Likewise "outsourcing" could result in a net increase of WFH given that contracting companies already support it.
Not certain what you mean by vanished and where the 2.4M number came from. CDC says 1,136,473 died in the pandemic [0], although a significant portion were not likely members of the labor force. As it stands the number labor force members caught up to pre-pandemic numbers in August of 2022. [1]
Feb 2020 164M
Apr 2020 156M
Aug 2022 164M
Jul 2023 167M
The "Civilian Labor Force Level" isn't a relevant statistic because of its definition:
> Civilian Labor Force is the sum of civilian employment and civilian unemployment. These individuals are civilians (not members of the Armed Services) who are age 16 years or older, and are not in institutions such as prisons, mental hospitals, or nursing homes.
This, by definition, ignores people who exited the workforce. Here is the two charts you want to compare instead:
- 2019: https://www.bls.gov/cps/aa2019/cpsaat03.htm
- 2023 https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat03.htm
Specifically the "Not in labor force" column. That's a 4M loss. Out of those it is disproportionately women and older people.
Ok, here is the same data from fred (sourced from BLS). Both the labor force and "not in labor force" increased by ~3M from pandemic to now. Given overall population growth of 8M, it looks like normal numeric growth of any statistical cluster within a growing population.
Date. Labor Nonlabor Pop
Feb 2020 164M 95M 259M
Apr 2020 156M 104M 259M
Aug 2022 164M 99M 264M
Jul 2023 167M 98M 267M
Net. 3M 3M 8M
Nonlabor: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU05000000
Population: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CNP16OV
> Out of those it is disproportionately women and older people.
Is the loss disproportionately among women? In terms of people not in the labor force, I don't see strong evidence for that. Stats for both women and men not in the labor force have returned to pre-pandemic levels.
Is job loss disproportionately among older people? Given that numbers of people in the labor force are now above pre-pandemic levels, we would have to posit a counterfactual world without a pandemic. I'm not going to do a whole regression with it's own assumptions of biz cycle etc. Eyeballing the chart, the current level could be in the range of alternative futures starting from April 2020. Its hard to say though with the boomers retiring out how many retired early or decided to not retire late.
All, Men, Women Not in Labor Force: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?id=LNU05000000,LNU0500000...,
There are a large number of people, namely on HN, that have never known anything other than $120K+ compensation, constant stream of offers for changing jobs, all while working from their home and doing about 4 hours of real work a day.
I don't think a recession is necessarily coming, but a reversion to the mean is going to leave these people obliterated.
The thing is, this has always been the case for the white collar world. Lawyers, executives, etc. The real change is that ICs that aren’t playing politics are able to live that life now. The reversion to the mean isn’t happening until those people stop producing massive economic value.
Personally, I will work in a warehouse before I go back to the office. Do twenty hours a week temp work while I work on setting up a side business. It’s never been easier to start your own business, and we don’t need big companies to make a living anymore. The real reversion to the mean is cutting out the rent-seeking middle men that extract value from our economic output while contributing little themselves.
No idea if I should be rolling on the floor laughing or extremely saddened reading that. I might advice taking a reality check before spurring this kind of non sense in public if you want to avoid sounding both entitled and utterly disconnected.
Maybe I'm uniquely on a path to burnout, but I put in at least 6 hours of what I would call hard knowledge work per day as a SWE. Throw on 1-3 hours of collaboration and an hour of truly useless meetings and I'm at a 45+ hr week.
Factor in commute time, via bike so counts towards exercise minutes, and I'm working 50 hr weeks + 24/7 15 minute SLA on-call once every other month.
It's unfathomable to me that this isn't the average experience, and that anyone would get paid more than $120k doing any less.
One of the consequences of working from home is I tend to work 8-12 hours a day. Sometimes it's hard to mentally shut off work because it's in the same place I live. I don't know how anyone works 4 hours a day, unless they simply don't have a lot to do.
Not if they 'made hay while the sun shines' and are now financially independent
IMHO, for jobs that can be done either in an office or remotely the crux is the company's management team: Some people want to be in office to keep an eye on staff and maintain status, some don't care as long as the work is done.
This is only true for people who don't have essential skills at a high level. For senior people, this won't be a problem. I cleaned up during the last two recessions, partly due to the prevalence of M&A activity during recessions, and was able to buy property cheap at auction post 2008 due to high foreclosure rates.
If you're just starting your career in a recession you're pretty screwed, if you're mid-career with a specialized skillset that is essential to core business function, you'll be completely fine.
You can't be serious.
> During a recession, it is either social assistance or one takes the job that is available.
It's only this way because we allow it to be. Huge productivity gains over the last decades have been captured by the .1%. There's nothing ambiguous or mysterious about it.
I have to agree with the parent post here. What do you think the median age of HN commenters is? I'd say it's probably mid-late 20s, in which case most people graduated after the great recession was largely over and only experienced the COVID blip that wasn't a cyclical recession in the normal sense and mostly helped tech workers instead of harming them.
Based on that.
And this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2322031
Which has more links to older surveys. Thus 40.
Ok, im serious. It's silly to quote someone when you don't have a rebuttal.
2008 was 15 years ago, and didn't hit tech as hard as other industries. The last serious one was early 2000s. A significant number of people "in it for the money" or with non-traditional credentials simply had to leave the field.
Anyone that worked through the dot-com bust is late-forties, at minimum. But they'd have to be mid-50s or older to really feel the effects and know what changed. And people in their mid-50s+ are a strong minority in tech.
If the median tech worker is 32, they would have graduated college after the GFC was over (2014ish).
Seems like it is that employees should never ask for better working conditions because, it may be taken back when conditions allow employers to be more abusive? Is that really a point worth making?