Great graph, crazy that we still haven't recovered to 2018/2019 levels
We likely will not
Job trends of HN Who Is Hiring?
61–70 of 93 posts
Re: Job trends of HN Who Is Hiring?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sincerely, yes. A lot of talented people are struggling right now, but could take the time and energy they're spending on fruitless job applications and devote it to some modest-scale side project with commercial potential. Worst-case scenario, you get an interesting portfolio project and something to talk about at a future interview. Possibly, you get something that pays the bills and avoids having to deal with ever…
Few people, even in decently earning roles like in tech, will have the runway to try and make something successful on their own all of a sudden after job loss. Starting a freelancing practice is more likely to bear fruit, but it's a very different ballgame of overheads than "just" the core job itself, if you want to get the full rewards of being a freelancer.
Runway is not the issue, imho the issue is skills and having a idea that can be monetized.
Hosting is pretty cheap, we have insanely good tools to automate tedious parts of the process and the time investment isn't huge as well.
Re: Job trends of HN Who Is Hiring?
#63As lolinder stated, one of the main causes of this is Section 174 where software is now amortized as R&D over 5 years which means companies can't treat is as a regular expense. This leads to companies hiring less.
There is a bill that is stuck in the Senate which aims at reversing this (among other things): https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7024
Please reach out to your senators and tell them to support this bill so our job prospects can return to normal.
Re: Job trends of HN Who Is Hiring?
#64Looks like the downtrend has slowed, and almost stopped. This aligns with my observations on local job boards to me, and some programming language specific Slack channels I'm on that have #jobs boards, in that there's a slight uptick in jobs right now. This is good news, it seems.
Somewhat correlates with the Layoffs.fyi trends [1][2].
Extreme lack of layoffs Q3 2020 to Q1 2022. Big rise through 2024, peaking at Q1 2023 and then slowly declining. Mostly tapered off to 2021 and 2022 levels near the start 2025.
Also, complimentary chart from Stackoverflow about the general trends in questions related to these categories [3]
[2] [layoffs.fyi chart] "Tech layoffs since Covid-19", https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRluXcoyZOl3...
[3] StackOverflow Trends, https://trends.stackoverflow.co/?tags=reactjs,python,typescr...
Re: Job trends of HN Who Is Hiring?
#65I know this doesn't make things better, but it bears repeating: much as the media would like it to be, this is not caused by AI. Two major things happened in 2022 that everyone knew would cause this if they stuck around: * The Section 174 changes went into effect, requiring all software to be expensed as R&D, which means it can't be deducted from profits directly and instead has to be amortized over 5 years [0]. * In…
> * The Section 174 changes went into effect, requiring all software to be expensed as R&D, which means it can't be deducted from profits directly and instead has to be amortized over 5 years [0].
I get the short term initial issue. I don't see why it would be an issue to stick current level of staffing until it normalizes 5 years later. I'm not sure this was ever a major issue. It just seems like a convenient excuse to cover up something else.
Interest rates are obviously definitely an issue.
> this is not caused by AI.
It may not be caused by AI, but it is going to affect hiring numbers from now on.
Re: Job trends of HN Who Is Hiring?
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Few people, even in decently earning roles like in tech, will have the runway to try and make something successful on their own all of a sudden after job loss. Starting a freelancing practice is more likely to bear fruit, but it's a very different ballgame of overheads than "just" the core job itself, if you want to get the full rewards of being a freelancer.
Runway is not the issue, imho the issue is skills and having a idea that can be monetized. Hosting is pretty cheap, we have insanely good tools to automate tedious parts of the process and the time investment isn't huge as well.
"Making money is easy, just go out there and make money" is effectively what you're saying.
It takes time to find and execute these ideas. Yes the tech can be cheap, maybe even building it can be cheap, but the time to grow your customer & client base from scratch can be highly varied.
If it were really this easy, you'd have every person on IndieHackers having ditched their jobs already because their ideas have taken off. Yet very few have.
Go out and execute, yes, but it can take many iterations to get anywhere.
Even Pieter Levels has about a 10% hit rate on his projects being successful.
Re: Job trends of HN Who Is Hiring?
#67Anecdotally, I've been getting a lot more recruiter spam lately.
Yeah. Really slow in November/December (I assume holidays, budgets, etc.), but seems to be picking back up.
Re: Job trends of HN Who Is Hiring?
#68Re: Job trends of HN Who Is Hiring?
#69I know this doesn't make things better, but it bears repeating: much as the media would like it to be, this is not caused by AI. Two major things happened in 2022 that everyone knew would cause this if they stuck around: * The Section 174 changes went into effect, requiring all software to be expensed as R&D, which means it can't be deducted from profits directly and instead has to be amortized over 5 years [0]. * In…
> * The Section 174 changes went into effect, requiring all software to be expensed as R&D, which means it can't be deducted from profits directly and instead has to be amortized over 5 years [0]. I get the short term initial issue. I don't see why it would be an issue to stick current level of staffing until it normalizes 5 years later. I'm not sure this was ever a major issue. It just seems like a convenient excuse…
I feel like the 174 issues might be more painful for smaller teams? Like if almost all your costs are in salaries, and you bring in a new person, suddenly you're booking profits despite not having cash profits?
That was my understanding, at least. That R&D salaries make this all weird.
Re: Job trends of HN Who Is Hiring?
#70I know this doesn't make things better, but it bears repeating: much as the media would like it to be, this is not caused by AI. Two major things happened in 2022 that everyone knew would cause this if they stuck around: * The Section 174 changes went into effect, requiring all software to be expensed as R&D, which means it can't be deducted from profits directly and instead has to be amortized over 5 years [0]. * In…
If anything, AI hype is actually helping keep many of us employed. And if/when it bursts, there will be more layoffs. Interest rates have an effect, but we also couldn't have survived with NZIR and Federal money printing like during COVID.
> If anything, AI hype is actually helping keep many of us employed.
AI is also going to keep many of us unemployed. I'm running a small version of Deepseek R1 locally and it does an extremely good job of predicting of where I'm going in a number of situations. I went to pull out some code into another function. As soon as I finished typing the name of the new function, it immediately suggested the exact code I was planning to move into the new function. All I had to do was hit tab. I didn't have to do the copy and paste myself. This was thirty lines of code and it chose the correct starting line and ending line.