number, but the number before the firings was too high. From what I've gathered by watching from the sidelines they are probably now gone too far south from the correct number. However the lesson to learn is not to not fire people. Yes. Of course it sucks when you lose your job, especially if it was for no fault of your own - just because some middle manager jack-off got too budget one year and decided to hire everyone with body temperature above room temperature. But we need to start culling the herd. We have too many noobs who are just wreaking havoc across our code bases, making products and user experience worse. Hardware gets faster and faster every single year, but end users don't see any benefits. We see some benefit since we are on the top of the food chain enjoying our $5K max specced Macs, but even then we should see much faster and way more reliable software than we see today. It is so fucking sad when I try to load a website and it takes 30-60 seconds for all the javascript bloat just to get to me and I'm even running all kind of blockers so I won't be getting nearly as much bloat as a normal end user. Tech used to be cool. Now it is just money all the way down. Just think how fucking cool the current AI wave would be without all the neutering that is going on since none of the big companies dare to take a risk and actually let people have even a bit of fun.
- rl3 4y ago>People were appalled by the Twitter firings Mostly due to the manner in which it was done, not so much the necessity or lack thereof (depending on your viewpoint). There's classy ways to do layoffs, and then there's whatever the hell that was.
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoYes. We are overpaid for incredible working conditions and devs basically became capricious divas, despite the fact 90% of them are plumbers, and many not very good ones. If you had any professional doing the same, wasting so much resources as us, changing part of the tech stack every month, debating vocabulary on twitter ad nauseam instead of coding, and whining about how their first world problem should be the focus right now rather than doing their job, they would get laughed at. But we were incredibly lucky that IT is the most amazing productivity cheat code humanity has come up with so far, so that all this BS was accepted as the cost of doing business. Well, here is the wake up call. No, we are not paid to rate the best cappuccino of the valley, converting the most stable software of your org to Elm nor write a commit hook so that nothing can be pushed before the diversity committee validated the change set. We are paid to solve problems. If you don't solve problems, when the hard times come, and they always do, you become part of the problem.
- grumple 4y agoAre we overpaid? The average software company is pulling in half a million per employee. That includes relatively worthless hr, admin, and other business people. Individual engineers prove over and over again that they can start multi-million dollar businesses on their own without any of those people. Software and the engineers that make it proves itself to be very valuable, engineers should be compensated accordingly.
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoApparently, thousands of "engineers" were deemed not that valuable in the last 12 months.
- IneffablePigeon 4y agoIndividual engineers who start multi million dollar businesses also prove over and over again that they need those “worthless” other business people by immediately hiring them once they get to a certain size. Not to mention that the engineers who do manage to start these companies are usually not top of the engineering field but rather the ones who are also good at sales and marketing and product management. Software is a team sport.
- matsemann 4y agoOne feeling I'm stuck with after reading the comments here, is that every commenter is "above average". It's "the others" that are bad developers that's just doing plumbing, or changing the frameworks every month, or just cashing a paycheck. What I'm doing is of course good and valuable work...
- demarq 4y ago> every commenter is "above average". It's "the others" that are bad developers Welcome to HN!
- urbandw311er 4y agoTo be fair, I suspect there is a correlation between being interested in things like HackerNews and being an above-average developer. I've met some pretty poor developers who couldn't really give a stuff about innovations, best practice, etc, they just churned out mediocre code they'd learned at university, or copypasted, then clocked off at 5pm.
- thallium205 4y agoWelcome to HN!
- postexitus 4y agoand those poor developers were not on HN - correlation confirmed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
- urbandw311er 4y agoI get what you're saying, but there was an equally unconfirmed supposition in the parent comment that all types of developer (good and bad) were equally likely to use Hacker News. I'm just saying there are at least some data points in a small anecdotal sample that did not confirm this equal distribution and so it might be worth questioning whether that is true. Sure, to be certain, we'd need to actually measure it somehow.
- thih9 4y ago> How this graph was created: Search FRED for “Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States (...)” I was hoping for details on how the data was gathered instead of instructions on how to generate a similar graph. If anyone else is interested, methodology is here: https://github.com/hiring-lab/job_postings_tracker#methodology https://github.com/hiring-lab/job_postings_tracker#methodolo... .
- DeathArrow 4y agoNot sure I agree with the "bubble". If something decreases during a crisis it doesn't automatically mean it was a bubble before that crisis. And if it ever was a bubble, it was just a FAANG and startup bubble, but the world of tech is far, far greater than that. That guy that writes Java for a tyre manufacturer is a tech guy. So is that guy that writes C# at a bank.
- beaviskhan 4y agoWas there a tech-hiring bubble, or has everyone just realized that posting on Indeed gives you garbage results, and has adjusted their posting activity accordingly?
- djha-skin 4y agoThe recruiter emails have slowed down but they haven't stopped. The demand is still pretty high. I'm not too worried.
- dehrmann 4y agoThis can be tricky to read because there are also desperate recruiters out there.
- mym1990 4y agoTime to go into carpentry! Always did want to work with me hands.
- debug-desperado 4y agoThis was confirmed for me back in 2021 when a personal trainer at my gym decided to do a quick coding boot camp and immediately got hired in the industry.
- dehrmann 4y ago> personal trainer...boot camp Imagine their disappointment when they showed up in gym clothes ready do to burpees.