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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

2 months ago was April/May. The stock market was crashing, layoffs were surging, and hiring freezes were everywhere. Absurd time to test this and declare the reason.

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The market crash happened in mid March, and immediately started to recover. I don't think that had anything to do with it.

I haven't been looking but I am not under the impression that hiring has bounced back. Didn't I see articles saying some big cos had a hiring freeze for at least the rest of the year?

And with the market flooded with big layoffs from businesses hit hard by lockdowns (Uber, Airbnb, probably others), whatever jobs are available probably have more competition than usual. Although perhaps enough time has passed so that the dust has settled for people affected.

I don't really have a good sense of whether hiring has "bounced back" except based on the volume of LinkedIn messages I get, which seems to have remained about the same (I haven't actually gone and checked). But, it's not clear to me that, within the tech industry, enough people got laid off that it would have made hiring measurably more competitive.

New unemployment claims are consistently dropping. The labor market isn’t as good as it was February, but it’s much better than it was in April.

I think a lot of companies have really cut back on hiring, even if the market bounced back.

Anecdotally, I got hit up on LinkedIn as much as ever by recruiters during this time.

Probably because recruiters work on commissions and they had to work extra hard to get the whatever openings were left filled ASAP to get paid.

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