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Lowest “Who is hiring?” Post Count in 30 Months

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Re: Lowest “Who is hiring?” Post Count in 30 Months

#131

Post by lotsofpulp »

giantrobot wrote: post #107
kiernanmcgowan wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like _something_ is happening, but it's not quite the recession that people are fearing. The US is somehow at the lowest unemployment rates we've seen and people are saying it's all going to collapse which just feels off. If the US hits 5% unemployment that simultaneously worse off than where we are but still a solid economic position. My pet theory is that everyone is just tired, so damned tired, and seeps…

Something that is very hard to measure WRT unemployment is the number of people that dropped out of the workforce during COVID. There's also poor reporting on underemployment. I'm not saying that to say the US is just going to drop into a recession or something, it's just unemployment numbers have always been very loose figures. We could have low unemployment but high underemployment and end up with a similar softeni…

> Something that is very hard to measure WRT unemployment is the number of people that dropped out of the workforce during COVID.

The labor force participate rate would (theoretically) capture this:

https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...

Re: Lowest “Who is hiring?” Post Count in 30 Months

#132

Post by slg »

xapata wrote: post #96
slg wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is still wild to me that this is the approach we are taking, things are getting too expensive so let's shrink the economy. That can't be the best solution. We are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Not shrink. Slow the growth of. Decelerate is different from stop. The real problem isn't any particular position, velocity, nor even acceleration. Those can all be planned for. It's the 4th time-derivative, jerk, that messes us up.

That is a semantic debate on whether we cross an axis on a graph and we won't know whether that will happen until after the fact.

We are intervening to make the economy smaller than if we didn't intervene. I think that qualifies as "shrinking" even if the growth is what is shrinking and not the overall economy.

Re: Lowest “Who is hiring?” Post Count in 30 Months

#134

Post by slg »

pbz wrote: post #101
slg wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is still wild to me that this is the approach we are taking, things are getting too expensive so let's shrink the economy. That can't be the best solution. We are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

It's the only way we know of to stop greed/fomo running rampant. Folks need to be put in a time-out to cool off and force them to reprioritize. We like to think of the market as this calculated and rational entity. It's far from that, in fact it's closer to the opposite of that. The other option is to do price control, but that won't fly in capitalism.

There are other levers that can be pulled. Taxes are one example that could be much more targeted at the specific sources of the "greed/fomo running rampant". We instead chose to take it out on everyone.

Re: Lowest “Who is hiring?” Post Count in 30 Months

#136

Post by interpenetrate »

cercatrova wrote: post #99
interpenetrate wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Within a single firm, particularly large ones, surpluses and deficits can be communicated absolutely and crises can be practically eliminated. (It would be unthinkable for Amazon to leave the coordination of its processes up to some sort of internal free market.) As for action between firms, the anarchy of the market is fundamental to capitalism. Real competition is a basic characteristic of capitalism and so perfect…

It seems you're advocating for a centrally planned economy, but from history we see that it doesn't work. It seems that there is simply too much in an economy for one entity to wholly plan. It can work in a smaller organization like Amazon (and even then, I'm sure teams compete for allocation of resources, it's not all centrally planned) but not at large. We see that people in centrally planned economies revert to un…

There are differences between the systems of a private capital and of a nation (or for that matter, the entire globe, which has never been planned centrally; incidentally this explains black markets).

The difference in goods is a mere quantitative difference. (Amazon sells literally everything.) Still, the amount and diversity of crap managed by Amazon is much greater than that of North Korea (comparing net sales vs. GDP). "It seems that there is simply too much in an economy for one entity to wholly plan" has to be tongue-in-cheek if it's not simply a mindless mantra. It's a staggering ideological contradiction whose poles the Hacker News crowd must oscillate between. On one hand, we're on the cusp of generalized artificial intelligence, and on the other we can't figure out the linear algebra needed to maintain a input-output table that changes over time.

But the difference in competition is a qualitative difference. The laws that determine the "competition" between teams at Amazon are different (opposite, even) than the laws of competition between capitalist firms. This is an empirical question. We can certainly imagine Amazons teams undercutting each other's "prices" in order to maximize private "profit," leading to a centralization and concentration of "capital" in the hands of a "monopolistic" team, but this simply does not happen in practice. The categories of intra-firm operation are totally different than those of inter-firm operation.

Re: Lowest “Who is hiring?” Post Count in 30 Months

#137

Post by lysecret »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #30

also consider the whole chain -- From the layoffs I've observed Recruiters were some of the top laid off roles. Less recruiters means prioritization of efforts. HN Who's hiring is probably a low priority platform. (Recruiter's boss doesn't know what it is, hard to instrument for tracking metrics) If you really want to know how many jobs are out there it's better to index and crawl all the companies jobs page directly…

Companies job pages are very vague estimates of actual offering, especially at startups were everyone is incentivized to post more than existing to look good.

Re: Lowest “Who is hiring?” Post Count in 30 Months

#138

Post by ouid »

harryvederci wrote: post #23

I don't know the intention of the author, but I see like a lot of "Look, it's happening! The economy is going down!" posts pop up these days. Which may be true, but it can also be a self-fulfilling profecy if everyone is doing that on all platforms. Which would be a shame. I'm not saying HN and other platforms should censor (/ take action) either. It's just a thought I have on this subject, and I don't know if there…

The economy "going down" is not necessarily pessimism.

Re: Lowest “Who is hiring?” Post Count in 30 Months

#139

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

whatshisface wrote: post #122
zdragnar wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a pretty narrow segment of a much larger market, presumably.

"Startups quit hiring first," sounds like a leading indicator on the surface, but if you think about it that also means that they will stop hiring during smaller dips that later pick back up. Every big dip has to do through the smaller dip state, but since plenty of smaller dips recover it is still a martingale - unless it isn't, but if it isn't that's the cause of my surprise.

That's basically true of all "leading indicators", and is summarized in the popular joke that "Economists have predicted 8 of the last 5 recessions".

Re: Lowest “Who is hiring?” Post Count in 30 Months

#140

Post by hanniabu »

kiernanmcgowan wrote: post #47
anonygler wrote: post #37

I feel like people are trying to wish the economy into a recession / depression, but I really don't see it happening. I do see some belt tightening wrt SaaS expenditures. There's still a massive demand for labor. While the housing market has fallen, the actual cost of buying a house is still rising. Rate increases have well outpaced the list price reductions. So I think all this talk of a recession is just a bunch of…

It feels like _something_ is happening, but it's not quite the recession that people are fearing. The US is somehow at the lowest unemployment rates we've seen and people are saying it's all going to collapse which just feels off. If the US hits 5% unemployment that simultaneously worse off than where we are but still a solid economic position. My pet theory is that everyone is just tired, so damned tired, and seeps…

> The US is somehow at the lowest unemployment rates we've seen and people are saying it's all going to collapse which just feels off.

When this point of unemployment is hit, it always acts as an inflection point before the trend reverses and unemployment goes up.

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