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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   16216 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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I'm going to pushback a bit at least on tech employment and present this data analysis posted on /r/cscareerquestions yesterday. Bolded mine:

From the data, several distinct periods can be identified:

Following the early 1990s recession and during the Clinton admin. economic and internet boom, tech employment increased exponentially at a 12% annual rate, peaking at 1.358 million in March 2001. It then collapsed in the dot-com bubble, up to an 18% downturn at its worst, and only recovered to the same level 6 years later, on March 2007. However, the market returned to growth in under 3 years.

The 2008 global financial crisis actually had only a limited impact on tech employment, since tech continued to boom during this time. From June 2009 to the pandemic in February 2020, tech employment increased in a remarkably stable and rapid linear growth pattern of around 80k per year.

The disruption caused by the pandemic was incredibly brief. It caused a net change of -70k, but by June 2020, hiring restarted at the fastest pace in history, around 130k per year. Having been a high schooler in this period, I definitely remember how insane the hype was around tech.

Hiring finally began to plateau beginning in May 2022. Total employment peaked at 2.483 million in March 2023. Ever since then, it has changed at a net rate of -42k a year.

The current slump is characterized by being less severe compared to the massive displacement of the dot-com bubble, which was much worse in percentage terms.

However, the current slump is also very protracted. This is the longest contiguous period of declining tech employment in the 36 years of data. That probably explains why this slump feels worse than anything in history. Even if it is not as intense as the dot-com bubble was, it is already longer, and it also followed the most rapid period of hiring in the history of tech.

It seems obvious that 2021-2022 overhiring has contributed to a disproportionately large glut of CS majors who had been expecting that 130k/yr employment growth rate when the market has actually suddenly shifted to -42k/yr, a gap in expectations of 172k.

This can be seen by the recent shifts in CS major enrollment. We can see enrollment as a rough 3-4 year lagging indicator for the sentiment of the candidate pool (since the data I have only tracks the employee pool, not how many people are applying for those positions). It started to drop rapidly this year.

So there is definitely a downturn in tech employment. And because tech ate the world, there are reverberations outward.

FRED source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ces6054150001

That's an interesting fact, but I don't see why it wouldn't show up in unemployment/underemployment figures. If fewer people are going into CS when there's a glut of workers and unemployment is stable... Seems everything is working as intended?

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