Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by colmanhumphrey 1167 days ago
Here is a chart going back to 2014: https://slight.run/graphs/colman/ratio_of_seekers_to_hirers_...

Not quite as drastic as yours, but still not ideal.

The underlying query and data source: https://slight.run/apps/colman/job_seekers_vs_job_hiring_hac...

I'm restricting to top-level comments here, because those seem like a better proxy than all comments (excluding some discussion on a given post for example).

3 comments

If anybody is interested, maybe this should be considered along with the core inflation rates - which is high in the US (peaked at 7% within the last 12 months and currently at 5.5%) and possibly still rising in the EU (12-month peak [now] at 5.7%).

If the central banks are going to stick to their declared purpose of keeping this around 2% we're still in for further rate hikes, I would imagine.

* https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/core-inflation-ra...

* https://tradingeconomics.com/euro-area/core-inflation-rate

I know it's not within the desired behaviour on HN to simply write "thank you!", and I hope I did provide a bit more than just that. That being said: Thank you! Also to ed_balls and madcaptenor for collecting data in the other thread.

Hopefully they are not quite that stupid. Inflation is a lagging indicator, so expect it to start dropping fairly quickly as the -12 months price delta normalises, against the M2 injection 2 years ago.

M2 continues to drop (this is a bad thing for stability, but will feed into prices dropping over time):

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

To answer what you were probably going to look for in the link: peak was March 2020 (1.19), when Covid got real, bottom was April 2018 (0.067), don't know any particular significance of that month.
April 2018 sounds about right for the tech bubble peak - iirc softbank was still in full swing, everyone was "blitzscaling", it was peak exuberance. Not that the music stopped right after that, but even into 2019 things were starting to decline and the VC industry was getting slightly more conservative.
FED started raising interest rates in 2017[1]. The market didn't really start reacting until 2018, and by 2019 the FED got cold feet and was lowering rates again.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFEDTARU

Is cold-feet a euphemism for "harassed by an orange toad"?
Looks like your chart only goes up to 2022 October? Whereas OP's goes up to today.
It includes the Nov 1 post, you can see the data here: https://slight.run/apps/colman/job_seekers_vs_job_hiring_hac... (Vega reads 2022-11-01 into your local timezone, hence why you're possibly seeing 2022-10-31).

They claim they update it daily (https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/details/y-combi...) but they only update it every few months it would appear.

Of course you can manually get this data from the HN API and create a query built on https://slight.run/apps/colman/job_seekers_vs_job_hiring_hac... by adding the extra few rows manually (but unlike OP, I recommend you exclude non-top level comments).

Ok so either way though, it's not really comparable to OP because it doesn't include 2023 data (i.e. all of the current recession).
If instead I had supplied a time series for eight years ending just prior to all of OP's data, you wouldn't discuss "comparing" the charts (I assume!), so it's a little unclear what the concern is with comparison.

If you just need the last few data points, of course you can either just look at OP's chart, or if you don't trust that data, then quickly get the data yourself. Again you can even create an account on slight.run and recreate the full graph if you prefer.

We are also not currently in a recession. If instead you're referring to market conditions that affected tech heavily, that was in place by Q3 2022 (e.g. https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/20/remembering-the-startups-w...), and this also lines up more closely with how the Fed has been raising rates (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFEDTARU).