Is there some kind of tech crash happening right now?

Don't forget the http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=Ninja&l= http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=Guru&l=

Or this: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=rock+star%2C+engineer%2C+p...

Compared to this: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=rock+star%2C+engineer%2C+p...

Cute, but that graph ranges from 0 to 0.04 percent -- it would be just a blip on the other graph, which ranges from 0 to 10 percent.

Long past the salad days of the code monkey http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=code+monkey&l=

I think its an interesting way to drive traffic to the site. A variation on the "does this house from your neighborhood look like its worth a million bucks?" kinds of things I've seen Realtors do.

Any serious analysis of the health of the STEM job market would have to be a bit more rigorous than a text match search.

I think people are looking for candidates in alternative places, via Github, SE careers 2.0, coderwall, twitter, IRC, linkedin (direct connections), meetups, hacker news, and less via major job listing sites that indeed crawls. But it's a good question. Anyone feeling all of a sudden that it's easier to fill an engineer's position?

EDIT: the absolute graph is described as "percentage of matching job postings" so it's absolute (total number of jobs), but still "relative" to "other" job titles. so theoretically, one explanation could be that the economy was recovering faster on the tech industry, but now other sectors are catching up... (just a thought, not sure I'm even convinced, but still worth checking).

EDIT2: Seems that a clearly defined crash is not what most recruiters think about for 2013: http://media.dice.com/report/december-2012-special-edition-h...

This seems like a reasonable explanation, given that "manager", "plumber", and "electrician" all show similar drop-offs. I wonder what is increasing enough to have such a visible effect, though.

You can't see them on the same graph since they're magnitudes are so different, so this isn't easy to see/I may be imagining things.

In relative percentage AND in the job offers that indeed.com have. Maybe job's offers for dev is done by another way than indeed.com. Maybe, as you suggest, there is a massive look for gardeners jobs. Maybe, the dev's keywords are more specific (It seems not: other keywords like "javascript" or "ios" show the same graph). Maybe there is effectively less demands than before.

In fact there's a corresponding uptick in "health" jobs: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=software%2C+health&l=

Holy cow, I shoulda sold those months while they were still fresh!

Damn, I had high hopes for 2012.

And 2010 is so last millennium: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=2010&l=

No. Even as a percentage of jobs it's not very useful. I.e, do you really believe that engineering/programming jobs peaked in late 2008 / early 2009?

That could also just mean that more people are going freelance, which if true could also explain the down trend in job postings on indeed if more employers are working with freelancers instead of hiring.

I'm fairly certain that your subjective opinion of things you've seen on twitter doesn't count as "data".

Those all show the same downturn in the last few weeks, though.

I see a downturn when looking at a single term.

Second one was Obama's first election. Jobs having "terrorist" in the name are not jobs for blowing up buildings, they're jobs beating the drum for Republicans. Then in 2010 the Republicans failed to take the Senate and in so doing realized that terrorism rhetoric wasn't having the same effect as it did a decade ago, so they started focusing on other things.

So their figures concur, indicating a marked slow in computer engineering last year.

I know personally 2012 was a very bad year for I.T. here in Australia. But it has seem to be picking up a little since the start of 2013.

Right. It could actually show a downturn in the market for job posting sites like monster. When I worked for Simply Hired, I thought it was really odd that I found the job through Craigslist, but the White House was calling us for hard numbers indicating demand for skills in the job market.

There's a secretary crash too! http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=secretary&l=

But seriously, this is relative to other job postings, so you can't say it is necessarily a crash, it could just be that the diversity of job types is increasing, or other areas of the job market are growing faster than these particular ones.

You may be on to something. Of the companies in your query, only Microsoft has results on the same scale as the 'engineer' query (6-8% of jobs posting). And, Microsoft has a downturn that is visually similar as the 'engineering' query. So, it could be that another big player or major deal recently landed and increased the job mix. Or, it could be an effect of Microsoft's recent recruiter layoff (I only know about this because a friend was affected -- no idea how widespread, etc.).

I don't know, but your data has a reasonable narrative.

From the page: "This job trends graph shows the percentage of jobs we find that contain your search terms."

Sounds like they're crawling sites like Monster.com and counting keywords.

years...not days

I think those numbers are years.... :)

I think it's years. Notice the '08 and '09 etc.

Here's an interesting "up" keyword: "part time" http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=part+time&l=

That's not a good thing.