I would think the leading indicator would be Big Tech layoffs and hiring freezes that started months ago.

If I were to change my course of action, I'd use that since it happened way earlier.

i mean, even with hiring freezes and layoffs i'm still getting emails from recruiters (this month i got one from google amongst other companies).

Freezes are never absolute or company wide. It just means that it will be harder to get headcount. The recruiters keep filling the funnel at a lower pace.

I think everyone is getting emails from recruiters, and this will keep happening until the recruiters themselves are laid off. Good people are hard to find in any market, and if there's even a chance that you're a good person from your resume or current employer, you will keep getting these emails.

I feel like the big companies have nothing to lose from saying and doing these things. First it frees them of any guilty conscience to hack and slash at 'extra fat', second it allows them to get away with running skeleton teams. Third, it makes people who get solicited and receive a job offer feel "lucky" that they were given an offer in a "bad market".

There's no reason for them to not act like this. Unless a pile of startups are standing around throwing more money at engineers and loudly attracting google's talent away.

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

Leading indicator of the (overall) tech job market is a better way to put it. The job postings in The Who Is Hiring? threads are a small sliver of the overall industry.

It's a fine sample though.

I’m not sure it’s representative. It has a higher proportion of startups and a lower proportion of established non-tech companies who still often make tech hires

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.

That's basically true of all "leading indicators", and is summarized in the popular joke that "Economists have predicted 8 of the last 5 recessions".

Yeah, there are literally thousands of tech companies that don’t use HN.

Isn't it too early to count the total on October 4th?

OP wants to be early to report a trend. Too early and premature IMO, but he wants to be first, I guess.

Oh I don’t know about that. I would say the vast majority of a threads discussion happens in the first 12 hours here. The who’s hiring threads don’t have that much longer of a tail.