Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US Job Openings Decline to Lowest Level in More Than a Year

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 376 posts

Re: US Job Openings Decline to Lowest Level in More Than a Year

#201

Post by nis0s »

giantg2 wrote: post #162
mbgerring wrote: post #18

It makes sense that you wouldn't hire in such an uncertain environment. We have a President using emergency powers to affect sweeping, unpredictable, consequential changes to the economy that can dramatically alter unit economics overnight and completely tank a previously viable business. Within this calendar year, the President's ability to do this may be upended by pending court cases, an election, or both. Followi…

The theory makes sense, but it doesn't match with the graphics in the article. We can see that job openings have been declining since before the 2024 election and that hiring actually increased briefly around the time the tarrifs were implemented. This seems to suggest there are other factors at play, including macro trends.

Investment monies have been tightened across the board, mainly due to high interest rates and the fact that investments in anything other than Tech/AI don’t match expectations of growth.

Re: US Job Openings Decline to Lowest Level in More Than a Year

#202

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

javiramos wrote: post #191
FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a regional manufacturing company in the US and we have been booming since COVID (nearly doubling every year) and have not seen a slow down. Manufacturing firms seem to be doing really well, here (midwest US).

What industry?

Packaging. Boxes, shippers, pallets, parts transports for use within automotive and other factories, etc. Very little direct to consumer or display stuff.

Analysts use packaging companies as a canary for manufacturing in general.

Re: US Job Openings Decline to Lowest Level in More Than a Year

#203

Post by nis0s »

bakies wrote: post #197
nis0s wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US companies have long been reliant on free flowing investment monies subsidized by the USG. Tightening those purse strings has reduced the level of jobs openings, including tightening of SBIRs and other non-research grant programs that small to medium sized companies use. Small business loans are also tight or non-existent. So, of course jobs will be limited. The macro-level economic policies really only affect larg…

This is just Trump, not the USG as a whole. Congress approved a budget and Trump refuses to give the money out. People have to fight in court to get the money they're owed.

Data shows jobs have been in decline before Trump, likely related to reduced investments from high inflation and high interest rates. I guess I should add that part of opening up more funding includes managing other aspects so we don’t end up in the same economic environment post-2020.

Re: US Job Openings Decline to Lowest Level in More Than a Year

#204

Post by potato3732842 »

acdha wrote: post #65
potato3732842 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bespoke AI has not gotten everywhere but generic AI absolutely has. The workforce is happily making themselves more efficient by using AI on their phones for what used to be multi step look it up in the literature or your supplier's catalog or consult the instructions or read the rules process when performing cookie cutter tasks they know but don't remember exact specifications for.

Do you have a source for that? Everyone I know who works outside of tech is complaining about how AI is making their jobs harder because it’s wrong so much of the time that they’re spending more time correcting it than it saves, and it’s been a boon for cheaters looking to remove obvious tells from their attacks.

I'm talking about people who shower after work not people who shower before work.

I have no doubt that people who are having AI foisted upon them by admins at the behest of someone else hate it.

They use AI as basically a leveled up version of the summaries google used to provide for certain search types. Saves them a bunch of obnoxious clicking around on the internet or in software that was never designed for mobile or to make giving up the kind of info they're seeking easily.

Re: US Job Openings Decline to Lowest Level in More Than a Year

#205

Post by yndoendo »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #175
dwpdwpdwpdwpdwp wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for an global company in the industrial automation space. Not only is there is a major effort underway to offshore jobs and manufacturing from the US, but our customers around the world are pulling way back on capital expenditures, citing US policy uncertainties as a primary reason.

I work for a regional manufacturing company in the US and we have been booming since COVID (nearly doubling every year) and have not seen a slow down. Manufacturing firms seem to be doing really well, here (midwest US).

This is all dependent on the company owners.

A multi-million dollar company I help start, in the Midwest USA, had manufacturing, customer service, R&D, and shipping all in the same state. After being bought by Texas VCs, everything moved out of the area. They don't want to run and build a business, they want to make X millions in Y years.

To do this, manufacturing moved to South Korea, customer service to some Asian country, slashed R&D by removing QA, and shipped the other jobs to a more _cost effect state_ not in the Midwest. Everyone that had institutional knowledge was fired to reduce cost of employee salaries.

Note you want QA because it is a life safety solution. Speaking with former colleagues, the quality of the solution went down hill while the price kept rising.

In my current company, all assembly jobs were removed from in-state and shipped to a more _cost effect state_ before the end of 2025. This also affects the end user because I can no longer go to assembly and test software changes or custom hardware changes before the product ships.

Jobs are not being lost because of unskilled people, they are being lost to help the rich get richer.

Re: US Job Openings Decline to Lowest Level in More Than a Year

#206

Post by kypro »

lvl155 wrote: post #122

Corporate America is such a weird place. They rather hire immigrants than retrain or educate existing workforce. Everything about the US economy is plug and play then discard. And if they can’t plug and play, they will just scrap the whole thing. That’s exactly what’s happening right now.

How is that weird? If American's can't compete with the wage expectations of foreign workers then they're not going to be hired.

If US workers can't compete then vote for less immigration. It's not the corporates or the foreigners fault, it's the government that's putting those groups first over US workers.

Re: US Job Openings Decline to Lowest Level in More Than a Year

#207

Post by rchaud »

lenerdenator wrote: post #144
mbgerring wrote: post #18

It makes sense that you wouldn't hire in such an uncertain environment. We have a President using emergency powers to affect sweeping, unpredictable, consequential changes to the economy that can dramatically alter unit economics overnight and completely tank a previously viable business. Within this calendar year, the President's ability to do this may be upended by pending court cases, an election, or both. Followi…

Understand something, though: many of those people making those decisions thought that the current administration would be a way to fix regulation. We're learning why government shouldn't be run like a business. Corporate governance, at least in the view of these people, arguably benefits from tyranny in some ways. You have a management structure where people have the ability to cut off your income and health insuran…

Seems to me like it's American businesses that are increasingly operating like governments. Acquiring media outlets to manufacture consent, bending the courts to deregulate their operations, trading political favors and engaging in centralized economic planning for giant bets on AI, funded with debt.

Re: US Job Openings Decline to Lowest Level in More Than a Year

#209

Post by ElevenLathe »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #150
adriand wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of my clients is a midsized logistics brokerage based in LA. Right now is RFP season, where they bid on freight contracts with various existing and potential customers. These contracts are typically one year long. A bid you submit now might be for a contract that goes Sept-Sept. This is difficult even under normal circumstances because you have to predict what carrier (trucker) rates will be in the future. You al…

Typically companies use things like futures, options, and forward contracts to fix or cap their input costs for commodities like oil. This lets them bid on projects without needing to know the future price of oil.

Even if you can find someone to write you a weird, bespoke (and therefore expensive) derivative to hedge against the Trump DoT revoking thousands of CDLs, you've still only succeeded in moving all these calculations and risks to that counterparty. Somebody somewhere still has to have the headache of pricing this risk.

Re: US Job Openings Decline to Lowest Level in More Than a Year

#210

Post by coryfklein »

jibe wrote: post #44

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTSJOL Job openings are still very high, ~30% higher than the average for the last few decades.

This has been called out by the Moody's Analytics economists in their podcast [0] for a while. The generally accepted explanation is that online job postings no longer map 1:1 to actual open positions at companies, ie many companies are not actually hiring despite having a listing for an open role.

This has become common enough that it has gained it's own term: "ghost" postings/listings.

[0] https://www.moodys.com/web/en/us/insights/podcasts/inside-ec...

Post reply on HN