Looks like the data job market slowly thawing?

The (mostly) bi-weekly Thursday posts are normally for paid subscribers, but today's topic is ephemeral on nature so out it goes to everyone.

While the overall US job market (from the statistics released by the gov't) keep indicating that the labor market has been ultra tight the past few years, it's been a brutal stretch of time for tech and video games (I know there's other sectors affected, I'm just unfamiliar with them). Sadly, both industries tend to employ a bunch of data positions, so the data job market has been correspondingly brutal too.

Then over much of 2023 into early 2024, things just seemed extremely tight. At my company, I never had to do any interviews for new quant ux researchers, the random recruiter spam from LinkedIn completely stopped for once. I was obviously still seeing people I knew get randomly laid off all over the place.

Then since around the springtime, the layoffs because slightly less noticeable, and I had started getting the occasional random bad LinkedIn spam again. Recently I've even had to dust off my rusted-over interview skills and talk to candidates again every couple of weeks. Outside of my local bubble I've started seeing some people posting about open positions again.

All of that positive behavior is still much lower than in the boom times during the COVID hiring frenzy, but the tone is very clearly less bleak.

I'm not trying to make light of how tough the current job market continues to be. I still hear stories about how brutal the experience is on the side of the job seeker. But the supply of jobs seems to be recovering slightly now that industry has made new budgets and growth projections.

I hope that everyone out there searching doesn't lose heart and keep searching as more jobs come online