The actual BLS press release referenced tells a bit of a different story. The charts also add to the story. According to the household survey data, the actual labor force participation rate,...
According to the household survey data, the actual labor force participation rate, number of long-term unemployed, unemployed, and underemployed.... all changed little. However, one group did increase:
Among those not in the labor force who wanted a job, the number of people
marginally attached to the labor force changed little at 1.7 million in January.
These individuals wanted and were available for work and had looked for a job
sometime in the prior 12 months but had not looked for work in the 4 weeks
preceding the survey. The number of discouraged workers, a subset of the
marginally attached who believed that no jobs were available for them,
increased to 452,000 in January.
So, that's quite stark contrast to the job growth reported. I'm wagering (but do not have time to investigate myself) that a lot of this "growth" is really just balancing out against the substantial layoffs that happened throughout 2022 and 2023. Which is good, I guess, but the fact that unemployment remains unchanged definitely raises a lot of eyebrows. And the width of those confidence intervals is not exactly awe-inspiring.
Also, I dislike all the reports of hourly earnings going up by 0.8% , while revealing in-article that it's also paired with a reduction in hours resulting in real earnings only going up 0.5%. Its still good that it's going up....but not nearly as much as the headline would make you believe.
Just remember, U-3 "official unemployment" is at 3.9%. But once you add in "people employed part time for economic reasons but want full-time jobs", and other smaller numbers that should be counted, that number jumps up to 7.2%. Again, that's pretty normal for "good times," but it's indicative of how official numbers misrepresent economic reality for people. For reference, that 16% official peak in 2020 was in reality almost 23%.
Just to put some of these numbers into context, there does seem to be a bit of an upward trend in discouraged workers, but it also seems to be a pretty noisy measurement. I'm not sure an uptick in...
Just to put some of these numbers into context, there does seem to be a bit of an upward trend in discouraged workers, but it also seems to be a pretty noisy measurement. I'm not sure an uptick in any given month can say much. Here are the numbers for the past few months: 345, 425, 346, 452. Looking at the the chart it seems like the current level is relatively low compared to the last few decades.
U-6 at 7.2% is not pretty normal, but near historic lows. From 2022 to 2023 we had two years of historic low U-6 at 6.9%. Prior to that, the data series going back to 1994 only has one year that averaged lower than 7.2%, which was the year 2000 at 7.0%. The average U-6 was also 7.2% in 2019. Every other year was higher than that. Given that the Fed is trying to slow down the economy, having a U-6 at near historic lows is actually great. If I try to think back at any of the times I could say that the economy was "pretty good," the U-6 was higher in all those years.
I wonder if the trend of "overemployment" is being reflected in these job growth numbers. In the days of in-person office work, it was very difficult for someone to work two full time jobs at...
I wonder if the trend of "overemployment" is being reflected in these job growth numbers. In the days of in-person office work, it was very difficult for someone to work two full time jobs at once. But in many office jobs, the actual active work consumes less than half of your actual work hours. The rest gets taken up by meetings, schmoozing, or just working to look busy. But with work from home, you may be responsible only for your work output. A company may assign you the equivalent amount of work of a full-time in-person employee, but because you're free from the office time sinks, you can get full time work done on part time hours. Certain AIs may also be helping with this, especially for more generic tasks like emails, reports, etc. There are reports out of people using this to work 2 or 3 full time jobs. Sometimes they're caught, but often their work is high enough quality that it goes overlooked or unnoticed. In-person work is often so staggeringly inefficient that in some roles, one remote employee can do the work of 2-3 in-person workers. And even if they are caught, the worst consequence they can face is they get fired from one of their multiple jobs. The company could try to sue them, but what would their damages be? The overemployed worker completed all the tasks they were assigned, the company is just miffed the employee made them look bad. Also, no company wants the publicity of it being definitively proven that their regular in-person work process is comically inefficient. So the worst overemployed people face is dismissal.
There aren't a ton of people going this overemployment route, but it wouldn't take many to skew the numbers. If even just 1% of workers did this, that would be about 1.5 million people working multiple full time jobs. If 1.5 million overemployed people took on an extra job over the course of a year, that would represent 125,000 new jobs per month showing up on employment roles. And the existing systems really aren't set up to capture this kind of employment pattern. And hell, if you called people up who are doing this and asked if they worked multiple jobs, they would likely be hesitant to tell you the truth.
Personally I'll always take more free time for myself over a second job. I'd probably exercise half as much, cook less, clean less, have less time for hobbies. I like my job but there's a balance...
Personally I'll always take more free time for myself over a second job. I'd probably exercise half as much, cook less, clean less, have less time for hobbies. I like my job but there's a balance to be found and IMO it's around 25-30 hours per week of engaging work I can be passionate about.
Having been "overemployed" (before that term even entered my lexicon and am no longer overemployed) prior, it's less about hustling and more about maximizing the money spent for my time. For...
Having been "overemployed" (before that term even entered my lexicon and am no longer overemployed) prior, it's less about hustling and more about maximizing the money spent for my time.
For example, how many hours does a person actually work during a typical 40 hour work week? 10 hours, 20 hours? Yet, a person is expected to be available the entire 40 hours. So if I'm going to be at a desk for double the amount of time that's actually required to do my job, why not get two jobs?
I'm bewildered that there are jobs that only have fewer than 20 hours of engaging work a week. I feel like my job has 45+ hours of engaging work a week. :|
I'm bewildered that there are jobs that only have fewer than 20 hours of engaging work a week. I feel like my job has 45+ hours of engaging work a week. :|
Somebody's got to make the donuts. It turns out there are a substantial number of jobs, that once you figure out the bottlenecks that was nessecitating someone working it for 40 hours, you can now...
It turns out there are a substantial number of jobs, that once you figure out the bottlenecks that was nessecitating someone working it for 40 hours, you can now do it in 20.
Sysadmining is one of those jobs. If your sysadmin is genuinely busy all the time, that's a bad thing.
A good sysadmin did all the interesting work up front for a few years, eliminating the 25 hours a week of firefighting, and now can keep things running smoothly for 5 hours a week and then maybe another 15 for looking forward.
In the before times, when it wasn't neccessary to tweak a UI 30 times a year to maximize engagement, when an app would eventually just hit maintainence mode, this was a pretty easy thing to do (provided you got on top of the firefighting).
The real reason for all the systemd hate is because a whole lot of sysadmins had to rewrite a bunch of shit they had working for 20 years.
Democrats have finally learned that if they don't rig the numbers to make themselves look as good as possible, then Republicans instead rig the numbers to make Republicans look as good as...
Democrats have finally learned that if they don't rig the numbers to make themselves look as good as possible, then Republicans instead rig the numbers to make Republicans look as good as possible.
It only took them 60 years to learn this lesson :/
Either way I blame the media for sucking at their 4th estate jobs.
If only we were collectively smarter than this kind of BS! I also don't care about how gas prices correlate with a presidency or how many days they spend on vacation or golfing. But I agree that I...
If only we were collectively smarter than this kind of BS! I also don't care about how gas prices correlate with a presidency or how many days they spend on vacation or golfing.
But I agree that I support numbers that make Democrats look good. I hate it, but they do need to do a better job of appealing to the general populace. If it requires cheap tricks to have actual progress, then so be it.
Yeah, tech jobs (and associated support roles) are going through a rough time right now. There are a lot of unemployed developers, project managers, recruiters, etc out there right now and it only...
Yeah, tech jobs (and associated support roles) are going through a rough time right now. There are a lot of unemployed developers, project managers, recruiters, etc out there right now and it only seems to be getting worse. I kinda seems like the tech job bubble is bursting. Some of it was over-hiring during COVID, but I feel like we're well past that now.
I'd love to see a graph of new tech jobs per month. Maybe it would look something like this? The population of employed tech workers could still be going up, but the rate is way lower than it used...
I'd love to see a graph of new tech jobs per month. Maybe it would look something like this? The population of employed tech workers could still be going up, but the rate is way lower than it used to be, so there would be a huge backlog of laid-off workers.
Anecdotally, highly skilled tech workers are still in a good market. We're hiring people with machine-learning PhDs and they seem to be getting lots of attention. As a proven full-stack web dev I didn't have too much trouble when I was job searching last fall.
Yeah this market makes me wish I had studied nursing or something... at the time tech was as closed to a sure thing as you could get, but I suppose that might be why we are in this situation.
Yeah this market makes me wish I had studied nursing or something... at the time tech was as closed to a sure thing as you could get, but I suppose that might be why we are in this situation.
You'd have a job for certain, but the pay, at least in Nevada, is trash. The hours are flexible but it's really disappointing how underpaid nurses are.
You'd have a job for certain, but the pay, at least in Nevada, is trash. The hours are flexible but it's really disappointing how underpaid nurses are.
Hah, I was actually considering the medical field when I was deciding careers and occasionally still have this thought. Nursing is very, very stable and has amazing work/life balance (3x12h shifts...
Hah, I was actually considering the medical field when I was deciding careers and occasionally still have this thought. Nursing is very, very stable and has amazing work/life balance (3x12h shifts is considered full time). But doesn't pay nearly as well as software (at least not right now, we'll see what the future holds).
Very much a COVID era thing. Travel nursing still pays more than permanent positions, but it's nowhere near what it was during COVID since hospitals have been cutting travelers for a while now. My...
Very much a COVID era thing. Travel nursing still pays more than permanent positions, but it's nowhere near what it was during COVID since hospitals have been cutting travelers for a while now. My wife works for a hospital and I think they have gotten rid of all of their travelers (at least that was the plan).
The article on the FT website is longer and not marked as a developing story. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to refresh the archive.today capture.
The article on the FT website is longer and not marked as a developing story. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to refresh the archive.today capture.
Does the longer article break down the wage and job growth by types of jobs or economic tier? Eg, if wages are only growing for the rich or everyone evenly, and how the poorest among us are doing?;
Does the longer article break down the wage and job growth by types of jobs or economic tier? Eg, if wages are only growing for the rich or everyone evenly, and how the poorest among us are doing?;
The article mostly discusses whether or not this will lead to a rate cut by the Fed and the issues in seasonal hiring which the data does not apparently take into account.
The article mostly discusses whether or not this will lead to a rate cut by the Fed and the issues in seasonal hiring which the data does not apparently take into account.
I don't think the rate cuts will be politically motivated – more that rates will come down because inflation has subsided and interest rates are pretty high compared to a 10-year average.
I don't think the rate cuts will be politically motivated – more that rates will come down because inflation has subsided and interest rates are pretty high compared to a 10-year average.
The actual BLS press release referenced tells a bit of a different story. The charts also add to the story.
According to the household survey data, the actual labor force participation rate, number of long-term unemployed, unemployed, and underemployed.... all changed little. However, one group did increase:
So, that's quite stark contrast to the job growth reported. I'm wagering (but do not have time to investigate myself) that a lot of this "growth" is really just balancing out against the substantial layoffs that happened throughout 2022 and 2023. Which is good, I guess, but the fact that unemployment remains unchanged definitely raises a lot of eyebrows. And the width of those confidence intervals is not exactly awe-inspiring.
Also, I dislike all the reports of hourly earnings going up by 0.8% , while revealing in-article that it's also paired with a reduction in hours resulting in real earnings only going up 0.5%. Its still good that it's going up....but not nearly as much as the headline would make you believe.
Just remember, U-3 "official unemployment" is at 3.9%. But once you add in "people employed part time for economic reasons but want full-time jobs", and other smaller numbers that should be counted, that number jumps up to 7.2%. Again, that's pretty normal for "good times," but it's indicative of how official numbers misrepresent economic reality for people. For reference, that 16% official peak in 2020 was in reality almost 23%.
Just to put some of these numbers into context, there does seem to be a bit of an upward trend in discouraged workers, but it also seems to be a pretty noisy measurement. I'm not sure an uptick in any given month can say much. Here are the numbers for the past few months: 345, 425, 346, 452. Looking at the the chart it seems like the current level is relatively low compared to the last few decades.
U-6 at 7.2% is not pretty normal, but near historic lows. From 2022 to 2023 we had two years of historic low U-6 at 6.9%. Prior to that, the data series going back to 1994 only has one year that averaged lower than 7.2%, which was the year 2000 at 7.0%. The average U-6 was also 7.2% in 2019. Every other year was higher than that. Given that the Fed is trying to slow down the economy, having a U-6 at near historic lows is actually great. If I try to think back at any of the times I could say that the economy was "pretty good," the U-6 was higher in all those years.
I wonder if the trend of "overemployment" is being reflected in these job growth numbers. In the days of in-person office work, it was very difficult for someone to work two full time jobs at once. But in many office jobs, the actual active work consumes less than half of your actual work hours. The rest gets taken up by meetings, schmoozing, or just working to look busy. But with work from home, you may be responsible only for your work output. A company may assign you the equivalent amount of work of a full-time in-person employee, but because you're free from the office time sinks, you can get full time work done on part time hours. Certain AIs may also be helping with this, especially for more generic tasks like emails, reports, etc. There are reports out of people using this to work 2 or 3 full time jobs. Sometimes they're caught, but often their work is high enough quality that it goes overlooked or unnoticed. In-person work is often so staggeringly inefficient that in some roles, one remote employee can do the work of 2-3 in-person workers. And even if they are caught, the worst consequence they can face is they get fired from one of their multiple jobs. The company could try to sue them, but what would their damages be? The overemployed worker completed all the tasks they were assigned, the company is just miffed the employee made them look bad. Also, no company wants the publicity of it being definitively proven that their regular in-person work process is comically inefficient. So the worst overemployed people face is dismissal.
There aren't a ton of people going this overemployment route, but it wouldn't take many to skew the numbers. If even just 1% of workers did this, that would be about 1.5 million people working multiple full time jobs. If 1.5 million overemployed people took on an extra job over the course of a year, that would represent 125,000 new jobs per month showing up on employment roles. And the existing systems really aren't set up to capture this kind of employment pattern. And hell, if you called people up who are doing this and asked if they worked multiple jobs, they would likely be hesitant to tell you the truth.
Personally I'll always take more free time for myself over a second job. I'd probably exercise half as much, cook less, clean less, have less time for hobbies. I like my job but there's a balance to be found and IMO it's around 25-30 hours per week of engaging work I can be passionate about.
Right, I feel that if someone is really that into hustling... why not just start a business or consultancy and make even more money?
Having been "overemployed" (before that term even entered my lexicon and am no longer overemployed) prior, it's less about hustling and more about maximizing the money spent for my time.
For example, how many hours does a person actually work during a typical 40 hour work week? 10 hours, 20 hours? Yet, a person is expected to be available the entire 40 hours. So if I'm going to be at a desk for double the amount of time that's actually required to do my job, why not get two jobs?
I'm bewildered that there are jobs that only have fewer than 20 hours of engaging work a week. I feel like my job has 45+ hours of engaging work a week. :|
Somebody's got to make the donuts.
It turns out there are a substantial number of jobs, that once you figure out the bottlenecks that was nessecitating someone working it for 40 hours, you can now do it in 20.
Sysadmining is one of those jobs. If your sysadmin is genuinely busy all the time, that's a bad thing.
A good sysadmin did all the interesting work up front for a few years, eliminating the 25 hours a week of firefighting, and now can keep things running smoothly for 5 hours a week and then maybe another 15 for looking forward.
In the before times, when it wasn't neccessary to tweak a UI 30 times a year to maximize engagement, when an app would eventually just hit maintainence mode, this was a pretty easy thing to do (provided you got on top of the firefighting).
The real reason for all the
systemdhate is because a whole lot of sysadmins had to rewrite a bunch of shit they had working for 20 years.Democrats have finally learned that if they don't rig the numbers to make themselves look as good as possible, then Republicans instead rig the numbers to make Republicans look as good as possible.
It only took them 60 years to learn this lesson :/
Either way I blame the media for sucking at their 4th estate jobs.
What numbers are rigged?
read the comment that I replied to
I did. What about that comment shows some numbers are rigged? Which numbers were rigged and what is the evidence that they were rigged?
I'm expressing agreement with the comment.
If only we were collectively smarter than this kind of BS! I also don't care about how gas prices correlate with a presidency or how many days they spend on vacation or golfing.
But I agree that I support numbers that make Democrats look good. I hate it, but they do need to do a better job of appealing to the general populace. If it requires cheap tricks to have actual progress, then so be it.
From an anecdotal view the job market sucks right now. I've been a developer for 20 years and have never seen such a bad job market as this one.
Yeah, tech jobs (and associated support roles) are going through a rough time right now. There are a lot of unemployed developers, project managers, recruiters, etc out there right now and it only seems to be getting worse. I kinda seems like the tech job bubble is bursting. Some of it was over-hiring during COVID, but I feel like we're well past that now.
I'd love to see a graph of new tech jobs per month. Maybe it would look something like this? The population of employed tech workers could still be going up, but the rate is way lower than it used to be, so there would be a huge backlog of laid-off workers.
Anecdotally, highly skilled tech workers are still in a good market. We're hiring people with machine-learning PhDs and they seem to be getting lots of attention. As a proven full-stack web dev I didn't have too much trouble when I was job searching last fall.
Yeah this market makes me wish I had studied nursing or something... at the time tech was as closed to a sure thing as you could get, but I suppose that might be why we are in this situation.
You'd have a job for certain, but the pay, at least in Nevada, is trash. The hours are flexible but it's really disappointing how underpaid nurses are.
Hah, I was actually considering the medical field when I was deciding careers and occasionally still have this thought. Nursing is very, very stable and has amazing work/life balance (3x12h shifts is considered full time). But doesn't pay nearly as well as software (at least not right now, we'll see what the future holds).
A traveling nurse moved in next to me a couple of years ago and seems pretty well paid. But maybe that was a covid era thing?
Very much a COVID era thing. Travel nursing still pays more than permanent positions, but it's nowhere near what it was during COVID since hospitals have been cutting travelers for a while now. My wife works for a hospital and I think they have gotten rid of all of their travelers (at least that was the plan).
Archive.is link.
Short article, and is a "developing story."Edited the link to include the longer, more complete article.
The article on the FT website is longer and not marked as a developing story. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a way to refresh the archive.today capture.
Does the longer article break down the wage and job growth by types of jobs or economic tier? Eg, if wages are only growing for the rich or everyone evenly, and how the poorest among us are doing?;
The article mostly discusses whether or not this will lead to a rate cut by the Fed and the issues in seasonal hiring which the data does not apparently take into account.
Hear a rumor from a loan officer that they're expecting rate cuts by June.
Makes sense....cheap debt makes for happy voters.
I don't think the rate cuts will be politically motivated – more that rates will come down because inflation has subsided and interest rates are pretty high compared to a 10-year average.
I think I was able to update the link. I updated the original comment but also here: https://archive.is/yBnMa