[magicalhippo]

We're a growing B2B company in Norway. We struggled for years to fill in-person positions. We've been at least 2-3 devs short for the past 6+ years.

That is, until December last year. Then it was like a flood gate had opened up. Suddenly we had tons of candidates to try to select from.

I knew things were bad over in bay area and such, but I didn't expect it to hit the market over the pond here so quickly and abruptly.

[richrichie]

It is getting more and more apparent that BLS has been cooking jobs numbers.

[jandrewrogers]

It is more nuanced than that. The BLS and ADP jobs report numbers sometimes diverge significantly. This is explainable by differences in how the data is sourced and modeled.

Roughly, BLS accurately reflects government employment and then extrapolates to the private sector using a census model that can be several years old. ADP is private sector data and doesn’t reflect government employment. They are essentially sampling disjoint employment pools which leads to some known artifacts.

Sometimes there are large spasms of government job growth through expansion of spending and jobs programs when there is no matching growth in the private sector and the private sector may actually be declining (as seen in ADP data), yet BLS will extrapolate that the private sector must have similarly grown based on the government growth data. Similarly, ADP is generally considered a reasonably accurate model of private sector job growth but doesn’t account for government employment even when it is substantial. ADP can significantly exceed BLS in boom markets.

A heuristic that has been around forever for tracking “productive employment” is that the job market is good when (ADP - BLS) is a positive number and bad when it is negative. Currently, this heuristic is tracking at something like -100k to -150k, which indicates a poor job market.

[richrichie]

I don’t understand the downvotes. Chairman of the federal reserve stated that jobs are overstated.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/mediacenter/files/FOMCprescon...

[CrazyStat]

Here’s what the chairman of the federal reserve actually stated about payroll numbers:

> there’s an argument that they may be a bit overstated

Not one, not two, but three qualifiers[1] that you left out of your retelling.

[1] “there’s an argument,” “may be,” and “a bit”

[snowwrestler]

You got downvoted for saying that BLS is intentionally lying about jobs numbers. That’s what “cooking” means in this context and it is a big accusation.

The Fed chair’s statement you cite doesn’t support it. He’s just saying that the jobs numbers may not be perfectly representing the actual job market. That is not exactly news; it’s a very hard thing to measure. He’s not accusing the BLS of lying.

[richrichie]

Check the revisions from BLS over the past year. BLS revised down both April and May numbers by 30%. These are big revisions. This is a pattern now. Media only reports the initial figures.

[snowwrestler]

I agree with you on the very flawed way that the media covers the revisions. But revisions are nothing new and you’ll need a lot more than that to support an accusation of intentionally reporting wrong numbers.