US economy beats expectations to add 178,000 jobs in March | Hacker News Reader

US economy beats expectations to add 178,000 jobs in March

ft.com

9 pointsalephnerd11 comments

Interestingly, an additonal 15,000 manufacturing jobs; 26,000 construction jobs; and 91,000 healthcare and education jobs.

The only industries that saw severe layoffs were Financial Services and Information/Software.

There was a healthcare strike that ended this month which counts as added jobs iirc

Good callout. I didn't take that into account.

Healthcare will carry the economy, 4M Boomers retire every year and these jobs cannot be offshored like finance and tech.

Also manufacturing. If you know how to code and real engineering skills like circuits, CAD, mechanical design, etc you will land a decent manufacturing role.

That said, why hire a SWE when most MechE programs have been requiring CS courses as well for over a decade now.

Unlikely (imho).

The U.S. is losing manufacturing jobs, analysis finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45189816 - September 2025 (7 comments)

Promises of a US manufacturing Renaissance leave experts scratching their heads - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44941126 - August 2025 (5 comments)

Why aren't Americans filling the manufacturing jobs we have? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43987654 - May 2025 (1 comment)

Manufacturing jobs are never coming back - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43777941 - April 2025 (0 comments)

The US service economy is ~83% of GDP. Manufacturing only makes up 8% of jobs in the US.

Citations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46529223

Your citations rely on JOLTS reporting on the manufacturing sector. The jolts report also states for the occupation of Mechanical Engineering a nearly 10% growth rate for the next decade. This is 3 times the average.

Manufacturing sector includes a significant minority of all mechanical engineers, but more to the point the sector includes nearly all jobs involved in manufacturing durable and nondurable goods. This includes machinists and technicians and assembly workers.

https://archive.today/s7zt6

Why isn’t this on the front page like the opposite article would be :’)

We’ll see what it revises down to.

I found it on the front page...

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