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Comment by rev_bird | Hacker News Reader

I don't think I buy the premise. "Tech job listings on one website are down 40%" seems more accurate, and is much less scary. It definitely helps that the author mentions that they track their listings compared to their competitors, but I'm baffled as to why there isn't a graph that covers more than a six-month span when the thesis spans years. If this company has job listing data for multiple listing websites that goes back to at least 2014, that'd be interesting data to look at, but it's not here.

Even then, I'm not sure "tech hiring is down 40%" would be a reasonable conclusion to draw -- it's like saying, "the newspaper only had 15 job listings in it, the American economy must be in the toilet."

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First, the job board can only tracking "listings", not jobs or hiring.

- Perhaps job boards are slowly dying as a way to fill jobs

- Perhaps you're not tracking the job boards that are growing the fastest and only the same "nearest" competitors

- Perhaps job listings used to exist for jobs that weren't ever hired for, and now listings are more accurate

- Perhaps listings used to live for a long time, and now they are filled faster reducing the backlog

- Perhaps tech jobs are shifting away from smaller companies that would use a job board and back towards bigger companies that use other methods to hire

Lots of other conclusions.

> - Perhaps job boards are slowly dying as a way to fill jobs

There certainly seems to be a new class of job site. Hired, underdog, and greenhouse are what everyone seems to use these days. With the exception of angellist, nobody I know hires using boards (though that's a small number of data points, since most of the people I know are front-line types that aren't in charge of hiring)

> I'm baffled as to why there isn't a graph that covers more than a six-month span when the thesis spans years.

There is. This one covers the last three years for the first half of each year: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*ptKtTWdeh0XfGPrWsr...

That's fair. I should have been more clear -- it's weird to me that chart shows 18 months of data in parallel, rather than just having a line graph that spans the 30 months from the beginning of 2014, and (less so) that it doesn't include the other sites.

Volume of job listings on one site over the last 30 months would be measuring far more than the trend in number of jobs. Did the job site add new features? Did they snag a big new customer who consistently posts their jobs there? Did they run a different ad campaign, or more of them? If the company is doing well, it'll probably have a steadily increasing number of job listings over that period, but it doesn't necessarily mean that there are more jobs available overall.

But it doesn't include the competitors.

"Tech job listings on one website are down 40%"

Which (authenticjobs.com) certainly isn't one of the top 5, and I'm guessing not even top 10 such websites.

I'm in the same boat, for all we know the hiring is the same rate but it's through more informal channels like internal recommendations, networking, etc.

It could be even simpler than that -- maybe there's a really popular job board that's attracting all the customers? MySpace losing hundreds of thousands of users didn't mean there were less teenagers.

Oooor, even simpler... Tech hiring is down 40%... C'mon, guys... Ockham's razor. Hell, a couple of friends of mine were laid off, and are having a hard time finding employment...

this is not ockham's razor. people here are refuting the 40% hiring decline, so it's not an explanation to choose from to begin with.

Ockhams' razor does not magically remove confounding variables.

That's not a good application of Ockham's razor, it's not about which explanations sound simple, and you need priors. If I gave you some data saying that telecom industry sales have been correlated to GDP for decades and suddenly telecom industry sales dropped 40%, GDP dropping 40% is really unlikely and you wouldn't guess that. 40% is huge

Completely agreed.

A 40% decline in real tech-hiring rates would be a shocking, sudden decline. The simpler, most consistent, and most likely explanation is that the author's data isn't representative of the big picture.

It's very similar to "my helloworld.c won't compile, the compiler must be broken"

40% drop in GDP is huge, you're right. 40% drop in open job listings isn't huge, because it's not the same as overall employment. I'm quite sure we've had drops like that before, although I don't have any references at the moment to back it up.

Edit: if the author has only been in the business a couple of years, he may not be aware of the historical boom/bust nature of it - yet.

It's "Occam's".

Both are used. It is named after William of Ockham (though he did not invent it, nor name it).

Wouldn't that be a bit more scary? If 40% of tech hiring is now all happening within the same group of people (people do tend to befriend others that are similar to them), that seems quite remarkable and alarming.

However, as @felipellrocha mentioned, the conclusion that hiring is simply down seems to make the fewest assumptions.

I was offering alternatives, there are many confounding factors I don't think the article accounted for. Maybe the 40% is very regional, or like others suggested tied to only certain job boards.

> "Tech job listings on one website are down 40%" seems more accurate

> It definitely helps that the author mentions that they track their listings compared to their competitors

Hmm.

The author didn't say anything about listing trends on those other sites, only that their listings usually trend closely with the others, using the past six months as evidence. He shows us the first six months of each year, with only his site. The only explanation I can come up with is that the absent data doesn't jive well enough with the thesis.

One chart could have made all this more clear: January 2014 through June 2016, with all the sites mentioned included in the chart. The author hints at having that data available, but has left out big chunks of it.

I can understand not wanting to dump so much business intelligence on some website, but they're the ones trying to write about the data without showing it.

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