Lowest “Who is hiring?” Post Count in 30 Months

I don't know the intention of the author, but I see like a lot of "Look, it's happening! The economy is going down!" posts pop up these days. Which may be true, but it can also be a self-fulfilling profecy if everyone is doing that on all platforms. Which would be a shame.

I'm not saying HN and other platforms should censor (/ take action) either. It's just a thought I have on this subject, and I don't know if there is a solution.

I see what you are saying, but I think the impact of a post like this on something so intangible as "market sentiment" is extremely tenuous. It's hard to measure/quantify but I'd be shocked if it's more than a rounding error.

On the other hand, there are actual fundamentals like economy-wide inflation, employment numbers, GDP growth, supply/demand curves, etc., and it's important as an operator to have information about how the economy actually is, and more importantly how it's changing. I think the benefit of a post like this is much less tenuous; it provides insight into how the broader market conditions are panning out in our specific corner of the economy.

So yes, every measurement perturbs the system under measurement. In some cases that can be substantial. But in this case I don't think it is so.

I believe the intent is to share as a possible leading indicator. I don't know the OP's exact reasoning, but I have tracked this data for years at hntrends.com and it was my original thesis that this thread is a leading indicator of the tech job market at a minimum.

How can you call it a leading indicator of the tech job market when it is a tech job market?

Not the author but I would assume they mean that "Who is hiring" was indicative of the job market outside the HN thread itself, in a macro-perspective.

It is a pretty narrow segment of a much larger market, presumably.

"Startups quit hiring first," sounds like a leading indicator on the surface, but if you think about it that also means that they will stop hiring during smaller dips that later pick back up. Every big dip has to do through the smaller dip state, but since plenty of smaller dips recover it is still a martingale - unless it isn't, but if it isn't that's the cause of my surprise.

> I don't know the intention of the author

Why does his intent matter unless you think the data is being skewed or misrepresented? Seems like a fairly objective factual post to me (but I didn’t run the numbers myself).

I would appreciate if data observations like this always included the script so people could easily (and quickly) verify the results, but that’s just a personal knit pick.

"Look, it's happening! The economy is going down!"

I agree this can be a self fulfilling prophecy. A lot of larger tech companies were announcing hiring freezes or restructuring months ago to get ahead of the downturn.

But I also think we could restate the quote above in ways that are actually true. For example, a lot of these posts are startups and monetary policy is slowing or shrinking the money available for VC. It makes sense that we see slower hiring. The past few years have probably been above historical VC funding levels anyways, so we may be returning to a more historical level for the next few years (or who knows?).

We're also heading into the holiday season, and notably "Open Enrollment" for health insurance, which is titanic industry who typically freezes their code in September. Lots of companies slack off or halt their hiring, particularly health insurance during this period.

And also all the inflation and recession action going on.

So it's likely a combination of the two.

This could be considered a good thing. The whole point of increasing interest rates is to lower business investment and consumer purchasing power, which is what we need to do to combat inflation (or magically fix all supply chain issues.)

Zimbabwe has 200% interest rates and 280% inflation iirc

https://www.africanews.com/2022/06/28/zimbabwes-key-interest...

Why am I being downvoted? All this is is a data point showing that rising interest rates don't have to bring down inflation.

I don't think people should downvote you for disagreement, but I do disagree with your analysis. The US has a system where the Fed lets banks manage the money creation, and they control that by changing the interest rates to change the bank's incentives. In Zimbabwe, the government prints money directly (or at least they did under the Mugabe government, I am not up to date on their current affairs), which means that the central bank interest rate doesn't restrain their money supply growth.

That does have some relevance to the US because the federal government can borrow+spend way more than a small country with a bad credit score - but since the interest rates they borrow at are coupled to the Fed rate, rising rates should in theory slow that down.

The Fed is a creature of Congress, which is to say that Congress completely controls the Fed. The Fed was created by an act of Congress and can be restructured, abolished, or otherwise changed however Congress likes by subsequent acts of Congress. Indeed, in the history of US central banking, Congress has done so before. Therefore, the Fed's continued existence is predicated on not motivating a congressional majority plus the executive or alternatively a veto-proof congressional majority to change things. Practically and observably speaking, that means when Congress says "print" the Fed says "brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr." There is no operational limit on how much money Congress can spend. There are real limits though, in particular the productive capacity of the economic zone that does business in US dollars. If, for example, China were to withdraw from the dollar denominated global market, it would be a severe supply shock and result in massive inflation.

Furthermore, most money in the USA isn't even reserves, but rather bank deposits. Theoretically bank deposits are supposedly somehow constrained by reserves, but that hasn't really been true for well over a decade. Raising rates doesn't directly impair banks ability to originate as many new loans and corresponding deposits as they care to. Conceivably, higher rates could reduce the demand for loans from credit-worthy borrowers, or even reduce the pool of credit-worthy borrowers directly, but I'm not sure it doesn't end up being a wash after accounting for inflation.

Personally I suspect most of the effects that we do see are related to hysteresis rather than a fundamental transmission mechanism from interest rates. That is to say, the shocking effects we see from rate increases aren't due to a fundamental change, but rather a lag while market participants to catch up with the new rules of the game.

Another important factor is the prestige media using all of its persuasive powers to convince market participants that Fed actions will result in a downturn. There certainly is a large psychological component to economic activity.

Zimbabwe's economy is non-functional. Stats for inflation and interest rates aren't meaningful to anywhere else. There's no real applicable lessons other than to look at it and feel bad for Zimbabweans stuck in that situation.

> This could be considered a good thing.

Lower wages, lower job mobility, asset deflation, consumable inflation -- YAY!

It is still wild to me that this is the approach we are taking, things are getting too expensive so let's shrink the economy. That can't be the best solution. We are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Not shrink. Slow the growth of. Decelerate is different from stop.

The real problem isn't any particular position, velocity, nor even acceleration. Those can all be planned for. It's the 4th time-derivative, jerk, that messes us up.

It's the only way we know of to stop greed/fomo running rampant. Folks need to be put in a time-out to cool off and force them to reprioritize. We like to think of the market as this calculated and rational entity. It's far from that, in fact it's closer to the opposite of that. The other option is to do price control, but that won't fly in capitalism.

Another option for lowering inflation is increasing productivity to allow the same amount of money to chase more goods and services, thus resulting in lower prices.

This isn’t 1980, raising interest rates doesn’t fix supply chain issues. This isn’t inflation it’s a real supply shortage. By the fed doesn’t seem to know how to help with that so, let’s just tank everything. Killing demand to get workers back to lower wages and unemployment up seems to be that real goal.

There is a supply shortage in some areas... and there is price inflation as well. That's actually what you'd expect with a supply shortage that isn't very evenly distributed anyway, but when you add dramatic expansion of the money supply in a period of very low interest rates on top of that, you'd certainly expect to see dramatic price inflation to match, as we have. The idea that a supply shortage is causing all of this seems insane.

Within a single firm, particularly large ones, surpluses and deficits can be communicated absolutely and crises can be practically eliminated. (It would be unthinkable for Amazon to leave the coordination of its processes up to some sort of internal free market.) As for action between firms, the anarchy of the market is fundamental to capitalism. Real competition is a basic characteristic of capitalism and so perfect information is not a tendency of the system (despite its theoretical elevation in neoclassical economics).

So, no, there is no solution. To avoid crises of overproduction (including the subsequent adjustments), the planning that takes place within the capitalist firm has to be extended to the global network of production.

It seems you're advocating for a centrally planned economy, but from history we see that it doesn't work. It seems that there is simply too much in an economy for one entity to wholly plan. It can work in a smaller organization like Amazon (and even then, I'm sure teams compete for allocation of resources, it's not all centrally planned) but not at large. We see that people in centrally planned economies revert to underground black markets, signifying that somehow markets are a key to functioning economies.

> a self-fulfilling profecy (sic)

I think Powell jacking up the fed funds rate is going to have a much larger effect than some random HN post.

> Which may be true, but it can also be a self-fulfilling prophecy if everyone is doing that on all platforms. Which would be a shame.

This also happens with inflation. It is probably because people start acting differently. The hypothesis is that if people are preparing for a recession then demand goes down, which pushes prices up, which is identical to inflation. Obviously this model is far too simplistic but it is still interesting.

Why do you say that softening demand will cause prices to go up? That sounds contrary to every economics lesson I've ever had.

What? That’s opposite of how it should work. Lower demand depresses prices.

Well empirically lower demand does not lead to higher prices. The hopes and dreams of sustained profits are dashed by the coercive forces of competition. It's very sad.

That's not how it works.

Revenue is the area of the rectangle "price times volume". (Profit is "revenue minus costs".) Businesses want to maximize the area of that rectangle.

If a business thinks they can keep the area of that rectangle the same by increasing the price dimension, that will cause buyers to react by shrinking the volume dimension. That might yield the same effective area for the rectangle, but then also might not.

"The hypothesis is that if people are preparing for a recession then demand goes down, which pushes prices up"

This makes no sense at all. even the inverse makes no sense, if people preparing for a recession stopped buying goods, prices would go go down not up, which obviously would not cause inflation. This idiocy of saying that inflation comes from the people, and not from monetary policy, is depressing. It guarantees that governments will keep having a free pass to print as much colored paper as they want.

Almost as depressing as this belief that the (US) government just prints money.

Presumably enough employers have stopped posting to be statistically significant. I know I did; finding one qualified candidate in a sea of 50 bootcamp grad applicants for an explicitly staff-level position just wasn’t worth the effort. Worse was when I was threatened with an ageism lawsuit because our recruiters didn’t want to move forward with a guy with 10+ <1 year job stints became immediately argumentative in the recruiter phone screen.

Who is hiring vs. wants to be hired (top-level) post count disparity could be a fun one to track.

Here's the chart for those threads, which isn't too exciting: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kqUnALPvgpM6HiK5s-GP...

Although I'm not sure why 2019 ushered in much better performance on those threads.

I actually check that sometimes. Anecdotally, I remember the ratio being ~4.5 in 2019, then ~3.5 during the pandemic. This month it's at 1.8

I don't know if it really means anything though.

It might at least control for changes in the hackernews popularity.

Has anyone actually gotten much success in either direction (hirer/candidate) from these posts?

My current position is directly attributable to a "who wants to be hired?" post where the founders reached out to me directly. I have gotten to final offer stage with at least four companies in the past two years, and had several dozen more interesting conversations about potential opportunities that have all come through the "who wants to be hired?" thread.

I post every month on the "who wants to be hired?" thread except for when the 1st of the month falls on a weekend or a national holiday in the US. Why? Because the number of people reading the thread, and the number of people posting on "who is hiring?" threads dips precipitously when the 1st of the month falls on the weekend or a national holiday in the US.

Most of the outreach I get from founders through "who wants to be hired?" is low-effort "we'll pay you in exposure!" or "well you can't live on what we're paying in any major meotropolitan area but think of the equity when we IPO!" but occasionally there is a diamond in the rough that reaches out. My current job was one of those diamonds.

The difference between entrepreneurs who "get it" when selling their company on the "who is hiring thread?" and those that don't is stark. And even more stark is the difference between entrepreneurs selling their company to prospective hires on the "who is hiring thread?" vs developers selling their skillset on the "who wants to be hired?" thread. It is the difference between selling features vs selling benefits writ large.

That's really neat to hear your experience, and I'm glad to see there are some successes! I wonder if the success rate is higher than similar job boards or linkedin-esqe spam outreach.

Also, can you expand a bit more on the "those who get it" vs "those who don't"? What are you looking for here? What do you mean selling features vs. benefits?

I posted in "who wants to be hired" a few times, and a few people reached out. About 50% seem to be somewhat targeted to the message. At least one lead to an offer (which I declined for other reasons, it was a fair and interesting offer though).

"Who is hiring" never worked out for me, as the geographic limitations are too strict or confusingly worded. Looking through 400 posts to figure out which are actually open to hire someone from europe is not as promising as looking through dedicated job portals.

At a previous job, HN's "Who's Hiring" was by far our most successful job posting. Frankly it was the only successful recruiting method of those we tried (setting aside personal referrals).

Yes! I was hired for my current role several years ago from a Who’s Hiring post.

I got hired for my current role after posting on "Who wants to be hired". Around ~10 companies reached out.

I got hired for my current job based on a "who wants to be hired" thread. I've also been reached out to 2-3 times based on comments I've made (some recent, some a few weeks/months old) on HN asking me to interview for a position.

I got previous two jobs via Who's Hiring. And, indirectly, my current job due to networking from the previous.

I also recently interviewed for another position advertised via Who's Hiring. I didn't take the offer, but it was a very close decision.

I was hired into a super fun startup from a Who's Hiring post back in 2012. Thanks for this service!

I found out from an ad on here that a startup in a field I am interested in were based 2 minutes from my flat and were hiring, so I got in in touch and ended up working there for 5 years and had a lot of fun, made some great friends and it moved my career in a really interesting direction. I’d never have thought of applying to them otherwise so it worked out well for me!

I've gotten a lot of work through the monthly freelancer thread.

I posted as a candidate in one thread over the summer and got contacted by ~10 companies and did a handful of interviews — a couple were duds with non-technical founders casting a wide net but others were solid opportunities. I also applied to a few jobs from that same month's employers thread and got to the offer stage with one of those companies.

I had enough success to try again the next time I am looking for a new gig.

I get a fair number of good resumes from these threads.

I was hired at my current company because I responded to a who’s hiring post almost 2 years ago

I think I posted in one once or twice and had ~3 people reach out to me about roles. One ended up being promising, but I had to pull out for a family emergency that kept me from being able to participate.

Its a sample size of 1, but I found my previous job through a whoishiring post.

I feel like people are trying to wish the economy into a recession / depression, but I really don't see it happening. I do see some belt tightening wrt SaaS expenditures. There's still a massive demand for labor.

While the housing market has fallen, the actual cost of buying a house is still rising. Rate increases have well outpaced the list price reductions.

So I think all this talk of a recession is just a bunch of reporters trying to jeer people into that state of mind for clicks.

> "I feel like people are trying to wish the economy into a recession / depression, but I really don't see it happening."

Depending on your personal financial circumstances, it may be many months before you end up "seeing this with your own eyes". Inflation won't eat up your savings over night - but over a period of 5-10 years, combined with increasing energy prices, interest rates, costs of living and salary stagnation? A lot can change. It's a boiling frog situation...

It feels like _something_ is happening, but it's not quite the recession that people are fearing. The US is somehow at the lowest unemployment rates we've seen and people are saying it's all going to collapse which just feels off. If the US hits 5% unemployment that simultaneously worse off than where we are but still a solid economic position.

My pet theory is that everyone is just tired, so damned tired, and seeps into everything.

Remember that people that are not employed are only considered "unemployed" in that metric if they have been "looking for a job".

If you stop looking for 4 weeks, you're not employed but not "unemployed" (in their numbers).

Tired of (or from) what?

With the major exception of the pandemic/remote work, the world is not markedly different than it was in 2013 or 2003. What makes it seems like 2023 is so different?

Something that is very hard to measure WRT unemployment is the number of people that dropped out of the workforce during COVID. There's also poor reporting on underemployment. I'm not saying that to say the US is just going to drop into a recession or something, it's just unemployment numbers have always been very loose figures.

We could have low unemployment but high underemployment and end up with a similar softening of consumer demand just because people don't have the discretionary income to buy stuff. Underemployment combined with inflation is extra painful.

Now figure out how many "who is hiring?" threads have been posted on Saturday, Sunday or a national holiday in the US and compares those numbers against any others.

Months when the 1st falls on a Saturday or Sunday.

  May & October 2016
  January, April, July & October 2017
  April, July, September & December 2018
  June, September, December 2019
  February, March, August & November 2020
  May & August 2021
  January, May, October 2022

Whilst I think your numbers are reasonably accurate, and there is "other things going on" to push those numbers down, I don't think they paint the full picture. There is a definite slow-down towards the end of each year.

Would be interesting to see this chart: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13yGlJzFpVzZ-WNHAOsdo...

With traffic stats for HN, so we could see if there was a change in traffic/participation, or something else.

My personal thought is that many startups have been advised by investors to trim the sails for less follow on capital for a while, and that results in more conservative hiring. What I'm seeing at the day job (I have a recruiting tech platform), is that non-tech companies have plenty of open tech jobs to go around - and still can't find enough people.

Mind sharing some cool facts regarding your experience from the platform?

What is currently in demand, what is desirable?

My theory, YC software team has been building features like https://www.workatastartup.com/ and so YC companies are posting less on HN.

Or companies are cutting spending in anticipation of a recession.

Or HN traffic is down. Or people don't hire into the holiday season, or tech is down. There are countless things that could drive that number. We can't tell from a few monthly counts.

No. It's the answer that fulfills your own confirmation bias. "Obvious" is never a word you should use when you can quantify the truth.

No, it's the obvious answer, so it's less interesting to speculate about than alternative, less obvious answers.

Most of the titans are in a hiring freeze or have choked non essential hiring.

I've been seeing the YC software team disaggregate HN features to make it easier for founders to run their startups:

Ask HN is now sort of part of YC Startup School where founders can ask people in the community about their startup issues.

Show HN is now Launch YC: https://www.ycombinator.com/launches

Most of the Who's Hiring posts are non-YC companies

We've had a good run in tech, but I don't think it's necessarily over. Well the days of social media and advertising might be limited, there's still a wide world of technological advances that I think can make good businesses.

also consider the whole chain --

From the layoffs I've observed Recruiters were some of the top laid off roles.

Less recruiters means prioritization of efforts.

HN Who's hiring is probably a low priority platform. (Recruiter's boss doesn't know what it is, hard to instrument for tracking metrics)

If you really want to know how many jobs are out there it's better to index and crawl all the companies jobs page directly. Albeit much much harder to do than a single HN thread per month.

I would be curious to know if Who's Hiring is recruiters or other devs/founders. I always assumed other devs or founders.

Do we know what is happening with HN engagement overall? I assume it's monotonically increasing, but, maybe not?

Looking at September's Who is Hiring [0] it does look like there are quite a few posts many days into the month. I don't think we can draw many conclusions on this data until the end of the month to be honest.

Saying that last month had 536 posts, and that that was a low since June of 2020 seems much more interesting IMO.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32677265

Do you have data for the past 12 months rather than only October? That way, we can observe how gradual (or not) the curve was.

All data in CSV format would be ideal if someone has it to share via gist or such.

Here's a chart from the thread I linked above: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13yGlJzFpVzZ-WNHAOsdo...

EDIT: I generated a new sheet for the chart with up-to-date data and fixed a data issue noted below.

Does anyone have any idea _why_ there's a peak in Q1 2020?

So that appears to be a fun edge case with that quick SQL query!

The spike was in March which was the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States/shelter-in-place, which was a time of odd behavior and so a spike wouldn't be too weird.

It turns out that dang posted a special whoishiring soon after which was massively popular: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22665398

I thought I filtered out nonstandard threads in the query:

   WITH whoishiring_threads AS (
      SELECT id FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full`
      WHERE `by` = "whoishiring" 
      AND REGEXP_CONTAINS(title, "Ask HN: Who is hiring?")
    )

...but that filter is a regex, and in a regex the `?` is a modifier character and not a literal. So the query will combine the counts of both the top-level comments of that thread and the original one.

Data science is fun like that, and surprisingly not the first time I've made that particular query mistake.

I can reflect that we saw this happening in real life hiring. Remote hiring competition got FIERCE from the beginning of the pandemic and really through most of 2021. It has since settled out quite a bit.

There was a combination of large companies needing programmers to enable remote work or process changes due to the pandemic, stimulus funds causing a lot of VC funding to hit startups, hiring binges at FAANG companies, and everyone suddenly being remote-friendly.

Covid opening up more companies to the idea of remote workers? Or forcing development to fill gaps of processes that used to happen offline?

Things that used to be done in person suddenly went online and everyone was in a rush to make that transition happen quickly and smoothly.

The jobs market goes in cycles, sometimes there are less roles, sometimes there are more roles.

Don't fret about the state of the market - you can't do anything and it is irrelevant.

Focus on making sure your skills are up to date and you network and put yourself in the best position.

If there are a hundred less roles, it doesn't matter if you are in the top 10%, even the top 50% - just be better than average and you'll be fine.

Actually, what's going on is the job market is waiting to collapse until I've just about finished my thesis. As soon as I really need a job, we're doomed. The problem is, the universe needs to fill in the backstory, so my unexpected delays have messed up it's ability to build the narrative. On the bright side, my laggardly pace may have fended things off until after the midterms.

I'll let you all know when I've scheduled my defense so that you can start stockpiling gas, food, ammo, and whatever else.

Any analysis such as this should account for seasonality and/or some sort of trending.

Not saying the results would different, but just comparing arbitrary dates for this sort of data is not going to give you data to derive any meaningful conclusions.

Is there seasonality? Like hiring slows down into the end of the year, is my guess. In which case, can you get 10-15 years of HN posts? Then you would need to adjust by user base as well..

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ICNSA << in fact, Jobless Claims are typically seasonally adjusted. Non-seasonal adjustment indicates claims spike around start/end of the year. The idea being, all else equal, if same amount of people get hired/fired every month, but supply of jobs dips, then claims go up...

Conclusion: not enough data points.

It definitely continues through October, though; it usually drops off in December.

The last quarter of the year is not really a huge time for hiring.. a lot of companies are finishing up their budgets and waiting for new ones to hit to post jobs in the new year..

Its down >50% year over year (which should be seasonally adjusted):

October 2021 [1]: 853 posts

October 2022 [2]: 415 posts

Not an exact comparison, as some posts will continue to trickle in to Oct 2022, but its still a sharp decline.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28719320

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33068421

These are posted every month. If you want to make a point then graph all of them rather than pick out three random data points.

I've thought about tapping into the HN BigQuery dataset (or perhaps the HN API, whichever is more appropriate) to analyze the results of the Who's Hiring posts and their companion Who Wants to be Hired posts. I think aggregation of this data will paint an interesting picture for job-seekers and other technology professionals as to what's hot, what's not, what employers are looking for (and not), as well as other trends.

Does anyone know if such a resource already exists? Don't want to duplicate effort.

Minor but I wish it got posted only on business days when it falls on a weekend. I tend to wait until the following Monday but then we usually lost in all the other comments.

> This account automatically submits a 'Who is Hiring?' post at 11 AM Eastern time on the first weekday of every month.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring

> A regular "Who Is Hiring?" thread appears on the first weekday of each month

From the FAQ

I genuinely don’t understand what the purpose of such a thread would be.

* Weird sense of relief? (“At least I wasn’t laid off!”)

* Gloating? (“Ha! I knew that wildly successful company wasn’t so great!”)

* Determine if a particular company is shrinking headcount? (Seems unreliable at best.)

Something else?

Good signal not to apply. I won't join a firm that has recently had layoffs for obvious reasons.

I like https://www.trueup.io/layoffs a bit more because of the stacked chart. I was [pleasantly] surprised that September layoffs were less than half of the ones in the previous month.

No one knows what the economic forecast looks like these days, and anyone that thinks they do is fooling themselves. Whats happening in the EU/GB is very real, and uncoordinated inflationary control measures are amplifying issues.

Around Q2/Q3 of 2023 we should have most supply chains stabilized again, and a better estimate of actual market demand.

Hang on, it is going to be one volatile winter... ;)

On past who is hiring threads I seen posts throughout the month, but in September it seems it only lasted about the first week before new posts stopped.

Perhaps the posts were restricted to a certain time frame, or coincidence?

Day of the week matters. I didn’t post my job postings because I didn’t look at hacker news on Saturday.

The who is hiring post is always done on the first business day of the month. In this case it was Monday, not Saturday.

So you're saying that the economy was worse in 2016 than it is now? That is the only possible direct conclusion I can read from your research.

You could both be making more money and have more money in the bank, but if you're worried you might be laid off soon you might not spend as much as you did last year.

I do have to comment that while I see a lot of job postings online (incl. HN), the requirements are going up as crazy.

People wanting a Mobile Developer with knowledge both in iOS and Android, and it wouldn't hurt if you knew some crass platform solution also.

I see posting with wanting 8+ years in a particular framework or language...

Am I the only one who finds that insane? I know that before "the requirements" were more like "wants" and if you are a good candidate, the company will give you a chance, but I have had situations right now where the recruiter would just answer point blank that all of the requirements must be met...

How are people with under 2,3,4 years of experience supposed to find a better paying job?

God forbid if you are fresh from college...

Well, third quarter in the row — now it is finally a recession, or what?

Nah, that’s how it was defined historically, it has been changed to be defined in another way in order to influence certain demographics.

I heard this argument and thought the same, but looking into it there is no standard definition for a recession. Two quarters is a nice layman version people share, but it does involve other factors. This isn't something that's changed recently, economic textbooks from the early 2000s say this too. Just something some people heard and ran with :)

When people hear these anecdotes, check yourself! In an era of fake news and bubbles you have to be accountable to yourself by researching if common sayings are really true before sharing them.