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...

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.

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.

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