But seriously, this is relative to other job postings, so you can't say it is necessarily a crash, it could just be that the diversity of job types is increasing, or other areas of the job market are growing faster than these particular ones.
Just in case the xkcd that crntaylor posted doesn't explain the situation well enough:
Let's assume that there's 10,000 total job postings in your graph. If the "rock star" trend grew from just 1 posting to just 70 postings, that would represent a 7000% growth over the period, even though "rock star" would still represent just .007 of the total market.
Growth graphs answer a very specific kind of question, and it's rarely the question that people mean to ask.
Or, put another way: click the "Absolute" link next to "Scale", under "engineer, programming, engineering, rock star Job Trends".
I think its an interesting way to drive traffic to the site. A variation on the "does this house from your neighborhood look like its worth a million bucks?" kinds of things I've seen Realtors do.
Any serious analysis of the health of the STEM job market would have to be a bit more rigorous than a text match search.
I think people are looking for candidates in alternative places, via Github, SE careers 2.0, coderwall, twitter, IRC, linkedin (direct connections), meetups, hacker news, and less via major job listing sites that indeed crawls. But it's a good question. Anyone feeling all of a sudden that it's easier to fill an engineer's position?
EDIT: the absolute graph is described as "percentage of matching job postings" so it's absolute (total number of jobs), but still "relative" to "other" job titles. so theoretically, one explanation could be that the economy was recovering faster on the tech industry, but now other sectors are catching up... (just a thought, not sure I'm even convinced, but still worth checking).
This is a chart of searches for jobs, not listings of available jobs, right? And it's at the top around 2008-2009 which was just around the time of the latest financial crisis?
Wouldn't this be more a sign of just the opposite, then? People have jobs and aren't searching for new ones?
That could also just mean that more people are going freelance, which if true could also explain the down trend in job postings on indeed if more employers are working with freelancers instead of hiring.
Absolutely true: it's the basis for a hypothesis more than anything. "Are there more availability tweets on Twitter in the last month than previous months?" However, if OP wants another data source to show what the Indeed graph is showing, using Twitter might prove interesting (or not)
The chart is based on relative percentage, not absolute counts. So it's useless - if more gardeners look for jobs on Indeed.com then the engineer/developer/etc lines in this chart drop off. The chart doesn't mean anything in isolation.
This seems like a reasonable explanation, given that "manager", "plumber", and "electrician" all show similar drop-offs. I wonder what is increasing enough to have such a visible effect, though.
You can't see them on the same graph since they're magnitudes are so different, so this isn't easy to see/I may be imagining things.
In relative percentage AND in the job offers that indeed.com have.
Maybe job's offers for dev is done by another way than indeed.com.
Maybe, as you suggest, there is a massive look for gardeners jobs.
Maybe, the dev's keywords are more specific (It seems not: other keywords like "javascript" or "ios" show the same graph).
Maybe there is effectively less demands than before.
this chart does not empirically prove this. It only proves that less people are trafficking in these jobs through Indeed. These kinds of jobs are increasingly being found through other channels.
Right. It could actually show a downturn in the market for job posting sites like monster. When I worked for Simply Hired, I thought it was really odd that I found the job through Craigslist, but the White House was calling us for hard numbers indicating demand for skills in the job market.
I mean, CL jobs would end up on Simply Hired as well, I just felt like we only had a slice, even if a big one, and we didn't know enough about the sample.
That's an interesting graph, and it seems like a material downturn, in my opinion. I wouldn't call it a crash though.
There could be a variety of reasons: fiscal cliff concerns, startup series A crunch, etc. My guess is that the FB IPO debacle had a huge impact on funding in Silicon Valley, which probably killed a lot of jobs. Whether or not that's a big deal going forward I don't know.
Interesting, especially considering today's headlines regarding a possible immigration agreement in Washington.
What I've read about it so far indicates that provision for more foreign tech worker visas will be shoe-horned into any agreement. I wonder if the mega body shops have insider information on this and are holding back to get cheaper labor.
Something changed, because I reviewed a few of these charts last month and they indicated no fall for any of the top trending words. So, they must have changed the way that they are rendering the data, or adjusted the data.
You may be on to something. Of the companies in your query, only Microsoft has results on the same scale as the 'engineer' query (6-8% of jobs posting). And, Microsoft has a downturn that is visually similar as the 'engineering' query. So, it could be that another big player or major deal recently landed and increased the job mix. Or, it could be an effect of Microsoft's recent recruiter layoff (I only know about this because a friend was affected -- no idea how widespread, etc.).
I don't know, but your data has a reasonable narrative.
Second one was Obama's first election. Jobs having "terrorist" in the name are not jobs for blowing up buildings, they're jobs beating the drum for Republicans. Then in 2010 the Republicans failed to take the Senate and in so doing realized that terrorism rhetoric wasn't having the same effect as it did a decade ago, so they started focusing on other things.
Since they appear to search some set of available online job listing sites, its clearly a change in the mix of listings at those sites -- but it doesn't even necessarily mean a change in relative number of tech jobs to other jobs available (much less a tech crash). Simply a burst in non-tech jobs being more widely posted to different job sites (or new job sites that are non-tech oriented being added to indeed.com's database) would produce this effect.
Also, tax. Is it seasonality? Is it a bigger trend in expansion of non-tech jobs? Is it more non-tech jobs getting posted more widely on job listing sites? Is it indeed.com indexing more sites that favor non-tech jobs? Is it something else? Is it a combination of some of these?
Really hard to tell.
Certainly not a strong basis for suspecting a tech collapse of any sort.
Also "work from home". I'm guessing something flooded the job boards in the last month with a single term (think something spammy!), combined with a seasonal downturn .
I'd be more inclined to hypothesize that companies are slowing down hiring after bringing on lots of people post-recession. It would be more concerning if numbers such as unemployment were creeping up.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 154 ms ] threadhttp://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=big+data%2C+mobile+apps%2C...
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=web+design%2C+graphic+desi...
But seriously, this is relative to other job postings, so you can't say it is necessarily a crash, it could just be that the diversity of job types is increasing, or other areas of the job market are growing faster than these particular ones.
No one wants a "Secretary" anymore, they want "Front-Office." "Office Assistant," and other buzz-worthy people.
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=front+office&l=
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=office+assistant&l=
is it really that surprising?
edit: ahaha, years. got it. thanks. :)
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=rock+star&l=
Compared to this: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=rock+star%2C+engineer%2C+p...
Let's assume that there's 10,000 total job postings in your graph. If the "rock star" trend grew from just 1 posting to just 70 postings, that would represent a 7000% growth over the period, even though "rock star" would still represent just .007 of the total market.
Growth graphs answer a very specific kind of question, and it's rarely the question that people mean to ask.
Or, put another way: click the "Absolute" link next to "Scale", under "engineer, programming, engineering, rock star Job Trends".
I think its an interesting way to drive traffic to the site. A variation on the "does this house from your neighborhood look like its worth a million bucks?" kinds of things I've seen Realtors do.
Any serious analysis of the health of the STEM job market would have to be a bit more rigorous than a text match search.
EDIT: the absolute graph is described as "percentage of matching job postings" so it's absolute (total number of jobs), but still "relative" to "other" job titles. so theoretically, one explanation could be that the economy was recovering faster on the tech industry, but now other sectors are catching up... (just a thought, not sure I'm even convinced, but still worth checking).
EDIT2: Seems that a clearly defined crash is not what most recruiters think about for 2013: http://media.dice.com/report/december-2012-special-edition-h...
Wouldn't this be more a sign of just the opposite, then? People have jobs and aren't searching for new ones?
Sounds like they're crawling sites like Monster.com and counting keywords.
You can't see them on the same graph since they're magnitudes are so different, so this isn't easy to see/I may be imagining things.
Edit: by which I actually mean that H&R Block is the largest seasonal employer (the Jeopardy question that ended Ken Jennings's run).
There could be a variety of reasons: fiscal cliff concerns, startup series A crunch, etc. My guess is that the FB IPO debacle had a huge impact on funding in Silicon Valley, which probably killed a lot of jobs. Whether or not that's a big deal going forward I don't know.
http://www.simplyhired.com/a/trends/aoccupation?ocp=Computer...
I know personally 2012 was a very bad year for I.T. here in Australia. But it has seem to be picking up a little since the start of 2013.
What I've read about it so far indicates that provision for more foreign tech worker visas will be shoe-horned into any agreement. I wonder if the mega body shops have insider information on this and are holding back to get cheaper labor.
Thus there's something funny going on
I don't know, but your data has a reasonable narrative.
financial crisis in effect: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=repo+&l=
no idea about this one: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=terrorist&l=
no idea about this one either: http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=escort&l=
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
Really hard to tell.
Certainly not a strong basis for suspecting a tech collapse of any sort.
http://www.indeed.com/jobtrends?q=2012&l=
I'd be more inclined to hypothesize that companies are slowing down hiring after bringing on lots of people post-recession. It would be more concerning if numbers such as unemployment were creeping up.