Ask HN: Is it significant the Who's hiring thread has lower volume this month?

21 points·mrfusion··8 comments

Could it be an early indicator of a recession starting? What other causes might there be?

I've been tracking whoishiring for a few years now at http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring-trends. Let's see how it plays out after a few days more of postings. There has been an occasional dip but is consistently seasonal (Sep lower than August, Dec lower than Nov). March has historically been fairly flat month when compared to Feb, so I'll definitely keep an eye on it.

If you go by comments, the latest (March 2017) post was created 13 hours ago and has 720+ comments.

Looking at HN Search [1] and sorting by popularity and then looking at the comments, you can see Jan and Feb 2017 are on the first page with 900+ and 1200+ comments and March 2017 is on the second page.

So far so good if you're going to use it as an indicator :)

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=...

You typically need to wait a full day. It's gained 100 comments over the last few hours already.

That would be a decent lead indicator for a very narrow sector of the economy. I would love to see a count of hiring posts vs time.

Edit: Too good of an idea to not be done already http://www.ryan-williams.net/hacker-news-hiring-trends/2017/...

Quick glance shows feb 2027 (yellow line) highest ever?

We are anticipating great things that year.

Glad you found the HN trends site, thanks for the link! (I maintain that site)

What other causes might there be?

Regression to the mean?

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