Openings continue to look stable to me! Hires messier but still moving sideways over the last 18 mos. JOLTS paints a picture of a jobs market in equilibrium not teetering on the brink.
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Any insight on methodology? “Openings” on its face would seem to be less reliable or less meaningful than actual hirings
sep 3, 2025, 2:16 pm • 2 0 • view
The methodology is a survey asking businesses if they have job openings. Openings are not a better indicator than hiring but they're a cleaner one to assess labor demand; you can have a job opening regardless of what's going on with the supply side of the labor market, not so for hirings.
sep 3, 2025, 2:17 pm • 7 0 • view
What about all those tech jobs that post fake openings - not intended to every fill the position
sep 3, 2025, 2:19 pm • 4 0 • view
There's no real way to account for businesses lying to the BLS tbh, but this is a survey based on asking them officially, not scraping job boards or something like that.
sep 3, 2025, 2:22 pm • 6 0 • view
Also Information industry openings have ramped up recently with hires also rising and quits starting to perk up. Pretty strong confirmation that tech labor demand has inflected higher lately.
sep 3, 2025, 2:22 pm • 6 0 • view
No bears in sight.
sep 3, 2025, 2:27 pm • 1 0 • view
Question is: stable or unstable equilibrium? Can it be tilted with a small push or how robust is it?
sep 3, 2025, 2:11 pm • 0 0 • view
Tell that to Waller lol
sep 3, 2025, 2:06 pm • 1 0 • view
Despite the AI narrative, tech labor demand has clearly inflected higher with improved openings, hires, and quits.
sep 3, 2025, 2:11 pm • 38 1 • view
The thing about $30trn economies is they have a truly staggering amount of inertia, especially when their households have lots of borrowing capacity and their fiscal deficit is running over 6% of GDP.
sep 3, 2025, 2:15 pm • 83 8 • view
One place where the labor market looks genuinely weak and deteriorating is manufacturing. Tariffs not helping.
sep 3, 2025, 2:21 pm • 72 15 • view
Anecdotally been fielding a marked increase in job apps and networking requests from folks in mfg in SEATAC area, and also lay offs / slow downs from data center builds in ID/Columbia basin
sep 3, 2025, 3:11 pm • 1 0 • view
every new proof of concept vibe coded by a product manager requires another engineer to take it over and fix it
sep 3, 2025, 2:13 pm • 1 0 • view
It looks like hires are near the lowest level in ten years
sep 3, 2025, 2:29 pm • 0 0 • view
the thing I'm noting is that they're sideways over the last 18 months, not making new lows.
sep 3, 2025, 2:32 pm • 3 0 • view
So stable, got it
sep 3, 2025, 2:37 pm • 1 0 • view
Does "private" in the graph title mean that this data is only for private industry? I'm hearing a lot about job losses and hiring freezes in the education sector, and of course much of that is "public" (govt-run)
sep 3, 2025, 3:54 pm • 1 0 • view
yes, this is non-government. focusing on private because it's much larger and not being driven by policy shifts which can obscure the larger picture of the economy.
sep 3, 2025, 3:56 pm • 3 0 • view
Gotcha, thanks!
sep 3, 2025, 3:57 pm • 0 0 • view
Continue to feel like we’re in a house of cards, held together simply by inertia.
sep 3, 2025, 2:13 pm • 8 0 • view