Hacker News Reader

Comment by mortenjorck | Hacker News Reader

Is there an org that tracks tech employment more closely than the BLS? I still don’t know what to make of the gulf between my observed experience and the larger job market.

Anecdotally, more people I know have been laid off in the past year than I’ve ever seen before. I’ve been laid off twice in under 18 months, and am currently going on three months without a job.

And with the caveat that they are both echo chambers, the consistent sentiment I’ve seen here and on LinkedIn is that this is the worst tech job market since the Great Recession. Is tech really that uniquely sensitive to interest rates while the rest of the economy doesn’t care?

View on HN

BLS itself tracks indicators down to far smaller granularity than "the entire labor force." Here are all monthly releases for employment: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.toc.htm

There isn't anything that drills down to sector-level, but the employment situation by occupation is probably the closest: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t13.htm

It doesn't get as far down as software or computing-related occupations, but these would fall under the broader "professional and related occupations." This seemingly encompasses most white collar work and it has the third-lowest unemployment rate, behind only maintenance and repair operations and management and finance.

Obviously, a lot of what you feel is happening will be colored by the particular people you know. It's probably wrong to even think of that as "tech employment." My wife and I both work for software companies. I don't personally know anyone who has been laid off in the past year. But I live in Texas and we both work in defense software. San Francisco adjacent web tech is not the entirety of "tech."

You're pretty lucky to be unaffected. I'm not in defense, but just off the top of my head Lockheed is doing layoffs in CT due to the loss of FARA. Raytheon is continuing their layoff death spiral and shutting down some stuff in Texas. Boeing is hemorrhaging people and money for obvious reasons.

That's just the three largest contractors.

My industry was last analyzed by bls.gov in 2023. It seems that tech was last analyzed in 2018.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-7/high-tech-industries-a...

Perhaps they will analyze the tech employment soon?

Here is a projection search. Ymmv. https://data.bls.gov/projections/nationalMatrixHome?ioType=o

> Is tech really that uniquely sensitive to interest rates while the rest of the economy doesn’t care?

This is likely due to IRS Section 174 which changed how tech salaries can be expensed.

I have yet to see any source that proves 174 is the sole or major reason for the downturn. If you have something that suggests otherwise that, please do share.

As far as I was able to surmise, after becoming interested in the topic last year, it was a combination of factors: interest rates, 174, over hiring during 2020-2022, over estimating future demand for digital goods/services during the covid, lack of cheap money for funding unprofitable businesses, AI hype, and probably other factors.

The most logical answer is multiple events/factors all within a short span of time, rather than one single thing being the sole reason for the downturn.

The changes to the market are not just in the US though. Admittedly the US has ripple affects worldwide, but if you take the UK for example, the contracting market is basically non-existant now.

TrueUp is best for HN-type positions imo: https://www.trueup.io/job-trend

It's not quite the same, but the Federal Reserve's history of software developer job postings provides some insight: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

Reply on news.ycombinator.com