[uglysexy]

Hiring is definitely a good indicator of the bubble bursting because hiring indicates that startups are getting funding and they turn around and hire people. When the funding dries up, these same startups tighten the belt, the hiring drops and then the layoffs start.

A good indicator of a bubble in SF/SV startups is measuring the IT job market using local Craiglist and Dice job postings since startups heavily use them.

I used both websites on & off since the late 90s to find contract & permanent full-time jobs. Back then at the height of the dot-coms, the Dice home page showed 120,000+ jobs, right after the crash (2001-2003) that number fell to around 20,000-30,000. Now it's around 80,000.

On Craigslist, at the dot com height, the Software section for the Bay Area (https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sof) had so many job postings per day that the list of postings for that day would spill over to the next page (there are 100 listings per page). A year & a half ago (late 2014) there was a good amount of postings and I got a frenzy of replies when I contacted them. Now, there's only a handful of postings per day.

[shostack]

I guess I'm making a clear distinction between "startup" (ie. no clear business model or path to profitability yet) vs. "established tech giant."

The latter has such massive hiring needs in comparison that even if funding dried up (which they do not need since they have lots of profit and are already oftentimes publicly traded), I don't think it would slow down the market THAT much.

[uglysexy]

Tech giants do have funding in the form of CapEx. Like Apple throwing money into their 'Apple Car' project or Twitter doing the same into building new features. These tech giants have these semi-independent projects that have that 'startup' feel. Google has many of these, including their self-driving car team.

When these tech giants have layoffs - usually in the 100s or 1000s - it's a big hit to the job market. May not be reflected on Craigslist or Dice, but there'll be a lot more job-seekers. Instead of getting 50 resumes per job posting, hiring managers would be getting hundreds.

[paulddraper]

Yahoo and AOL aren't hiring these days.

"To big too fail" isn't a thing.

[uglysexy]

> Yahoo and AOL aren't hiring these days If I may ask..how do you know this? And can you provide some detail?

Bottom line is - hiring (or lack of) is a leading indicator of a company's financial health. A company that doesn't have any open jobs for a sustained length of time (3-6 months to a year) is in belt tightening mode - which comes right before layoffs or worse, closing shop.

Btw - Yahoo is already doing layoffs or 'downsizing'. If Yahoo wasn't hiring during the past 3-6 months, that definitely was an indicator of this.

Yahoo Downsizes In Latin America, Closes Mexico And Argentina Operations http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/28/yahoo-downsizes-in-latin-am...

Here are some news sites that track layoffs. I recommend keeping a close eye on things.

http://techcrunch.com/tag/layoffs/

https://twitter.com/search?q=layoff%20OR%20layoffs%20OR%20%2...

Or better yet, keep an eye on the Dice jobs number which is prominently displayed on the Dice.com home page.

As of today, January 29, 2016 that number is 84,201. My take is that if this number goes below 60,000 then the bubble is bursting.