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Comment by buppermint | Hacker News Reader

Worth seeing the whole chart in perspective:

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

Worth also noting that this chart has the bottom of the Y-axis cut off, exaggerating differences and making visual intuition basically useless.

The art of putting wavy lines across an axis to denote a range skip has atrophied, probably because few charting software packages support it ?

Broken axes aren't the solution. Starting from 0 is but nobody making graphs seems to understand or, in the case of journalists, they're trying to mislead their readers. I suppose readers enjoy being awed by dramatically changing graphs too.

It would also be nice to include a shaded area for the first standard deviation over a relevant period of time to get an idea of how far outside normal it is.

In my unhinged pipedreams, we’d have some sort of standard for conveying the data directly so users could use browser settings to decide how to display the data. There like a dozen people in the world that would use it, but they’d really really enjoy it I bet.

It's usually intentional so they're not going to show more information to reveal that their narrative is weak or wrong. It's up to the reader to think critically because journalists are constantly trying to fool them with true facts presented in a misleading way.

Readers are guilty too - they like to see wiggly lines wiggle. Nobody wants to see a graph that's just a horizontal line or shaded band. We want to peer harder at it to tease out any sort of signal that can tell our emotional brains "good" or "bad".

The format is editable. The line chart seems always to be scaled so the minima is at the bottom, but you can get the zero point by changing it to bars.

The options do seem a bit idiosyncratic, but I guess they are useful for the kind of data the site users usually look at.

"Minimum". That's the singular. "Minima" is plural.

Similar with "criterion" or "phenomenon".

Are you assuming a unique minimum?

Yes, cause grammar. Parent wrote "the minima is". Not matter one or multiple minima, that expression has a problem.

do do, de do do

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTXyXuqfBLA)

But it essentially shows the same thing, the covid overhiring boom and then layoff cycle post-covid is over. And jobs are rising again.

What’s absolutely mind blowing to me though…the idea AI isn’t causing software engineering jobs to collapse…which you would think would make people here happy…is something that makes software engineers upset??

It’s almost as if everyone here has married their identity to the idea they are victims of AI progress and any suggestion otherwise is ego destruction.

”What??? You mean the job market is expanding and the reason I can’t find a job is…me? That can’t possibly be true I’m a genius, the data is clearly wrong!”

This graph was scaled to 2020=100 so not as bad as excluding 0 for raw numbers.

Wow. Huge crash between 2022 and 2023, from 230 to down around 80. Why? That's the real question. What happened? It's post-COVID.

Then stuck in the 60-80 range since 2023. The sample period chosen by Citadel is wildly deceptive.

This is an important question and these crap stats are not helping.

It’s not a crash, but a huuuge peak around ‘22.

Well, yes, but we're still sitting at ~80% of 2020 levels. Perhaps just hangover from 2022, perhaps the end of ZIRP, but it's still depressed relative to 2020.

There was a hiring bubble in 2022 just before the Fed raised interest rates. I'm not understanding what the mystery is.

The link you're responding to has the option to zoom out more to 2020. If you scroll down to view the other related graphs, you'll find that they also index 2020 as a starting point because they're all tracking this hiring bubble.

There was a change in US tax law that revoked the ability of software companies to classify engineer salaries as an R&D expense, which massively increased the tax liability for many software companies.

This is under-recognized by many folks. That full impact of the that aspect of the 2017 TCJA was hard to predict when it was so far in the future, and when it hit, we were dealing with the latter economic impact of covid in addition to these deduction changes.

This was reverted for us employees in OBBB and companies can refile taxes for what they couldn't use as an expense in the intervening time. I think the impact of this is generally overstated

Interesting chart that confirms hiring dynamics for SE have not much to do with AI despite all the PR, as in 2023 models and agents capabilities were quite limited, and now that capabilities increase hiring is picking up. I hope more journalists will start to challenge that narrative.

Click "max" to see its the corona peaks that's the outlier.

Wow, that says a lot with data. Thank you.

"Whole chart"

Graph starts with a black swan event

Unfortunately that's when they started recording the data

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