I would definitely not read that from the data. I don’t know what percentage of current seekers post in the wants-to-be-hired thread, but as a potentially-outlying anecdote, I didn’t until I had already been looking for three months.
I would hypothesize that there’s a psychological barrier to posting in WWTBH, even if you’ve been laid off and have no current employer you wouldn’t want seeing it – there’s a certain vulnerability in putting yourself out there versus privately applying to jobs. For me, it took a certain level of desperation with my search to make the jump from browsing the hiring thread to finally posting in the other thread this month.
But you're only deleting them on HN. Both the major job threads are heavily scraped and your profile goes all over the internet.
EDIT: The same is probably true for job seekers, too, now that I think about it. As another commenter noted, a lot of people are being frog-marched back to physical offices at gunpoint, and are probably low-key fishing for a sweet remote-only gig.
I have been on the other side of that. I hired guy I found on HN (one of the best guys I've ever worked with) and later discovered he had applied earlier through another source but I overlooked it (some sources for candidates can be an absolute fire hose).
No 0.94 is a sample that comes with a huge margin or error.
It very well could be that the actual ratio is that there are more programmers then jobs.
I would hope most people realize that this is not what is going on. I am always "hiring". That's basically my job and I need to be a lot better at hiring than you need to be at being hired.
Many of us, myself included, already did that. I had to wear a mask to do my "morning commute" to get coffee, but otherwise my 9-5 was mostly the same.
But there was some data on HN about how the start of the pandemic was terrible, worse than last year, at least. And there were some sales graphs that reflected this too.
Is it? Unemployment is still incredibly low and labour shortages continue to be reported.
IMHO, some unemployment is good. It means people are not desperate enough to jump to places with bad pay or poor working conditions.
In my area, many businesses outside of the tech sector is actively hiring and can't find enough people. I think Covid triggered a demographic shift with many Boomers retiring (or dying) and that gap has not been filled.
My dad's a boomer, he's still working.
The ever-expanding "millennials" label is even more absurd. It originally meant people graduating college around 2000: a very specific group. Now, again, it has blown up to include decades of people.
After Boomers, all the labels are just idiotic. Let's all just refer to age groups using [gasp] numbers.
This is not how generational cohorts work. AFAIK, what counts as a generation can refer to people born over from 10, and up to 33 year period depending on who you ask.
"Millennial" is not precise term, it simply refers to people younger than Gen X and older than Gen Z.
IMO this is the biggest factor causing the slowdown in tech hiring. Right now people just want to stay put wherever they are. In the past when someone jumps to another company, it opens a headcount where they were, which gets filled with someone who also jumped another company, which caused a headcount to be created there, ad infinitum causing a constant cacophony of job postings, like a "velocity" of jobs akin to velocity of money.
The combination of slack in the system (unemployed people being hired), low attrition, and some backfills not being done creates a giant dampener on the velocity.
The languages in demand change is probably more interesting. Less react positions, rails holding strong, python over taking, first time no php jobs offered.
I am sure that there is a huge margin of error. I have been looking a job for 5 months. Granted, I have not used Who's hiring threads religiously and I am sure that there are positions that I applied where something with better qualifications was chosen.
Which means, if you're employed and looking elsewhere, you have to be comfortable with your employer potentially discovering your eye is wandering. Which I for one, definitely wouldn't want to do right now.
So I imagine the WWTBH posts are really just the tip of the iceberg (there may be more than one employed person looking for every unemployed one that feels comfortable posting there)
Compared to the Who is Hiring posts which companies have no reason to be concerned about posting (well, maybe if they're simultaneously laying off and pretending that they need to reduce headcount when it's really about reducing the average wage)
It does amuse me that we're still at more people hiring than looking for jobs. It's a stark contrast to other industries, where the power is normally in the hands of employers.
Another thing to consider is that we've had layoffs recently, i.e. people without jobs encouraged to find new jobs. In the past, wants-to-be-hired may be a little low because usually people don't want to be seen looking for a job while employed.