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0 pointsshostack10y ago0 comments

I think you forgot another important metric:

* Are the startups that are hiring taking up enough of the talent compared to large established companies with billions in the bank such that if there were a bubble, and it were to pop, it would actually make an impact on the hiring environment.

I'd love to see some hard data on the % of people employed by the "startup ecosystem" vs. large established giants like Google, FB, Apple, Adobe, MS, Amazon, etc. These companies have MASSIVE hiring needs and will likely continue to for some time. Should interest rates cause lots of startups to die, I have a hard time believing it would result in a similar situation to the last dotcom bust. Salaries might be depressed for a while, but these giants would still be fighting each other to swoop up the talent.

I'd seriously love to see some hard data on how much of an economic impact it would have in the Bay Area housing market and the public markets in general if all of the funded startups were to go poof overnight. My current bet is "not much in the scope of things."

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uglysexy10y ago

Hiring is definitely a good indicator of the bubble bursting because hiring indicates that startups are getting funding and they turn around and hire people. When the funding dries up, these same startups tighten the belt, the hiring drops and then the layoffs start.

A good indicator of a bubble in SF/SV startups is measuring the IT job market using local Craiglist and Dice job postings since startups heavily use them.

I used both websites on & off since the late 90s to find contract & permanent full-time jobs. Back then at the height of the dot-coms, the Dice home page showed 120,000+ jobs, right after the crash (2001-2003) that number fell to around 20,000-30,000. Now it's around 80,000.

On Craigslist, at the dot com height, the Software section for the Bay Area (https://sfbay.craigslist.org/search/sof) had so many job postings per day that the list of postings for that day would spill over to the next page (there are 100 listings per page). A year & a half ago (late 2014) there was a good amount of postings and I got a frenzy of replies when I contacted them. Now, there's only a handful of postings per day.

shostackOP10y ago

I guess I'm making a clear distinction between "startup" (ie. no clear business model or path to profitability yet) vs. "established tech giant."

The latter has such massive hiring needs in comparison that even if funding dried up (which they do not need since they have lots of profit and are already oftentimes publicly traded), I don't think it would slow down the market THAT much.

uglysexy10y ago

Tech giants do have funding in the form of CapEx. Like Apple throwing money into their 'Apple Car' project or Twitter doing the same into building new features. These tech giants have these semi-independent projects that have that 'startup' feel. Google has many of these, including their self-driving car team.

When these tech giants have layoffs - usually in the 100s or 1000s - it's a big hit to the job market. May not be reflected on Craigslist or Dice, but there'll be a lot more job-seekers. Instead of getting 50 resumes per job posting, hiring managers would be getting hundreds.

paulddraper10y ago

Yahoo and AOL aren't hiring these days.

"To big too fail" isn't a thing.

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0 pointsshostack10y ago0 comments

I think you forgot another important metric:

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uglysexy10y ago

A good indicator of a bubble in SF/SV startups is measuring the IT job market using local Craiglist and Dice job postings since startups heavily use them.

shostackOP10y ago

I guess I'm making a clear distinction between "startup" (ie. no clear business model or path to profitability yet) vs. "established tech giant."

uglysexy10y ago

paulddraper10y ago

Yahoo and AOL aren't hiring these days.

"To big too fail" isn't a thing.

1 more reply

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse