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Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

I’d be curious what the numbers look like in the next quarter, also I recall that the US has some absurd definition of unemployed that conveniently undercounts the unemployed.

That said I think the real story now is that the previous recessions haven’t really impacted the big tech companies, but this time it is so we’re seeing the first mass layoffs that this generation of developers has likely ever encountered. Couple that with the “tech” companies that are essentially just advertising companies that write software (obviously FB and G, but many of the startups aren’t too different) discovering that attention based advertising isn’t as stable a revenue stream as was thought, and you get a _lot_ more “safe” jobs disappearing.

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The percentage you see flying around doesn’t include people who aren’t actively looking for jobs u-3.if you include them it goes to 4.4 go to bls.gov and find alternative measures of labor underutilization. Its not undercounting just different levels/definitions of unemployment qualifications

Right, but there's all sorts of issues in how that is counted. For example if a person is stuck in a town where there are no jobs (say a large employer going out of business), that person isn't looking for a job because there are none, but then they also no longer count as unemployed. A person who just got laid off and is having a break on their termination benefits is also not "unemployed".

But there's also just simple lag on the unemployment numbers as companies like Facebook, etc have only just started large scale layoffs.

As a side note, I am curious how much the less fragile companies are going to be using current events to get rid of "expensive" or "unproductive" employees. Previously companies got around legal reporting requirements by simply laying off people in groups of < N people where N is a legal "laying off N people in X days must be reported" - do "current macroeconomic" effects provide a different path? I write code, not legal docs so know nothing of such things and am kind of curious how it goes

The "the government is lying about unemployment" narrative is foolish. The number presented in most media headlines is just one number that the government publishes. Right alongside U-3 they publish numbers using definitions that include more people. It'd be a pretty stupid conspiracy to lie and publish the "true" numbers right next to your lie.

Both U-3 and U-6 are near historical lows. Even if you don't believe that U-3 is meaningful, you can compare the U-6 numbers now against other times in history and see that unemployment is indeed low right now.

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