Lowest “Who is hiring?” Post Count in 30 Months | Hacker News Reader

Lowest “Who is hiring?” Post Count in 30 Months

461 pointstrenning310 comments

October 2022 - 408

April 2020 - 608

January 2016 - 471

First time the thread has been under 600 posts since January 2016.

Posts still trickle in throughout the month but the first 12 hours is when the majority of posts show up. I'm sure someone could do a more thorough analysis of post count but the overall number is unusually low.

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I don't know the intention of the author, but I see like a lot of "Look, it's happening! The economy is going down!" posts pop up these days. Which may be true, but it can also be a self-fulfilling profecy if everyone is doing that on all platforms. Which would be a shame.

I'm not saying HN and other platforms should censor (/ take action) either. It's just a thought I have on this subject, and I don't know if there is a solution.

This could be considered a good thing. The whole point of increasing interest rates is to lower business investment and consumer purchasing power, which is what we need to do to combat inflation (or magically fix all supply chain issues.)

> This could be considered a good thing.

Lower wages, lower job mobility, asset deflation, consumable inflation -- YAY!

...

It is still wild to me that this is the approach we are taking, things are getting too expensive so let's shrink the economy. That can't be the best solution. We are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Not shrink. Slow the growth of. Decelerate is different from stop.

The real problem isn't any particular position, velocity, nor even acceleration. Those can all be planned for. It's the 4th time-derivative, jerk, that messes us up.

That is a semantic debate on whether we cross an axis on a graph and we won't know whether that will happen until after the fact.

We are intervening to make the economy smaller than if we didn't intervene. I think that qualifies as "shrinking" even if the growth is what is shrinking and not the overall economy.

> We are intervening to make the economy smaller than if we didn't intervene.

Depends on what time scale we're thinking about. True in the short-term, but I think the long-term expectation is that growth will be more stable, and therefore greater, with this short-term intervention.

> I think that qualifies as "shrinking"

Yes, and no. Yes, in that oh-so-important technical, relative sense. No, in that it's not the best choice of words.

> Those can all be planned for.

Literally nothing can be planned for. Compare the Fed dot plots at any given meeting since 2008 with actual rates a year, or three years hence. Look at the BoE and BoJ flail wildly around right now, absolutely shocked by the consequences of their own actions less than a year ago.

These people have arguably a worse predictive ability than the canonical South Park Chicken ritual.

Central Banking is the only industry I know of in which you can be catastrophically wrong, always, and retain job security. Great gig, if you can swing it.

It's the only way we know of to stop greed/fomo running rampant. Folks need to be put in a time-out to cool off and force them to reprioritize. We like to think of the market as this calculated and rational entity. It's far from that, in fact it's closer to the opposite of that. The other option is to do price control, but that won't fly in capitalism.

There are other levers that can be pulled. Taxes are one example that could be much more targeted at the specific sources of the "greed/fomo running rampant". We instead chose to take it out on everyone.

I'd put taxation in the same bucket as price control because for this to be effective the taxes would need to be on the rich (in effect to drain liquidity) and that's as likely as price control.

I don't disagree with the unlikely nature of new taxes on the rich. That was basically my original point. It is wild that we decided that we would rather go into a recession than tax the rich and I don't understand why there is seemingly no public pushback against this.

There's historic precedence that increasing rates controls inflation. Yes, it's a very blunt and crude instrument. However, when you know this tool works, trying another tool is too risky to experiment with (in case it fails).

Inflation does have the risk of getting out of hand and being even harder to control. The risk analysis is that whatever pain increasing the rates would cause it pales in comparison to having hyperinflation.

As far as the lack of a pushback: My guess is a combination of apathy and the fact that it doesn't affect the average person quite as much as inflation.

> to do price control, but that won't fly in capitalism

Price control doesn't fly in any economic system. Putting a legal floor or ceiling on the price anything doesn't affect what it actually costs to produce it.

That depends on how authoritarian the regime is... However, I was talking about putting a price control over the level/amount of profit. If you look at the financial reports of late you'd see record profits during record inflation.

I wouldn't say its the only way we know, rather its the only politically feasible move. Increasing taxes on the wealthy would arguably be a more effective way to take money out of the economy and wouldn't hurt non-wealthy people as bad, but good luck getting that through congress.

The only party that can act right now is the Fed, and the only move the Fed has in increasing interest rates.

The problem is that there's no proven good way to increase taxes on the wealthy. There's two flawed approaches: (1) increase income taxes, which doesn't tax the people who control the majority of the country's wealth, and (2) wealth taxes, which no country has ever figured out how to implement effectively.

Property taxes are the only successful way we have of taxing wealth.

The interest rate hikes serve to squash the glimmer of worker power that has the ownership class so worried.

Not to mention the greatest wealth transfer in history from the poor to the rich: https://www.newsweek.com/were-living-through-greatest-transf...

Inflation is dumping rocket fuel on that fire. There's a reason that they're fighting inflation with disregard for other consequences: the resulting inequality of continued unchecked inflation is a legitimate threat to the stability of our social system.

Asset deflation is a good thing for wage earners. Inflation is the worst possible thing for anyone who works for their money, as it means the wealth of the people who own assets (think 8-9 figure business portfolios, not a single residence) is skyrocketing away from the middle class in both relative and absolute terms.

This isn’t 1980, raising interest rates doesn’t fix supply chain issues. This isn’t inflation it’s a real supply shortage. By the fed doesn’t seem to know how to help with that so, let’s just tank everything. Killing demand to get workers back to lower wages and unemployment up seems to be that real goal.

It's both.

There is a supply shortage in some areas... and there is price inflation as well. That's actually what you'd expect with a supply shortage that isn't very evenly distributed anyway, but when you add dramatic expansion of the money supply in a period of very low interest rates on top of that, you'd certainly expect to see dramatic price inflation to match, as we have. The idea that a supply shortage is causing all of this seems insane.

The "expansion in the money supply" has been going on for 15 years. The supply issues started 2.5 years ago. The inflation started about 2 years ago. So only one of those factors is correlated with serious inflation.

The explicit goal of expanding the money supply in 2009 was to drive inflation in order to combat deflation. It didn't work. We ended up with a decade+ long period of low/no inflation.

Even today, the USD is growing stronger relative to other currencies. So in spite of this continued money supply expansion, Americans are experiencing inflation the least of anyone in the developed world.

Money supply has roughly doubled since 2020. So you are not correct.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

That big spike is literally just a change in the definition of M1/M2 money supply. Specifically, in May 2020, the Fed began including certain liquid investment accounts. So you can't compare pre-May 2020 figures with post-May 2020 figures because they are measuring different things and they aren't going to go back and retroactively fix the figures.

While he's wrong to say it "doubled," it has risen ~40% since 2020, and the graph he linked is M2 -- the spike in that graph is not due to definition change -- that's actual money supply expansion. You're thinking of the change to the definition of M1, which did cause a really huge spike that was misleading if you didn't understand the change. The converted figures that do adjust the definition in both periods do show this particular spike (as do graphs using only the pre-May 2020 definition).

Be a little more humble correcting people when you completely are wrong. M1 -> m2 conversion.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WM2NS

The money supply has expanded as much since the monetary policy shifts of 2020 as it did between 2011 and those shifts, and inflation is a lagging indicator. You can't use "oh, we've expanded the money supply before and it hasn't caused inflation" to dismiss the idea that expanding the money supply at several times the speed is going to have a much more dramatic inflationary effect.

Zimbabwe has 200% interest rates and 280% inflation iirc

https://www.africanews.com/2022/06/28/zimbabwes-key-interest...

Why am I being downvoted? All this is is a data point showing that rising interest rates don't have to bring down inflation.

Zimbabwe's economy is non-functional. Stats for inflation and interest rates aren't meaningful to anywhere else. There's no real applicable lessons other than to look at it and feel bad for Zimbabweans stuck in that situation.

I don't think people should downvote you for disagreement, but I do disagree with your analysis. The US has a system where the Fed lets banks manage the money creation, and they control that by changing the interest rates to change the bank's incentives. In Zimbabwe, the government prints money directly (or at least they did under the Mugabe government, I am not up to date on their current affairs), which means that the central bank interest rate doesn't restrain their money supply growth.

That does have some relevance to the US because the federal government can borrow+spend way more than a small country with a bad credit score - but since the interest rates they borrow at are coupled to the Fed rate, rising rates should in theory slow that down.

The Fed is a creature of Congress, which is to say that Congress completely controls the Fed. All talk of the Fed's independence has no constitutional basis. The Fed was created by an act of Congress and can be restructured, abolished, or otherwise changed however Congress likes by subsequent acts of Congress. Indeed, in the history of US central banking, Congress has done so before. Therefore, the Fed's continued existence is predicated on not motivating a congressional majority plus the executive or alternatively a veto-proof congressional majority to change things. Practically and observably speaking, that means when Congress says "print" the Fed says "brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr." There is no operational limit on how much money Congress can spend. There are real limits though, in particular the productive capacity of the economic zone that does business in US dollars. If, for example, China were to withdraw from the dollar denominated global market, it would be a severe supply shock and result in massive inflation.

Furthermore, most money in the USA isn't even reserves, but rather bank deposits. Theoretically bank deposits are supposedly somehow constrained by reserves, but that hasn't really been true for well over a decade. Raising rates doesn't directly impair banks ability to originate as many new loans and corresponding deposits as they care to. Conceivably, higher rates could reduce the demand for loans from credit-worthy borrowers, or even reduce the pool of credit-worthy borrowers directly, but I'm not sure it doesn't end up being a wash after accounting for inflation.

Personally I suspect most of the effects that we do see are related to hysteresis rather than a fundamental transmission mechanism from interest rates. That is to say, the shocking effects we see from rate increases aren't due to a fundamental change, but rather a lag while market participants to catch up with the new rules of the game.

Another important factor is the prestige media using all of its persuasive powers to convince market participants that Fed actions will result in a downturn. There certainly is a large psychological component to economic activity.

Given Congresses inability to get almost anything done other than the absolute "must-do's" like NDAA and yearly appropriations and then 1-2 big ticket admin items, why do you think that Congress has the capacity, much less the will to control or even exert significant interest over the Fed?

I think that if the Fed stopped acting in the interests of Congress’s real principals, who are observably not the general electorate, then we would see exactly that. It’s instructive to observe the cases where Congress reliably acts promptly and more or less unanimously. Pare off the procedural stuff and other fluff of course.

As a conceptual body it has the authority. The meat bags currently running the show have no motivation. Of course they too are Americans and would deflate their value by changing the rules, which is the problem with thought ending populist chants and mantras like “no new taxes!”

The public is “data structure” illiterate. They’re educated with spoken traditions coupled to vague imagery of hierarchical power structures of history and the work place. I am not sure it’s intentional, more of a Duning-Kruger thing.

As usual any sustained shift in the appropriation of agency is up to the public. Science shows us how to build things, but no theory states “we must build rockets to nowhere.” But “keep your hands off muh capitalism click clack” gets in the way of sincere discussion of fully automated logistics.

Protectionism of spoken tradition in human memory is not going away anytime soon. It’s innate to our biology.

> The Fed is a creature of Congress, which is to say that Congress completely controls the Fed.

No no no no no. It means that Congress created the Fed, and Congress can destroy the Fed. Congress can also change its charter.

But Congress is capable of creating and destroying independent agencies.

“I buy that car and fill it with gas. You drive it.”

The Zimbabwean economy is to the American one what a kids soccer match is to the World Cup.

Those numbers don’t mean anything.

The currency in Zimbabwe is so unreliable that barter has become the principal way of saving and storing wealth.

Zimbabwe has “cow banks.” You take your cash salary, and give it to the cow bank. The cow bank uses the cash to buy a cow.

The cow is put into a pen. You can make surprise visits to ensure the cows are alive, healthy, and not being “shared” with other customers.

Interest rates are based on the fertility rates of cattle, not central bank policies.

This sounds like it's just investing in a cattle ranch.

A bit … each customers cattle is sequestered. You get an actual cow with a name/number. You can take the cow home if you want - it’s yours.

More like owning a pet horse.

It's a little short of full-on financialization of a cattle. So, perhaps closer to beef/dairy futures? What's missing is a bank classifying the cattle, selling them fractionally, and creating a hedging instrument.

If you own oil or soy futures, you can go get the product if you like (to everyone's inconvenience). This is not far off.

Why people there can't just store value in a hard currency, like USD? That's the typical approach in countries with shitty currencies. Even if it's illegal, I can't imagine enforcement being that great.

Another option for lowering inflation is increasing productivity to allow the same amount of money to chase more goods and services, thus resulting in lower prices.

> Which may be true, but it can also be a self-fulfilling prophecy if everyone is doing that on all platforms. Which would be a shame.

This also happens with inflation. It is probably because people start acting differently. The hypothesis is that if people are preparing for a recession then demand goes down, which pushes prices up, which is identical to inflation. Obviously this model is far too simplistic but it is still interesting.

What? That’s opposite of how it should work. Lower demand depresses prices.

Not if you want to make the same profits.

That's not how it works.

Revenue is the area of the rectangle "price times volume". (Profit is "revenue minus costs".) Businesses want to maximize the area of that rectangle.

If a business thinks they can keep the area of that rectangle the same by increasing the price dimension, that will cause buyers to react by shrinking the volume dimension. That might yield the same effective area for the rectangle, but then also might not.

Well empirically lower demand does not lead to higher prices. The hopes and dreams of sustained profits are dashed by the coercive forces of competition. It's very sad.

Why do you say that softening demand will cause prices to go up? That sounds contrary to every economics lesson I've ever had.

Nuance matters. In this case people start saving but also EXPECT prices to increase. So prices are able to increase under that speculation. Sellers can then demand higher prices while demand decreases. [0] discusses self-fulfilling oil price increases due to speculation of oil price increases. This is more what I was pointing at but conveyed (extremely) poorly.

There's also the matter that people treat econ 101 as facts but the truth of the matter is economics is really fuzzy and there are no hard rules and there are always (ALWAYS) exceptions. Even what I said can happen or can not. I was just pointing out that it ,,can'' happen. It's all very statistical. But you may notice that the real world very much does not follow anywhere near the econ 101 models. It's like doing physics where everything is a spherical cow. Truth of the matter is that if we actually understood economics we wouldn't run into situations like this. It isn't like economies benefit from major downturns and inflation. It'd be like knowingly shooting yourself in the foot. Over and over again.

[0] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/033115/how-does-law...

I have no quarrel with your second paragraph.

As to your first: if people expect prices to increase tomorrow, they don't save today; they spend today, to lock in value prior to inflation. And even if people actually did as you claim and saved funds today despite their expectations of higher prices tomorrow, guess what: seller's can't eat expectations. They need actual sales. And in your scenario, the people aren't buying.

Well people do both. And different people do different things. I also think a big factor is the amount of inflation. Like the fed targets a 2-3% inflation because that encourages people to spend for exactly the reason you're talking about. Basic monetary theory. But inflation based recessions are a different story and people prepare for the shock. People will hold money because they also expect inflation to reduce and this be a temporary issue. If you expect prices to fall back down, then you should save instead of spending now.

"The hypothesis is that if people are preparing for a recession then demand goes down, which pushes prices up"

This makes no sense at all. even the inverse makes no sense, if people preparing for a recession stopped buying goods, prices would go go down not up, which obviously would not cause inflation. This idiocy of saying that inflation comes from the people, and not from monetary policy, is depressing. It guarantees that governments will keep having a free pass to print as much colored paper as they want.

Almost as depressing as this belief that the (US) government just prints money.

I believe the intent is to share as a possible leading indicator. I don't know the OP's exact reasoning, but I have tracked this data for years at hntrends.com and it was my original thesis that this thread is a leading indicator of the tech job market at a minimum.

How can you call it a leading indicator of the tech job market when it is a tech job market?

It is a pretty narrow segment of a much larger market, presumably.

"Startups quit hiring first," sounds like a leading indicator on the surface, but if you think about it that also means that they will stop hiring during smaller dips that later pick back up. Every big dip has to do through the smaller dip state, but since plenty of smaller dips recover it is still a martingale - unless it isn't, but if it isn't that's the cause of my surprise.

That's basically true of all "leading indicators", and is summarized in the popular joke that "Economists have predicted 8 of the last 5 recessions".

Yeah, there are literally thousands of tech companies that don’t use HN.

Not the author but I would assume they mean that "Who is hiring" was indicative of the job market outside the HN thread itself, in a macro-perspective.

Leading indicator of the (overall) tech job market is a better way to put it. The job postings in The Who Is Hiring? threads are a small sliver of the overall industry.

It's a fine sample though.

I’m not sure it’s representative. It has a higher proportion of startups and a lower proportion of established non-tech companies who still often make tech hires

I would think the leading indicator would be Big Tech layoffs and hiring freezes that started months ago.

If I were to change my course of action, I'd use that since it happened way earlier.

i mean, even with hiring freezes and layoffs i'm still getting emails from recruiters (this month i got one from google amongst other companies).

I feel like the big companies have nothing to lose from saying and doing these things. First it frees them of any guilty conscience to hack and slash at 'extra fat', second it allows them to get away with running skeleton teams. Third, it makes people who get solicited and receive a job offer feel "lucky" that they were given an offer in a "bad market".

There's no reason for them to not act like this. Unless a pile of startups are standing around throwing more money at engineers and loudly attracting google's talent away.

Freezes are never absolute or company wide. It just means that it will be harder to get headcount. The recruiters keep filling the funnel at a lower pace.

I think everyone is getting emails from recruiters, and this will keep happening until the recruiters themselves are laid off. Good people are hard to find in any market, and if there's even a chance that you're a good person from your resume or current employer, you will keep getting these emails.

Isn't it too early to count the total on October 4th?

OP wants to be early to report a trend. Too early and premature IMO, but he wants to be first, I guess.

Oh I don’t know about that. I would say the vast majority of a threads discussion happens in the first 12 hours here. The who’s hiring threads don’t have that much longer of a tail.

Within a single firm, particularly large ones, surpluses and deficits can be communicated absolutely and crises can be practically eliminated. (It would be unthinkable for Amazon to leave the coordination of its processes up to some sort of internal free market.) As for action between firms, the anarchy of the market is fundamental to capitalism. Real competition is a basic characteristic of capitalism and so perfect information is not a tendency of the system (despite its theoretical elevation in neoclassical economics).

So, no, there is no solution. To avoid crises of overproduction (including the subsequent adjustments), the planning that takes place within the capitalist firm has to be extended to the global network of production.

It seems you're advocating for a centrally planned economy, but from history we see that it doesn't work. It seems that there is simply too much in an economy for one entity to wholly plan. It can work in a smaller organization like Amazon (and even then, I'm sure teams compete for allocation of resources, it's not all centrally planned) but not at large. We see that people in centrally planned economies revert to underground black markets, signifying that somehow markets are a key to functioning economies.

There are differences between the systems of a private capital and of a nation (or for that matter, the entire globe, which has never been planned centrally; incidentally this explains black markets).

The difference in goods is a mere quantitative difference. (Amazon sells literally everything.) Still, the amount and diversity of crap managed by Amazon is much greater than that of North Korea (comparing net sales vs. GDP). "It seems that there is simply too much in an economy for one entity to wholly plan" has to be tongue-in-cheek if it's not simply a mindless mantra. It's a staggering ideological contradiction whose poles the Hacker News crowd must oscillate between. On one hand, we're on the cusp of generalized artificial intelligence, and on the other we can't figure out the linear algebra needed to maintain a input-output table that changes over time.

But the difference in competition is a qualitative difference. The laws that determine the "competition" between teams at Amazon are different (opposite, even) than the laws of competition between capitalist firms. This is an empirical question. We can certainly imagine Amazons teams undercutting each other's "prices" in order to maximize private "profit," leading to a centralization and concentration of "capital" in the hands of a "monopolistic" team, but this simply does not happen in practice. The categories of intra-firm operation are totally different than those of inter-firm operation.

https://www.financialsamurai.com/best-time-to-start-a-busine...

“ The Best Time To Start A Business Is During A Downturn”

Financial Samurai strikes me as sadistic. His post about Mr. Money Mustache's divorce is pretty horrible example of soulless SEO headings kicking a rival blogger when down https://www.financialsamurai.com/mmm-divorce/

I have mixed feelings. It’s sadistic but too relevant to ignore. It’s an hit in the aircraft carrier of the FIRE poster child.

I can see it both way. I never liked MMM types because they preach what I consider extreme frugality. As a core principle of my finances, I focus on the uncapped income side of the equation and practice what I consider modesty in my expenses. I have no desire to be flashy or flaunt the wealth I do have. But I’m sure as hell not living off the grid in the middle of nowhere because it cost 10% of a home in a metro area. Thing is, I’d never even consider it because my wife doesn’t want that, and it’s important for people to be fully aligned on that.

I found the post you linked to overly verbose as these bloggers often are. They make lists and sections and go on tangents on what could be a 300-500 word essay. I think he could have excluded the backstory and just focused on how important it is that your partner be onboard the FIRE/extreme frugality lifestyle. So I think it’s poorly written and not an enjoyable article. However, it’s a pretty damn important message and difficult to talk about until someone prominent that is serving as a poster child for the FIRE niche like MMM goes through it publicly.

ESH

He's kicking someone else when they are down, but that seems to be petty revenge in retribution for perceived attacks.

One of the most common reasons for divorce is finances so it seems relevant to draw attention to someone promoting a certain financial lifestyle.

Wow, it takes a grade A piece of shit to speculate about someone’s divorce.

As others like Jason Calicanis have pointed out, it will hopefully be easier for the resilient startups to hire and retain talent.

https://youtu.be/fU6QlvruLTw?t=607

"Look, it's happening! The economy is going down!"

I agree this can be a self fulfilling prophecy. A lot of larger tech companies were announcing hiring freezes or restructuring months ago to get ahead of the downturn.

But I also think we could restate the quote above in ways that are actually true. For example, a lot of these posts are startups and monetary policy is slowing or shrinking the money available for VC. It makes sense that we see slower hiring. The past few years have probably been above historical VC funding levels anyways, so we may be returning to a more historical level for the next few years (or who knows?).

> A lot of larger tech companies were announcing hiring freezes or restructuring months ago to get ahead of the downturn

Alternately, I think a lot of companies are using the spector of a recession as cover for reducing unproductive or unnecessary headcount.

Over-hiring is an issue that's difficult to correct. If you do a round of layoffs, the perception is that you're in financial duress. This can affect investor and consumer confidence.

It's also difficult to explain to the public and to employees "oops, mia culpa! We asked you to upend your life to take a job with us, but our bad, we don't really need you."

I see it as similar to the way a lot of businesses implemented cost-cutting measures during covid that they had very much wanted to do, but couldn't because of the worry that they'd lose a competitive edge. Many of these measures had nothing to do with public safety and everything to do with cost cutting.

Even if that is the case with some, it would still have the self-fulfilling prophecy component.

Most recessions are self-fulfilling. Outside of true exogenous disruptions (ie a pandemic or a war) recessions are largely driven by collective bad vibes creating a vicious cycle. In most cases, we could probably power through dips in consumer spending or specific industries shrinking or fuel prices rising but in reality the bad feelings trickle outward until they affect everyone very broadly. Then when we've had enough, things recover. Keynes called it Animal Spirits.

> a self-fulfilling profecy (sic)

I think Powell jacking up the fed funds rate is going to have a much larger effect than some random HN post.

We're also heading into the holiday season, and notably "Open Enrollment" for health insurance, which is titanic industry who typically freezes their code in September. Lots of companies slack off or halt their hiring, particularly health insurance during this period.

And also all the inflation and recession action going on.

So it's likely a combination of the two.

The first factor, if valid, would have shown up in previous years too, no?

> I don't know the intention of the author

Why does his intent matter unless you think the data is being skewed or misrepresented? Seems like a fairly objective factual post to me (but I didn’t run the numbers myself).

I would appreciate if data observations like this always included the script so people could easily (and quickly) verify the results, but that’s just a personal knit pick.

> Why does his intent matter unless you think the data is being skewed or misrepresented?

Because the data can be cherry-picked, intentionally or un-intentionally, similar to https://xkcd.com/882/

If you believe a trend exists (or just want to find evidence for it for other reasons) and you keep looking for statistical evidence of it, you're going to find it.

Yes for sure, but no conclusions were drawn. No summary or opinion was posited.

Of course results can be skewed. Seems unlikely in this case, but it's easy enough to verify. I mean if I was going to criticize the data, I'd probably just verify it myself first, and then question intent. Thinking about it, I could verify post counts for a hand full of these pretty easily using the dev console. No one even questioned the data though, it was more along the lines of; what's the hidden agenda...

My biggest takeaway from submitting this, is that most people (by top upvoted comments) had a negative knee jerk reaction to my 'intentions'. I just thought it was observationally interesting.

I see what you are saying, but I think the impact of a post like this on something so intangible as "market sentiment" is extremely tenuous. It's hard to measure/quantify but I'd be shocked if it's more than a rounding error.

On the other hand, there are actual fundamentals like economy-wide inflation, employment numbers, GDP growth, supply/demand curves, etc., and it's important as an operator to have information about how the economy actually is, and more importantly how it's changing. I think the benefit of a post like this is much less tenuous; it provides insight into how the broader market conditions are panning out in our specific corner of the economy.

So yes, every measurement perturbs the system under measurement. In some cases that can be substantial. But in this case I don't think it is so.

Yeah also looking at what jobs are in demand at recruiters from LinkedIn, I can see already since the pandemic it's more from companies with proven business models and rather small startups. Good to see some real numbers actually. But of course the effect is there, job seekers and companies get more cautious. Still, better than hiding this data. Also I don't think there is a real reason to worry within tech

The economy "going down" is not necessarily pessimism.

It’s true, I depend on HN posts to tell me whether or not I should put the brakes on my spending. /s

Despite two quarters of negative GDP growth, the current justification for saying we are not currently in a recession is that the unemployment rate is so low.

The current stated goal of the Federal Reserve is to raise the unemployment rate from 3.7% to a target of 4.4%.

What you are remarking on as possibly a self-fulfilling prophecy is instead the result of official policy achieving its goal.

>Despite falling GDP, the current justification for saying we are not currently in a recession is that jobs and employment numbers are high.

Pretty sure a recession is two quarters of negative growth. Rationalization hamster wheels notwithstanding.

We have had 2 quarters of negative growth before without an official NBER recession (though not since the 50s).

Until recently, a recession has meant two quarters of negative growth.

The term is used to describe economic conditions in various countries.

The NBER is not part of the designation.

Indeed, it would be impossible for an economist to observe that Egypt, for instance, was in a recession as the NBER issues no opinions on the Egyptian economy.

No, conditioning the definition of a recession on the NBER was a silly political stunt by the current admin. Don’t go along with these redefinitions… it’s silly and illogical.

As someone with an MA in econ, most of what you've said here is false. While two quarters of negative growth is often used as an informal measure of recession, the NBER definition is the one that has been used in the US for quite some time by economists.

Historically, here in the US we haven't used the Egyptian definition of recession when talking about the US economy, so what you think about their definition is irrelevant.

That isn't to say that we're not currently in a recession, but economists don't know yet, and neither do you.

That has never been the definition of a recession. All recessions are declared by NBER and NBER has always used a large number of metrics in their calculations. You can see the official list of "peak months" and "trough months" here, and you'll note they don't line up cleanly with 2 quarters of negative growth:

https://www.nber.org/research/data/us-business-cycle-expansi...

How did the ancient Greeks and Romans have recessions without NBER's guidance?

The ancient Greeks did not define a recession as two quarters of negative growth— that has never been the definition of a recession, even if you go back several thousand years.

So how do we know they had a recession? If the definition its only a recession if NBER says so you would have to assert that they did not. Have historians have been disseminating Russian disinformation for centuries?

Before 1800, and especially before 1500, the monetary economy was so small, and the barter economy was so large, that these economies did not have recessions as we understand them today. A modern recession, as we've understood them for the last 200 years, can only exist in a society that has largely converted all economic activity to the monetary economy, and thereby made it vulnerable to the money cycle. If you're interested in the emergence and development of the monetary economy the best books ever written on the topic are Fernand Braudel's history:

https://www.amazon.com/Civilization-Capitalism-15th-18th-Cen...

https://www.amazon.com/Wheels-Commerce-Civilization-Capitali...

https://www.amazon.com/Perspective-World-Civilization-Capita...

I strongly recommend these books.

If you're interest is more about the classical Western period, I recommend:

https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Economy-Sather-Classical-Lect...

The formal reason is the unemployment rate. The actual reason is because of midterm elections. After November it will be agreed upon we are in a recession.

Official measures are lagging indicators, so a recession always exists before it exists.

If sites like HN were that influential we’d all be running Linux on the desktop and listening to our nomads.

Not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.

I find my zune to be a perfectly cromulent device

If data upsets you it may be worth thinking about why. It’s just saying that hiring appears to be cooling off and that’s showing up in other places too (layoffs/freezes at FAANG, the BLS job opening stats just this morning: https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/us-job-openings-post-bigg...).

This isn’t some insidious campaign to crash the economy by showing that the economy is finally cooling off. Getting inflation under control is good long term but it will be painful.

“The vibes are off” is the best way I’ve heard this explained: https://www.npr.org/2022/09/15/1123281909/vibecession-vibes-...

We are teetering on theocracy which doesn't bode well for employment.

I mean, it's not just anecdotal, or only looking for bad news. New job postings in general are down markedly: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/04/jolts-august-2022.html

People want ANOTHER round of layoffs because the high demand doesn’t help their candidates

yes, this has been my joke.

"maybe it won't be a recession. maybe it will be. what i can tell you for sure is that it will be the first of its kind in real-time, full surround, three dimensional, quintophonic social media stereo."

economics is the study of population behavior. remember that.

> self-fulfilling profecy

that's not really how it works though, and it should absolutely not be a concern (it's quite common to get a sort of tech-industry tunnel vision while discounting the bigger picture or regional focuses.)

I've always argued that downturns are a natural part of every business cycle and perhaps instead of trying to avoid them, we plan for their inevitable occurrence.

If HN can sink the economy it was going down either way

times like those are the greatest opportunities for new things.

Similar discussion a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31675201

This thread by myself contains a BigQuery to reproduce the data + a chart of Who is Hiring posts over time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31675750

Here's a new chart of up-to-date data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13yGlJzFpVzZ-WNHAOsdo...

Just wanted to say thank you for collating and sharing this data, I thought it was really helpful and interesting!

Wow, I'm surprised the first covid month had such a huge impact, and its even crazier that we're on track to beat it.

One reason is that crypto is down and the flurry of random crypto startups are absent right now. Compare the number of posts in December 2021 for reference, which was peak crypto of recent times.

Crypto itself, or at least the bubble, was an unintended byproduct of low interest rates and lax securities enforcement. The low interest environment is intended to spurn the monied rich into investing in productive businesses, but "innovators" instead invented crypto assets and lauded them as the second coming of Mansa Musa, siphoning nearly a trillion dollars out of the productive economy. Clever crypto "innovators" recognized the monied rich's need to feed their insatiable craving for growth without doing any real work. Now that the government itself is providing that outlet, there's no reason for crypto to continue to exist.

> Now that the government itself is providing that outlet

Inflation adjusted nothing the government is selling is earning other than I-bonds (individual yearly buy limit of $15K). With Trump's energy output restriction deal with Saudi and others expiring inflation may slow, but the situation of gas in Europe over the winter seems poised to keep it up (CPI doesn't include energy directly, but it feeds back in).

> Inflation adjusted nothing the government is selling is earning other than I-bonds (individual yearly buy limit of $15K).

Inflation-indexed long term US treasuries are now earning positive rates of interest. See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFII30 -- it's not necessarily a high rate (currently 1.74% after inflation with a 30-year term), but when you have millions or billions to invest, it's certainly not nothing.

> (CPI doesn't include energy directly, but it feeds back in).

CPI does directly include energy, including gas [1]. You may be thinking of "core CPI" which excludes energy and food prices.

[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm

You're right about CPI and core CPI, and I didn't realize TIPS went that positive recently. Since the inflation adjustment gains are taxed I still don't know that you could come out preserving wealth at current inflation rates, unless it is held in a completely tax free account like a Roth.

IIRC, individual I-bond purchases are are limited to $10k p.a. - not $15k

What is the government outlet here?

I believe that would be BONDS (or GILTS if you're in the UK)

> siphoning nearly a trillion dollars out of the productive economy

Not exactly correct. While the global crypto market cap is currently around a trillion dollars (and was higher in the recent past), this is vastly different than it being the case that a trillion dollars was invested in crypto (i.e., "siphoned out" of the rest of the economy).

In fact, according to one estimate, in 2021 global crypto investment was $30.2 billion [1]. (I don't quickly see estimates for 2022.) For comparison, US gross private domestic investment across all industries was $4.1 trillion in 2021 [2] and globally it was several times that. While $30 billion is nothing to sneeze at when considered on its own, crypto investment is a rounding error when compared with global investment.

[1] https://home.kpmg/xx/en/home/media/press-releases/2022/02/to... [2] See Table 1.1.5. Gross Domestic Product at https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?reqid=19&step=3&isuri...

Market cap also quantifies the value of the labor that has gone into developing the infrastructure that supports these networks. Had that labor been allocated differently, that trillion dollars of value might be seen in parts of the economy responsible for the production of goods that are now becoming expensive.

You're conflating causation and correlation. Crypto just happened to be the it thing when funding went dry. It could have just as easily happened during the dozens of other software funding trends. The cause is more macro than a crypto startup trend.

Presumably enough employers have stopped posting to be statistically significant. I know I did; finding one qualified candidate in a sea of 50 bootcamp grad applicants for an explicitly staff-level position just wasn’t worth the effort. Worse was when I was threatened with an ageism lawsuit because our recruiters didn’t want to move forward with a guy with 10+ <1 year job stints became immediately argumentative in the recruiter phone screen.

Totally agree - never received a good candidate from here so I stopped trying a while ago. Maybe once and a while I post. Hiring good people is always hard, it’s a full time job for a full time recruiter.

That sounds like an issue you would have with or without post on HN. How did you solve that and how did it affect your hiring numbers? It feels like HN would at least attract way more technical people than generic job boards.

As an engineer, I gave up trying to help source candidates. I’ll refer a friend occasionally, but otherwise I don’t do strangers any favors and just let the recruiters do their job.

I feel like people are trying to wish the economy into a recession / depression, but I really don't see it happening. I do see some belt tightening wrt SaaS expenditures. There's still a massive demand for labor.

While the housing market has fallen, the actual cost of buying a house is still rising. Rate increases have well outpaced the list price reductions.

So I think all this talk of a recession is just a bunch of reporters trying to jeer people into that state of mind for clicks.

It feels like _something_ is happening, but it's not quite the recession that people are fearing. The US is somehow at the lowest unemployment rates we've seen and people are saying it's all going to collapse which just feels off. If the US hits 5% unemployment that simultaneously worse off than where we are but still a solid economic position.

My pet theory is that everyone is just tired, so damned tired, and seeps into everything.

Tired of (or from) what?

With the major exception of the pandemic/remote work, the world is not markedly different than it was in 2013 or 2003. What makes it seems like 2023 is so different?

I read this kind of sentiment often and I wonder the same thing. I mean, I'm much more tired (physically and emotionally stressed) than I was in 2013 or 2003, but I'm also 10-20 years older with 10-20 years of accumulated baggage and responsibilities. I think some people might forget that fact.

> the world is not markedly different than it was in 2013 or 2003. What makes it seems like 2023 is so different?

Nothing seems to be very different for the last 20 years, which also means things aren't getting any better. That's tiring.

What "things" are you talking about, and most importantly, how is that "tiring" beyond just getting older?

Any time I hear someone talk about how everyone is tired now and they weren't before it smacks of "I'm the main character" syndrome in that they're going through the same thing every generation on Earth has gone through for millennia - getting older - but suddenly it's a crisis because it's them going through it.

Why exclude the pandemic/remote work?

But to exclude it for a bit, my personal, super anecdotal and biased view is that those years were very different.

2003 had low hope for a better future, but there was a lot of action in the fallout of 9/11. It felt like we were at least trying, even if it ended up being a horrible try.

2013 I felt hope for a better future, but there wasn't a lot of action to make that a reality.

2023 and there's zero hope for a better future and we're doing nothing about it.

We need at least hope or action.

It depends on what you think is important, but there is a lot more happening today in addressing our problems than back in 2013 or 2003, imo.

I think many can agree that climate change is one of the higher priority efforts, and in the last few years, we've seen some major progress.

In the US, renewables make up the vast majority of new generating capacity, by far and solar deployments are growing at a rapid pace. We were still deploying significant amounts of coal plants 10 years ago, nowadays, it's basically zero. [https://www.seia.org/solar-industry-research-data]. China has doubled its solar deployments in the last year.

Wind deployments are accelerating [https://www.iea.org/reports/wind-electricity]

EVs are gaining marketshare at a fast pace, many countries/states are banning ICE sales in the near future. [https://www.virta.global/en/global-electric-vehicle-market]

Cost of lithium batteries has fallen by 89% since 2010 [https://cleanpower.org/facts/clean-energy-storage/]

US passed the IRA which has the potential to really accelerate these changes.

Still not enough of course, but we are seeing significant progress compared to 2013.

I run a small business that sells supplies to restaurants and other small businesses. Everyone I deal with is busier than they've ever been with less help than they've ever had. Hardly anyone has been able to take a vacation for 3 years now. There's a multitude of things going on that are drastically different than 10 or 20 years ago. There's a schism being created in this world with the work from home crowd being one side, and the warehouse/foodservice crowd on the other side. The warehouse side has a huge demand, in part because of the pandemic, and also in part because of the work from home crowd not leaving their house as much. None of the restaurants can afford to pay what the warehouse jobs are paying. The number of people willing to work in the food industry is lower than I've ever seen it.

>There's a schism being created in this world with the work from home crowd being one side, and the warehouse/foodservice crowd on the other side.

Totally agree, and it's good to know that anyone besides myself sees it. For me personally, I'm educated and know I have the skills to be on that first side of the divide, but it makes me feel very nervous/sad, because I know a lot of the stuff going on at the lower-wage end of the scale is unsustainable, and it makes me very worried for the future of our society. In the sense of how modern people want to live their lives, people in the service industries are extremely undervalued, and everyone deserves a fair wage for fair work and the ability to live in a dignified way.

I complain about everyone expecting a tip on their POS terminals and prices constantly rising, but in the spirit of my above point, they probably deserve it. We need a return to sanity regarding the returns of being a business owner.

> I complain about everyone expecting a tip on their POS terminals and prices constantly rising, but in the spirit of my above point, they probably deserve it.

This is also a huge complaint of mine in specific situations. If I go to an NBA game or concert, buy a beer for $12, and the POS has a tip thing, I want to scream. I want to scream at the vending group to just pay the people more money. The profit margin on the beer is insane, give your workers some of the money rather than try to pass the buck on to the consumer you’re already gouging.

Sorry, but you gotta tip in those scenarios. You have correctly identified the problem, and you know it isn't the workers' fault. Still, they aren't getting paid enough. It shouldn't be our job to spread money around evenly, but here we are. You can afford the game, you can afford the beer, you can afford to tip them.

There's no reason to believe that the workers there aren't making $15 or $20/hr. Sure, they might be minimum wage, but there are fast food places by me advertising $25/hr for first shift workers and they can't find anyone. The stadiums in the nearest city are fully staffed, so it's unlikely they're getting minimum wage.

It's certainly likely, bordering on probable, that a lot of the people getting tips now that didn't get tips 4-5 years ago are making good money without tips and that's just extra.

For a specific example, I go to a local Subway every now and then, and they advertise hiring at $18/hr to start, more for part time, less desirable shifts, etc. Their POS lets you tip 18%, 20%, 25%, or "Skip" ($0) unless you do custom. I obviously don't know their revenue but they've been in business years while others in the same shopping center have come and gone, so they've got to be doing decent volume. There's no reason to think they're not getting several dollars and hour (e.g. several thousand dollars a year) in tips beyond their salary. It's not because they're underpaid, it's because people will tip if you make that the default.

Something that is very hard to measure WRT unemployment is the number of people that dropped out of the workforce during COVID. There's also poor reporting on underemployment. I'm not saying that to say the US is just going to drop into a recession or something, it's just unemployment numbers have always been very loose figures.

We could have low unemployment but high underemployment and end up with a similar softening of consumer demand just because people don't have the discretionary income to buy stuff. Underemployment combined with inflation is extra painful.

> Something that is very hard to measure WRT unemployment is the number of people that dropped out of the workforce during COVID.

The labor force participate rate would (theoretically) capture this:

https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...

Remember that people that are not employed are only considered "unemployed" in that metric if they have been "looking for a job".

If you stop looking for 4 weeks, you're not employed but not "unemployed" (in their numbers).

Depends on the which level of unemployment you cite. But the thing is, it doesn't really matter which level of unemployment you look at, since they all have the same trend, just at a different scale.

The BLS collect and categorizes this data in every conceivable way. You can see, for example, that the duration of unemployment is actually quite low compared to previous recessions: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/duration-of-...

> The US is somehow at the lowest unemployment rates we've seen and people are saying it's all going to collapse which just feels off.

When this point of unemployment is hit, it always acts as an inflection point before the trend reverses and unemployment goes up.

> "I feel like people are trying to wish the economy into a recession / depression, but I really don't see it happening."

Depending on your personal financial circumstances, it may be many months before you end up "seeing this with your own eyes". Inflation won't eat up your savings over night - but over a period of 5-10 years, combined with increasing energy prices, interest rates, costs of living and salary stagnation? A lot can change. It's a boiling frog situation...

I get the same feeling - the only thing to me that makes sense is that people with money are afraid that a full scale war might break out as a result of Russia and perhaps China or North Korea etc.

Otherwise when I look around it seems like the restaurants are busy, people are taking holidays (even those who wouldn't usually), and people as a whole seem better off than they've been in a while...

It kind of seems like the view of the economy is being manipulated, because here on the street everything looks hunky dory.

> and people as a whole seem better off than they've been in a while...

Some people. The lower classes are definitely struggling a lot more recently, especially given the rental market going bonkers.

This is how it happens though. Some people are easy to convince with data alone, some are not, and others are simply in denial. Watch financial markets before a crash - lots of volatility while these groups are placing bets on the direction of the economy. Eventually we cross a threshold where the market crashes and all those that were unconvinced change their tune. It doesn't happen slowly.

But officials are explicitly saying that the unemployment is too low and raising interest rates is one way to bring it up. The economy is overheated and needs to cool down. It's not wishful thinking or headlines grabbing topic, it is a stated fact that the economy is artificially induced into recession.

I'm European and I feel there is a certain segment of American libertarians who want a global/European systemic collapse because they feel it validates their views. American libertarians are overrepresented on HN.

House prices are pretty sticky, it takes a long time and a lot of downward pressure for housing prices to fall. No one wants to take a loss on their house.

>So I think all this talk of a recession is just a bunch of reporters trying to jeer people into that state of mind for clicks.

Economies don't roll-over in a month, sometimes it takes years. But this cycle has peaked. Inflation and rising interest rates will cause all kinds of issues, including the highest mortgage rates in 30 years.

Who is hiring vs. wants to be hired (top-level) post count disparity could be a fun one to track.

I actually check that sometimes. Anecdotally, I remember the ratio being ~4.5 in 2019, then ~3.5 during the pandemic. This month it's at 1.8

I don't know if it really means anything though.

It might at least control for changes in the hackernews popularity.

Here's the chart for those threads, which isn't too exciting: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kqUnALPvgpM6HiK5s-GP...

Although I'm not sure why 2019 ushered in much better performance on those threads.

Post-pandemic people wanted to change jobs

Has anyone actually gotten much success in either direction (hirer/candidate) from these posts?

I was hired at my current company because I responded to a who’s hiring post almost 2 years ago

I think I posted in one once or twice and had ~3 people reach out to me about roles. One ended up being promising, but I had to pull out for a family emergency that kept me from being able to participate.

I get a fair number of good resumes from these threads.

I got my current job through one of these threads

I posted in "who wants to be hired" a few times, and a few people reached out. About 50% seem to be somewhat targeted to the message. At least one lead to an offer (which I declined for other reasons, it was a fair and interesting offer though).

"Who is hiring" never worked out for me, as the geographic limitations are too strict or confusingly worded. Looking through 400 posts to figure out which are actually open to hire someone from europe is not as promising as looking through dedicated job portals.

I got hired for my current job based on a "who wants to be hired" thread. I've also been reached out to 2-3 times based on comments I've made (some recent, some a few weeks/months old) on HN asking me to interview for a position.

I posted as a candidate in one thread over the summer and got contacted by ~10 companies and did a handful of interviews — a couple were duds with non-technical founders casting a wide net but others were solid opportunities. I also applied to a few jobs from that same month's employers thread and got to the offer stage with one of those companies.

I had enough success to try again the next time I am looking for a new gig.

I got previous two jobs via Who's Hiring. And, indirectly, my current job due to networking from the previous.

I also recently interviewed for another position advertised via Who's Hiring. I didn't take the offer, but it was a very close decision.

My current position is directly attributable to a "who wants to be hired?" post where the founders reached out to me directly. I have gotten to final offer stage with at least four companies in the past two years, and had several dozen more interesting conversations about potential opportunities that have all come through the "who wants to be hired?" thread.

I post every month on the "who wants to be hired?" thread except for when the 1st of the month falls on a weekend or a national holiday in the US. Why? Because the number of people reading the thread, and the number of people posting on "who is hiring?" threads dips precipitously when the 1st of the month falls on the weekend or a national holiday in the US.

Most of the outreach I get from founders through "who wants to be hired?" is low-effort "we'll pay you in exposure!" or "well you can't live on what we're paying in any major meotropolitan area but think of the equity when we IPO!" but occasionally there is a diamond in the rough that reaches out. My current job was one of those diamonds.

The difference between entrepreneurs who "get it" when selling their company on the "who is hiring thread?" and those that don't is stark. And even more stark is the difference between entrepreneurs selling their company to prospective hires on the "who is hiring thread?" vs developers selling their skillset on the "who wants to be hired?" thread. It is the difference between selling features vs selling benefits writ large.

That's really neat to hear your experience, and I'm glad to see there are some successes! I wonder if the success rate is higher than similar job boards or linkedin-esqe spam outreach.

Also, can you expand a bit more on the "those who get it" vs "those who don't"? What are you looking for here? What do you mean selling features vs. benefits?

At a previous job, HN's "Who's Hiring" was by far our most successful job posting. Frankly it was the only successful recruiting method of those we tried (setting aside personal referrals).

I found out from an ad on here that a startup in a field I am interested in were based 2 minutes from my flat and were hiring, so I got in in touch and ended up working there for 5 years and had a lot of fun, made some great friends and it moved my career in a really interesting direction. I’d never have thought of applying to them otherwise so it worked out well for me!

Its a sample size of 1, but I found my previous job through a whoishiring post.

I was hired into a super fun startup from a Who's Hiring post back in 2012. Thanks for this service!

I've gotten a lot of work through the monthly freelancer thread.

I got hired for my current role after posting on "Who wants to be hired". Around ~10 companies reached out.

Yes! I was hired for my current role several years ago from a Who’s Hiring post.

A bit more specialized, but I don't get much inbound interest as a software developer for hardware projects.

Yes! At my current position from a post made in the Who's Hiring. Been here for over a year

I'd say that about 70% of our recent hires came from the monthly HN threads, and among first-interview invitees the % may well be even higher. Somehow the average quality of applicants via HN is way higher than via other platforms and I don't know why.

Sidenote: we're not a big company, we hire single-digit new people per year. I have no idea how to scale this success up, ie if we'd advertise way more aggressively elsewhere the % would likely go down.

One of the worst companies I've dealt with this time around was from an HN "who wants to be hired thread". Poor and conflicting communication, lack of respect for my time, that kind of thing. The company's been posting since late last year, and even made an appearance in the October 2022 thread (albeit this time it was posted by a different user).

I tend to comment on topics I wouldn't want to discuss in a professional setting and so I'm pretty unlikely to ever bother with a "who wants to be hired?" thread.

Generally if the company is posting for the same job on HN regularly they're a write-off.

I got my previous job thru a 'who's hiring' many years ago. I don't think I'd try doing it again, not least of which is because I've got less than 20 years left in the ol' career (knock wood) and I'd rather stay where I'm at than interview ever again.

I got my first tech internship (at a 5 person startup called "Pagerduty") thanks to one.

Posted a job here once. Got 9 applicants, none of those were hired.

Archive reasons: (4) Underqualified (4) Work Authorization (1) Unresponsive

Just passed two years into a job I got from a Who's Hiring thread. Emailed the given address and ended up in interviews a week or two later. It's worked out well so far.

I've been hired to more than one job through these posts over the past ~15 years; and I've also done hiring for my teams successfully through these threads.

Having said that, in the last ~2 years, we've had FAR less success with these threads. Didn't post in the last one cuz it just didn't feel worth it.

Wrote in Who wants to be hired recently. Got two emails from actual companies and one from a questionable recruiter with no concretes. One of those companies sent me a Triplebyte timed algo question without any real human contact whatsoever so I just didn't do it. Other one had a take home assignment with a fairly easy Leetcode wrapped in an API kind of task. Did that, never received any feedback besides 'thanks but no', no invite for actual technical interview. Had much better experience with companies I found through LinkedIn to be honest. Feels like people here feel elitist to a point where a decent engineer is nothing, without FAANG experience.

I wouldn't say full success as I didn't actually get a job, but I got deep into interviews that could have led to very good jobs. The progress vs effort ratio is by far the best of any channel.

My theory, YC software team has been building features like https://www.workatastartup.com/ and so YC companies are posting less on HN.

Or companies are cutting spending in anticipation of a recession.

This is the obvious answer

Or HN traffic is down. Or people don't hire into the holiday season, or tech is down. There are countless things that could drive that number. We can't tell from a few monthly counts.

No. It's the answer that fulfills your own confirmation bias. "Obvious" is never a word you should use when you can quantify the truth.

No, it's the obvious answer, so it's less interesting to speculate about than alternative, less obvious answers.

Perhaps _too_ obvious.

Most of the titans are in a hiring freeze or have choked non essential hiring.

I don't think those titans posted for jobs on here anyway.

Most of the Who's Hiring posts are non-YC companies

I've been seeing the YC software team disaggregate HN features to make it easier for founders to run their startups:

Ask HN is now sort of part of YC Startup School where founders can ask people in the community about their startup issues.

Show HN is now Launch YC: https://www.ycombinator.com/launches

Would be interesting to see this chart: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13yGlJzFpVzZ-WNHAOsdo...

With traffic stats for HN, so we could see if there was a change in traffic/participation, or something else.

My personal thought is that many startups have been advised by investors to trim the sails for less follow on capital for a while, and that results in more conservative hiring. What I'm seeing at the day job (I have a recruiting tech platform), is that non-tech companies have plenty of open tech jobs to go around - and still can't find enough people.

Mind sharing some cool facts regarding your experience from the platform?

What is currently in demand, what is desirable?

also consider the whole chain --

From the layoffs I've observed Recruiters were some of the top laid off roles.

Less recruiters means prioritization of efforts.

HN Who's hiring is probably a low priority platform. (Recruiter's boss doesn't know what it is, hard to instrument for tracking metrics)

If you really want to know how many jobs are out there it's better to index and crawl all the companies jobs page directly. Albeit much much harder to do than a single HN thread per month.

I would be curious to know if Who's Hiring is recruiters or other devs/founders. I always assumed other devs or founders.

Companies job pages are very vague estimates of actual offering, especially at startups were everyone is incentivized to post more than existing to look good.

That is a very good point that I had actually forgotten. Yeah tons of jobs are fake, sometimes to boost how you look, sometimes to fake out the competition (let them overhire and burn up their runway.

"HN Who's hiring is probably a low priority platform."

This has always surprised me. At several companies I've suggested to the hiring folks that they post on HN and I've rarely seen it happen. But IMHO, although you may not get a lot of candidates that way, I would imagine the signal/noise ratio is high, relative to the average recruiting channel. (Would be curious to see that (dis)confirmed.)

> (Recruiter's boss doesn't know what it is, hard to instrument for tracking metrics)

HN has a lot of very smart and talented people, but a lot more who think they are very smart and talented.

As someone on the other side, HN as a funnel isn't much better than a linked in job ad. Scanning through The Who Wants to be Hired thread might be better, but that's obviously more work.

The jobs market goes in cycles, sometimes there are less roles, sometimes there are more roles.

Don't fret about the state of the market - you can't do anything and it is irrelevant.

Focus on making sure your skills are up to date and you network and put yourself in the best position.

If there are a hundred less roles, it doesn't matter if you are in the top 10%, even the top 50% - just be better than average and you'll be fine.

Actually, what's going on is the job market is waiting to collapse until I've just about finished my thesis. As soon as I really need a job, we're doomed. The problem is, the universe needs to fill in the backstory, so my unexpected delays have messed up it's ability to build the narrative. On the bright side, my laggardly pace may have fended things off until after the midterms.

I'll let you all know when I've scheduled my defense so that you can start stockpiling gas, food, ammo, and whatever else.

As someone graduating in 2024, honestly feels the same way.

I do have to comment that while I see a lot of job postings online (incl. HN), the requirements are going up as crazy.

People wanting a Mobile Developer with knowledge both in iOS and Android, and it wouldn't hurt if you knew some crass platform solution also.

I see posting with wanting 8+ years in a particular framework or language...

Am I the only one who finds that insane? I know that before "the requirements" were more like "wants" and if you are a good candidate, the company will give you a chance, but I have had situations right now where the recruiter would just answer point blank that all of the requirements must be met...

How are people with under 2,3,4 years of experience supposed to find a better paying job?

God forbid if you are fresh from college...

Do you have data for the past 12 months rather than only October? That way, we can observe how gradual (or not) the curve was.

All data in CSV format would be ideal if someone has it to share via gist or such.

Here's a chart from the thread I linked above: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13yGlJzFpVzZ-WNHAOsdo...

EDIT: I generated a new sheet for the chart with up-to-date data and fixed a data issue noted below.

Does anyone have any idea _why_ there's a peak in Q1 2020?

Things that used to be done in person suddenly went online and everyone was in a rush to make that transition happen quickly and smoothly.

Covid opening up more companies to the idea of remote workers? Or forcing development to fill gaps of processes that used to happen offline?

So that appears to be a fun edge case with that quick SQL query!

The spike was in March which was the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States/shelter-in-place, which was a time of odd behavior and so a spike wouldn't be too weird.

It turns out that dang posted a special whoishiring soon after which was massively popular: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22665398

I thought I filtered out nonstandard threads in the query:

   WITH whoishiring_threads AS (
      SELECT id FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full`
      WHERE `by` = "whoishiring" 
      AND REGEXP_CONTAINS(title, "Ask HN: Who is hiring?")
    )

...but that filter is a regex, and in a regex the `?` is a modifier character and not a literal. So the query will combine the counts of both the top-level comments of that thread and the original one.

Data science is fun like that, and surprisingly not the first time I've made that particular query mistake.

This is part of why I prefer to use LIKE directly when the thing I'm doing isn't actually a regexp. Then again, it's equally easy to screw up the %, but I feel it's maybe more visible (due to the less common characters). [My primary reason is clarity for the reader, so they don't have to attempt to parse the potential regexp].

More pernicious than ? is . though. Not that it matters in your case, but a lot of matches really can be "oops, a one character substitution totally matches, too".

You have more experience in this area, but REGEXP_CONTAINS() seems faster than LIKE for bigger datasets IMO.

Although in my work I tend to use REGEXP_CONTAINS() as an efficient multifilter for different inputs, which speeds things up too.

Hmm. I'm totally going to do some benchmarking tomorrow...

I can reflect that we saw this happening in real life hiring. Remote hiring competition got FIERCE from the beginning of the pandemic and really through most of 2021. It has since settled out quite a bit.

There was a combination of large companies needing programmers to enable remote work or process changes due to the pandemic, stimulus funds causing a lot of VC funding to hit startups, hiring binges at FAANG companies, and everyone suddenly being remote-friendly.

Is there seasonality? Like hiring slows down into the end of the year, is my guess. In which case, can you get 10-15 years of HN posts? Then you would need to adjust by user base as well..

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ICNSA << in fact, Jobless Claims are typically seasonally adjusted. Non-seasonal adjustment indicates claims spike around start/end of the year. The idea being, all else equal, if same amount of people get hired/fired every month, but supply of jobs dips, then claims go up...

Conclusion: not enough data points.

It definitely continues through October, though; it usually drops off in December.

i have the impression there are jobs, but they are not getting filled because companies don’t want to pay proper compensation even though there is inflation and there is less supply now than a few years ago. they also still think that people are coming back into an office which is probably never going to happen again except in positions where you really need to because of security or confidentiality or physical access to infrastructure. HR people tend to be delusional and out of touch with reality. we’ll see what happens.

The last quarter of the year is not really a huge time for hiring.. a lot of companies are finishing up their budgets and waiting for new ones to hit to post jobs in the new year..

Its down >50% year over year (which should be seasonally adjusted):

October 2021 [1]: 853 posts

October 2022 [2]: 415 posts

Not an exact comparison, as some posts will continue to trickle in to Oct 2022, but its still a sharp decline.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28719320

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33068421

Can we get a "Who is firing?" post going?

https://layoffs.fyi/

I like https://www.trueup.io/layoffs a bit more because of the stacked chart. I was [pleasantly] surprised that September layoffs were less than half of the ones in the previous month.

nice! that's clever. thanks for sharing

I genuinely don’t understand what the purpose of such a thread would be.

* Weird sense of relief? (“At least I wasn’t laid off!”)

* Gloating? (“Ha! I knew that wildly successful company wasn’t so great!”)

* Determine if a particular company is shrinking headcount? (Seems unreliable at best.)

Something else?

I imagine it would serve a similar purpose to fucked company[1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company

Good signal not to apply. I won't join a firm that has recently had layoffs for obvious reasons.

You must be new here. Just kidding, just kidding :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31585304 (2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22887346 (2020)

We'd then also need a "Who wants to be fired?" post.

But shouldn't you wait for the entire month of October before counting that number? Presumably "We're hiring" posts could be added through October 31.

It's less days. Companies also try regular submissions and I sent some towards the whoishiring threads only to see that commenting is no longer possible. Telling the companies they have to wait 10 days for the next thread to open is a bit frustrating.

Didn't Oct 1 fall on a Saturday? Where web traffic to hacker news is typically much lower.

thread was yesterday

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33068421

That might have had a big impact. I used to always look for it on the 1st of the month, many posters might have failed to find it and just moved on.

Looking at September's Who is Hiring [0] it does look like there are quite a few posts many days into the month. I don't think we can draw many conclusions on this data until the end of the month to be honest.

Saying that last month had 536 posts, and that that was a low since June of 2020 seems much more interesting IMO.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32677265

No one knows what the economic forecast looks like these days, and anyone that thinks they do is fooling themselves. Whats happening in the EU/GB is very real, and uncoordinated inflationary control measures are amplifying issues.

Around Q2/Q3 of 2023 we should have most supply chains stabilized again, and a better estimate of actual market demand.

Hang on, it is going to be one volatile winter... ;)

These are posted every month. If you want to make a point then graph all of them rather than pick out three random data points.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13yGlJzFpVzZ-WNHAOsdo...

For a data centric view on the larger economy and an assessment of leading indicators I highly recommend this blog:

https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2022/09/predicting-next-r...

I’ve blown a delightful hour on this back catalogue. Any other recommendations?

Makes me realize how much I miss the glory days of rss.

Now figure out how many "who is hiring?" threads have been posted on Saturday, Sunday or a national holiday in the US and compares those numbers against any others.

Months when the 1st falls on a Saturday or Sunday.

  May & October 2016
  January, April, July & October 2017
  April, July, September & December 2018
  June, September, December 2019
  February, March, August & November 2020
  May & August 2021
  January, May, October 2022

Whilst I think your numbers are reasonably accurate, and there is "other things going on" to push those numbers down, I don't think they paint the full picture. There is a definite slow-down towards the end of each year.

This months post was made on Oct 3rd

On past who is hiring threads I seen posts throughout the month, but in September it seems it only lasted about the first week before new posts stopped.

Perhaps the posts were restricted to a certain time frame, or coincidence?

I've thought about tapping into the HN BigQuery dataset (or perhaps the HN API, whichever is more appropriate) to analyze the results of the Who's Hiring posts and their companion Who Wants to be Hired posts. I think aggregation of this data will paint an interesting picture for job-seekers and other technology professionals as to what's hot, what's not, what employers are looking for (and not), as well as other trends.

Does anyone know if such a resource already exists? Don't want to duplicate effort.

I think this used to exist for stack overflow jobs, probably not up to date though

Another worrying sign is "remote US only".

Why is that a worrying sign?

Downward pressure on wages due to competition with non-coastal wage earners.

Seemingly, non-coastal wage earners are people and still count, and that isn't worrying to them.

Because if you live elsewhere the positions are not available?

remote just means that you can work from home. you still need to be geographically close to the office.

That is the point, before most remote was global now they are local.

The whole point with remote is the global part. That with the internet anyone can work with anything anywhere.

it doesn’t matter you can work anywhere. companies understand remote as “within 100 miles”.

do you really think you are going to be paid CA salaries while being in thailand? not likely to happen.

I don't know what's happening but I'm getting way more unsolicited recruiting requests than I have in a very long time (Sr+swe), so either they're more desperate in bringing in seasoned employees to replace the often lighter pulling entries, or something.

A better discussion could be about whether these posts actually produce meaningful leads for anyone.

We've had a good run in tech, but I don't think it's necessarily over. While the days of social media and advertising might be limited, there's still a wide world of technological advances that I think can make good businesses.

I want to share that there are at least two jobs I've seen on "Who is hiring?" for almost 9 months. I applied to one of them and never heard back. Can only assume this is an effect of some form of "hiring freeze".

Any analysis such as this should account for seasonality and/or some sort of trending.

Not saying the results would different, but just comparing arbitrary dates for this sort of data is not going to give you data to derive any meaningful conclusions.

We are hiring and posted in the thread but the post looks like it was shadowban'd. Maybe the filters are just stronger these days? No shortage of demand for devs and growth, regardless of current market conditions..

Well, third quarter in the row — now it is finally a recession, or what?

Nah, that’s how it was defined historically, it has been changed to be defined in another way in order to influence certain demographics.

I heard this argument and thought the same, but looking into it there is no standard definition for a recession. Two quarters is a nice layman version people share, but it does involve other factors. This isn't something that's changed recently, economic textbooks from the early 2000s say this too. Just something some people heard and ran with :)

When people hear these anecdotes, check yourself! In an era of fake news and bubbles you have to be accountable to yourself by researching if common sayings are really true before sharing them.

https://www.nber.org/research/business-cycle-dating

I think GDP growth will be positive in Q3 when it’s announced. Current estimate is like 2.4%

Minor but I wish it got posted only on business days when it falls on a weekend. I tend to wait until the following Monday but then we usually lost in all the other comments.

> This account automatically submits a 'Who is Hiring?' post at 11 AM Eastern time on the first weekday of every month.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring

> A regular "Who Is Hiring?" thread appears on the first weekday of each month

From the FAQ

I'm hiring but I'm not sure if I'd post on whoishiring. I find hiring by recruiting specific people I know to be awesome to be much less pain than inbound.

So you're saying that the economy was worse in 2016 than it is now? That is the only possible direct conclusion I can read from your research.

You could both be making more money and have more money in the bank, but if you're worried you might be laid off soon you might not spend as much as you did last year.

I didn't post this time. But I've hired lots and I'm ahead on my hiring plans.

A lack of posts can't be interpreted as a lack of hiring.

It may not be a perfect indicator, but here absolutely is some correlation.

Well it's October 4th. Isn't there the whole month for people to post? We should at least wait until the end of the month..

Do we know what is happening with HN engagement overall? I assume it's monotonically increasing, but, maybe not?

This is actually quite scary, we know that the economy is going down. We're just not sure when will it recover

>we know that the economy is going down

No, we don't know that. If you do, you'll make quite the killing on the stock market.

It's Q4, lots of companies will open up new roles when new budgets get approved in a few months.

Day of the week matters. I didn’t post my job postings because I didn’t look at hacker news on Saturday.

The who is hiring post is always done on the first business day of the month. In this case it was Monday, not Saturday.

That might be another factor - people set their reminders for the 1st.

This was the most abundant (to my perception, as I have no numbers) about climate-related work.

Aren't budgets being made around last/first months, so people wait for it?

Are you a time traveler? My calendar says it's 2022-10-04, still 27 days left.

hiring freeze =)

inb4 rip economy

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