> The chart in the tweet represents year-on-year growth.

Can’t believe how many people are commenting without looking at what the chart means. We’ve lost 50k jobs last two years after decades of adding 100k+ every year including the pandemic highs of 300k+ per year. Total employment remains way above 2000s, 2008 and 2020 unlike the title suggests.

Tech has also changed to become an all encompassing thing. In 2000, loads of people didn't have computers or cell phones. Maybe they owned a CD player and watched TV. Tech was avoidable then. But now everyone has a phone in their pocket, a computer, does all their banking through apps instead of visiting the bank, orders food online, orders taxis through apps, and so on. Everything is lumped under tech now and unavoidably so.

Yeah but, there are like 100K CS/IT graduates in the US every year. Tech jobs increasing 100K per year was just maintenance.

Lotta people in tech are going to struggle to find a job. That's the point.

Yes, but how many people have tried to enter the field since then? Is the economy that supports current number of tech workers really better than one that supports 10x?

Thanks for pointing this out - title is extremely misleading. Total tech jobs is not lower than 2008 just because YoY is down.

No, the title is not misleading at all - your comment is misleading. Total tech jobs being up doesn't tell us anything, since there are also way more tech workers now than back then.

Over 100K people graduate in CS/IT per year, and that doesn't even count people who come in to the industry from overseas or from other degree paths.

"Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020" says the unemployment rate is higher today than in 2008 and 2020, but that is NOT what the chart shows.

General media, news, etc. gets this wrong all the time, see any commentary on inflation, GDP growth, rate of change in house prices, etc.

As an aside, I remember some time ago that Tesla stock went down because the growth of the Model 3 sales went down... After years of being one of the best selling cars on the planet.

If number don't go up fast I guess people get scared.

It could have been that so much future growth was priced in that a reduction in the growth rate could have justified a reduction in the share price

I didn't think of that! That's certainly possible.

The issue is the company's valuation has priced in ridiculous growth in the future. The trajectory matters here. Not saying you should short the stock

Absolute numbers are still higher than they were 5 years ago but the number of jobs going down means that the same (or about the same) number of people are starting to compete for a smaller number of jobs. Many people have chosen to study software development in recent years so nowadays the workforce is much larger than it was 5-10 years ago.

This imbalance of supply and demand shifts power toward employers and it's hard not to feel the pressure even if you're not looking for a job right now.

The chart shows devs still growing, and "Computer System Design SERVICES" getting hammered (most of the total loss).

I'm not even sure this chart tells the story of the title.

Is this WITCH companies?

Yes, but...

The health of the market is not a function of the total number of jobs alone, it's a function of the number of jobs and the number of people to fill them.

The number of total jobs going up year after year meant that there were increasing numbers of candidates, new people entering the field. If the job growth stops, then there still we be candidates coming in. There will also be the new hires from the last decade moving into increasingly senior roles, and there won't be space for them (unless you devalue the meaning of "senior" even more).

So the year over year change matters a lot. If it plateaus, or even declines slightly, it's more than enough to make a terrible market.

YoY change in jobs is still probably not the best way to visualize overall market health. As you say, you also have to take into account the number of people of fill the jobs. To me it seems like the least misleading statistics would be a graph showing unemployment and underemployment % over time. I'd probably also toss in graphs of length of unemployment period as well as various median wage percentiles (quintiles or deciles maybe) over time.

It shows growth or decline but it absolutely does not show what the title implies.

The chart shows the derivative of the thing people care about which is total cumulative change. The area under the curve shows cumulative change.

And they said we'd never have to use calculus in real life!

Thank you. And those raw numbers in the chart that go back to 2001 are not normalized percentages; what’s happening right now is NOTHING like 2001.

But, it just doesn’t hit the same way on X to say “We are back to late 2023-levels of tech employment” or “The losses in tech jobs over the last 18 months give back two months of hiring in 2022”.

The post-COVID spike was also absolutely insane and much bigger than dotcom boom.

And I already thought we hired more devs than needed pre-covid. It was pretty well surmised that big tech was hiring to starve other companies of talent, and thus employees were underutilised.