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This is wrong. Employers are adding employees, at a consistent rate of 200k or so per month for 7 years:

https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CES0000000001?output_view=ne...

The issue is that even with all these hires there is still a fairly large pool of people that want to work that don't currently have jobs. This is why wages aren't rising.



Filling cheap/temp jobs doesn't mean demand isn't weak.

If companies were truly desperate for people they would offer higher prices or even pay to train people to their standards.

I remember in the 90s, someone telling me that tech companies (even established ones like IBM) saying they were hiring anyone with a pulse, and that they were trained on the job instead of being asked for 20 years of experience with X, Y, and Z.

If you can afford to be so picky to only hire people that can answer absurd questions like why are manhole covers round or coding a minimum spanning tree operation on a whiteboard with 0 screwups, you do not have a very large demand for people.


I don't remember hiring being that lax in the 90s.

Microsoft used (and still uses) lots of contractors, but those were not secure jobs, nor did they provide much training opportunities.

Yes, during the dot-com boom, "HTML programmers" could be hired at startups with a minimum of experience, but this was hardly a long-lived trend.


Microsoft was the Facebook/Google of that time, they had the most stringent hiring requirements.


No, you can't look at a simple statistic like that and draw broad conclusions.

Yes, about 200k jobs are added per month. The question you have to ask yourself, the question that actually matters, is this: what kinds of jobs are those? Are we talking about well-paying white collar jobs with benefits that turn into stable careers, or temporary, low-paying jobs with no benefits that typically represent underemployment?


The vast majority of the jobs being added are full time positions.


200k/mo isn't really keeping ahead of the number of people entering the work force.


It is actually. That's why the unemployment rate has been steadily dropping.




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