Would be more interesting to include the numbers prior to the pandemic (which had an abnormal surge in hiring).
The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
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Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
#52Interesting. A few followup thoughts: - Can you share this analysis across a longer time span? - Maybe there's a way to normalize it to general activity on HN? It probably hasn't gone down, but it would be cleaner to do that.
Here it is: https://paquita.masto.host/@rinze/109954928934842396. My "toots" auto-expire in a month, so if anyone wants to keep these plots, make a local copy.
Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
#53Is this downturn affecting all regions at the moment or mostly just USA? I wonder how the overall HN comments are trending.. More people with free time to waste on HN or less people with a reason to slack off and waste time on HN..
Higher interest rates mean that investments in technologies that will pay off in the long run have to have a higher ROI than they did a year ago, hence less money going into them and layoffs at some places. I'd be super surprised if this reached across all programming or associated jobs.
Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
#54Is this downturn affecting all regions at the moment or mostly just USA? I wonder how the overall HN comments are trending.. More people with free time to waste on HN or less people with a reason to slack off and waste time on HN..
From what I've seen it's less pronounced in the EU. Recruiters I know say that things are slower than in 2022 but it's still healthy. And my direct vicinity still looks short on workers and high on demand.
Depends on where you are, I think. It's definitely been a lot slower in Ireland in the last nine months.
Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
#55It would be interesting to see the results of your script running on the "Who wants to be hired?" threads [0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34983765
Not the author, but quickly ran a script over "Who wants to be hired?" from Jan-2021 to March-2023 and here is the resulting plot of the top-level comments (where indent="0"): https://www.arminbuilds.com/2021_01-2023_03_hired.png
So I was perhaps the inventor of "who wants to be hired" (I had asked to be able to post that thread, and was told that I needed to wait two days... anyway someone ran with it, and I am happy that you have made this thread.
I propose the following:
WHO HAS BEEN HIRED and metrics on such.
Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
#56We have an expected attrition rate at my company across all departments. We normally lose about 10 people per quarter. This quarter the number of people leaving - zero.
Any change in salary?
Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US BLS has 6 different unemployment measures. The one that's usually quoted is U-3 which means unemployed but seeking work. But if you left the country, I assume you're not counted in any unemployment measurement. (Though I also assume that's a sufficiently unusual edge case that it doesn't really move the needle on any of the statistics.)
In the US, you're not "unemployed" if you don't have a job and you don't want one . I believe if you're a US citizen vacationing long-term in France because your work prospects aren't great at the moment - you'll still show up as not in the labor force in the labor force participation rate: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART But you won't show up in u-1 through u-6. > Discouraged workers (U-4, U-5, and U-6 me…
In general, it doesn't really make sense to count someone who isn't trying to be employed as unemployed in general. I am not sure how you would distinguish between a 60 year old who decided they had plenty of money and would rather not work for someone any longer and a 60 year old who got laid off and can't find anyone to hire them for the work they are trained to do.
And, as you say, there are labor force participation numbers if that's what you're interested in.
Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seeing a higher than normal attrition rate. Unemployment rate among tech workers stays absurdly low, went down to 1.5% last month: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/economy/2023/02/07/tech...
How do they calculate this rate? I simply left the country after layoff, and most likely not counted in the numbers.
Well, yes, if you aren't in the country, you won’t show up in the country’s employment or unemployment statistics.
Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
#59Is this downturn affecting all regions at the moment or mostly just USA? I wonder how the overall HN comments are trending.. More people with free time to waste on HN or less people with a reason to slack off and waste time on HN..
It looks to me like, in the US, the downturn is limited to a specific subset of the tech space. Mostly the SV-style companies. The larger tech space, at least in the software engineering segment, appears to be largely unaffected. They even seem to be hiring at the same rate as normal.
Naively, the category seems to be "high growth tech". So that includes both the SV megacorps and startups (which are also concentrated in the Bay Area).
Re: The tech downturn seen through Hacker News comments
#60This trues up with what I'm anecdotally seeing in my clients. RTO-3 days or even RTO-5 days is being pushed aggressively in some of them, and the general feeling amongst their rank and file is it is a stealth layoff (no severance for those leaving due to the policy switch is a big financial incentive for the companies). A big challenge I'm not seeing really addressed though is a lot of staff at my clients stepped up…
I’m fully remote atm and checks slack when I’m off work all the time. If I were to commute 50 mins each way, I wouldn’t be looking at slack after work for sure, hell even 10min commute will make me dislike my job, just thinking of having to get up early to walk my dog..
yeah, I have a 10 minute commute right now, and I hate it
I have to walk all the way across the building to a phone room every time I need to make a phone call, and the rooms are usually all full. Which means I have to hide in the mail room or walk a couple of blocks out to my car.
The office is full of minor annoyances like broken elevators, full bathrooms, no coffee creamer, etc. It's super obnoxious.
I'm trying not to be a spoiled /r/antiwork jerkbag here, but I really hate this job, haha.