Any H1B related postings are a tiny fraction of the postings by recruiters and recruitment agencies trying to build up their databases, and companies wanting to look like they’re continuing to grow.
BLS says there are 140,000 of new job postings for sw engs annually. DOL stats show ~120,000 PERM applications (for which job postings are required - they're not required for H1Bs), of which probably only 20% are for software engineers. So 30,000 / 140,000 - ~21%. Pretty small fraction.
I am not a Trump supporter and I didn't vote for him, but the fact is that Biden's BLS numbers were always manipulated to portray the former president as successful. These statistics are unreliable, in addition, the underlying premise of relying on job postings was flawed from the start which was my initial argument.
Take a look at this, the previous administration hired hundreds of thousands of gov workers to inflate the employment numbers.
Doesn't pass the smell test since the chart for government employees clearly includes more than just Federal. The Federal workforce is about 3mm, but that graph shows 23mm [1], so it clearly can't just be Federal employees.
EDIT: here you go, just looking at Federal employees [2]:
Jan 2021: 2.89 million
Jan 2025: 3.02 million
The Federal government added ~130k employees over the four years that Biden was in office, an increase of about 4.4%.
During that exact same period, all private employment went from 121 million to 135 million, an increase of about 11%. So Federal employment grew slower under Biden than private employment did. [3]
Thanks for the additional information. The thing is the Trump administration is about to fire 200k probationary federal employees meaning they were hired within in the last year or so. These numbers don't add up either.
"A probationary employee is often a recent hire to the agency or *a long-serving employee who was moved or promoted into a new position*. They are put on a "probationary" period that typically lasts for one or two years, though it can be longer at some agencies. It's like a trial period during which the worker and their performance are under heightened scrutiny."
Yeah, I know FRED is a legit source, but I have absolutely horrible experiences everytime some internet rando is trying to interpret their charts. Just two random FRED charts with marker ink on them already was sending red flags.
I'm a part of the circus, and I don't think many of these have h1-b code smells to it. Companies just wanna hype up AI or whatever and make less people do more work.
If this has general ghost jobs caught in the crossfire too, that'd be amazing. Just don't waste my time on something you already know doesn't exist.