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shagieyesterday at 3:52 PM2 repliesview on HN

Comparing US job openings from 2024 to 2025 seems to be selective. Is the job in sudden decline? Or a reset to a norm? Or is the decline something that has been happening over even a longer timeframe?

Taking two years and drawing conclusions from those two years seems to miss larger pictures - especially when the mess of Covid and the pandemic years and that job market is mixed in with this. Yea, that's half a decade back but companies are still trying to figure out how much staff they need where.

Photography? Yes, that's likely been impacted. Compare https://web.archive.org/web/20230124085038/https://www.bls.g... and https://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/photographer... and the rate of growth has changed. However I'll also draw attention to the estimates that there's only a few thousand open positions with that classification each year. This includes self employed stock photographers and artists - corporate photographers have been a hard thing to get for a much longer timeframe (I looked into it a little bit back in '09). Additionally, artistic photography is impacted by the amount of money that regular people are willing to spend at art festivals and the like - that's gone down irrespective of AI.


Replies

rdsubhasyesterday at 4:28 PM

A few more steps (<< post-covid << covid << zero interest-rate << ...) to understand that there is no reliable baseline for this use case.

This subset is not perfect, but good enough.

GenerWorkyesterday at 5:59 PM

I agree with this. I'm a product designer, and apparently there's "only" been a decrease in job postings of 2.6%. That doesn't seem bad, however in late 2022 through all of 2023 people were getting canned left and right and the market was incredibly tough. Can't really have big decreases when you're near the bottom of the hole.