Lowest “Who is hiring?” Post Count in 30 Months October 2022 - 408 April 2020 - 608 January 2016 - 471 First time the thread has been under 600 posts since January 2016. Posts still trickle in throughout the month but the first 12 hours is when the majority of posts show up. I'm sure someone could do a more thorough analysis of post count but the overall number is unusually low. |
Does anyone know if such a resource already exists? Don't want to duplicate effort.
Not saying the results would different, but just comparing arbitrary dates for this sort of data is not going to give you data to derive any meaningful conclusions.
When people hear these anecdotes, check yourself! In an era of fake news and bubbles you have to be accountable to yourself by researching if common sayings are really true before sharing them.
A lack of posts can't be interpreted as a lack of hiring.
No, we don't know that. If you do, you'll make quite the killing on the stock market.
The whole point with remote is the global part. That with the internet anyone can work with anything anywhere.
do you really think you are going to be paid CA salaries while being in thailand? not likely to happen.
I'm not saying HN and other platforms should censor (/ take action) either. It's just a thought I have on this subject, and I don't know if there is a solution.
If I were to change my course of action, I'd use that since it happened way earlier.
“ The Best Time To Start A Business Is During A Downturn”
Why does his intent matter unless you think the data is being skewed or misrepresented? Seems like a fairly objective factual post to me (but I didn’t run the numbers myself).
I would appreciate if data observations like this always included the script so people could easily (and quickly) verify the results, but that’s just a personal knit pick.
Because the data can be cherry-picked, intentionally or un-intentionally, similar to https://xkcd.com/882/
If you believe a trend exists (or just want to find evidence for it for other reasons) and you keep looking for statistical evidence of it, you're going to find it.
I agree this can be a self fulfilling prophecy. A lot of larger tech companies were announcing hiring freezes or restructuring months ago to get ahead of the downturn.
But I also think we could restate the quote above in ways that are actually true. For example, a lot of these posts are startups and monetary policy is slowing or shrinking the money available for VC. It makes sense that we see slower hiring. The past few years have probably been above historical VC funding levels anyways, so we may be returning to a more historical level for the next few years (or who knows?).
Alternately, I think a lot of companies are using the spector of a recession as cover for reducing unproductive or unnecessary headcount.
Over-hiring is an issue that's difficult to correct. If you do a round of layoffs, the perception is that you're in financial duress. This can affect investor and consumer confidence.
It's also difficult to explain to the public and to employees "oops, mia culpa! We asked you to upend your life to take a job with us, but our bad, we don't really need you."
I see it as similar to the way a lot of businesses implemented cost-cutting measures during covid that they had very much wanted to do, but couldn't because of the worry that they'd lose a competitive edge. Many of these measures had nothing to do with public safety and everything to do with cost cutting.
On the other hand, there are actual fundamentals like economy-wide inflation, employment numbers, GDP growth, supply/demand curves, etc., and it's important as an operator to have information about how the economy actually is, and more importantly how it's changing. I think the benefit of a post like this is much less tenuous; it provides insight into how the broader market conditions are panning out in our specific corner of the economy.
So yes, every measurement perturbs the system under measurement. In some cases that can be substantial. But in this case I don't think it is so.
The current stated goal of the Federal Reserve is to raise the unemployment rate from 3.7% to a target of 4.4%.
What you are remarking on as possibly a self-fulfilling prophecy is instead the result of official policy achieving its goal.
Pretty sure a recession is two quarters of negative growth. Rationalization hamster wheels notwithstanding.
Not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.
And also all the inflation and recession action going on.
So it's likely a combination of the two.
https://www.africanews.com/2022/06/28/zimbabwes-key-interest...
Why am I being downvoted? All this is is a data point showing that rising interest rates don't have to bring down inflation.
Lower wages, lower job mobility, asset deflation, consumable inflation -- YAY!
...
I think Powell jacking up the fed funds rate is going to have a much larger effect than some random HN post.
that's not really how it works though, and it should absolutely not be a concern (it's quite common to get a sort of tech-industry tunnel vision while discounting the bigger picture or regional focuses.)
I've always argued that downturns are a natural part of every business cycle and perhaps instead of trying to avoid them, we plan for their inevitable occurrence.
"maybe it won't be a recession. maybe it will be. what i can tell you for sure is that it will be the first of its kind in real-time, full surround, three dimensional, quintophonic social media stereo."
economics is the study of population behavior. remember that.
So, no, there is no solution. To avoid crises of overproduction (including the subsequent adjustments), the planning that takes place within the capitalist firm has to be extended to the global network of production.
This also happens with inflation. It is probably because people start acting differently. The hypothesis is that if people are preparing for a recession then demand goes down, which pushes prices up, which is identical to inflation. Obviously this model is far too simplistic but it is still interesting.
This makes no sense at all. even the inverse makes no sense, if people preparing for a recession stopped buying goods, prices would go go down not up, which obviously would not cause inflation. This idiocy of saying that inflation comes from the people, and not from monetary policy, is depressing. It guarantees that governments will keep having a free pass to print as much colored paper as they want.
This isn’t some insidious campaign to crash the economy by showing that the economy is finally cooling off. Getting inflation under control is good long term but it will be painful.
This thread by myself contains a BigQuery to reproduce the data + a chart of Who is Hiring posts over time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31675750
Here's a new chart of up-to-date data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/13yGlJzFpVzZ-WNHAOsdo...
While the housing market has fallen, the actual cost of buying a house is still rising. Rate increases have well outpaced the list price reductions.
So I think all this talk of a recession is just a bunch of reporters trying to jeer people into that state of mind for clicks.
Although I'm not sure why 2019 ushered in much better performance on those threads.
I don't know if it really means anything though.
Ask HN is now sort of part of YC Startup School where founders can ask people in the community about their startup issues.
Show HN is now Launch YC: https://www.ycombinator.com/launches
With traffic stats for HN, so we could see if there was a change in traffic/participation, or something else.
My personal thought is that many startups have been advised by investors to trim the sails for less follow on capital for a while, and that results in more conservative hiring. What I'm seeing at the day job (I have a recruiting tech platform), is that non-tech companies have plenty of open tech jobs to go around - and still can't find enough people.
What is currently in demand, what is desirable?
From the layoffs I've observed Recruiters were some of the top laid off roles.
Less recruiters means prioritization of efforts.
HN Who's hiring is probably a low priority platform. (Recruiter's boss doesn't know what it is, hard to instrument for tracking metrics)
If you really want to know how many jobs are out there it's better to index and crawl all the companies jobs page directly. Albeit much much harder to do than a single HN thread per month.
This has always surprised me. At several companies I've suggested to the hiring folks that they post on HN and I've rarely seen it happen. But IMHO, although you may not get a lot of candidates that way, I would imagine the signal/noise ratio is high, relative to the average recruiting channel. (Would be curious to see that (dis)confirmed.)
Don't fret about the state of the market - you can't do anything and it is irrelevant.
Focus on making sure your skills are up to date and you network and put yourself in the best position.
If there are a hundred less roles, it doesn't matter if you are in the top 10%, even the top 50% - just be better than average and you'll be fine.
I'll let you all know when I've scheduled my defense so that you can start stockpiling gas, food, ammo, and whatever else.
People wanting a Mobile Developer with knowledge both in iOS and Android, and it wouldn't hurt if you knew some crass platform solution also.
I see posting with wanting 8+ years in a particular framework or language...
Am I the only one who finds that insane? I know that before "the requirements" were more like "wants" and if you are a good candidate, the company will give you a chance, but I have had situations right now where the recruiter would just answer point blank that all of the requirements must be met...
How are people with under 2,3,4 years of experience supposed to find a better paying job?
God forbid if you are fresh from college...
All data in CSV format would be ideal if someone has it to share via gist or such.
EDIT: I generated a new sheet for the chart with up-to-date data and fixed a data issue noted below.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ICNSA << in fact, Jobless Claims are typically seasonally adjusted. Non-seasonal adjustment indicates claims spike around start/end of the year. The idea being, all else equal, if same amount of people get hired/fired every month, but supply of jobs dips, then claims go up...
Conclusion: not enough data points.
October 2021 [1]: 853 posts
October 2022 [2]: 415 posts
Not an exact comparison, as some posts will continue to trickle in to Oct 2022, but its still a sharp decline.
* Weird sense of relief? (“At least I wasn’t laid off!”)
* Gloating? (“Ha! I knew that wildly successful company wasn’t so great!”)
* Determine if a particular company is shrinking headcount? (Seems unreliable at best.)
Something else?
Saying that last month had 536 posts, and that that was a low since June of 2020 seems much more interesting IMO.
Around Q2/Q3 of 2023 we should have most supply chains stabilized again, and a better estimate of actual market demand.
Hang on, it is going to be one volatile winter... ;)
https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2022/09/predicting-next-r...
Makes me realize how much I miss the glory days of rss.
Months when the 1st falls on a Saturday or Sunday.
May & October 2016
January, April, July & October 2017
April, July, September & December 2018
June, September, December 2019
February, March, August & November 2020
May & August 2021
January, May, October 2022
Perhaps the posts were restricted to a certain time frame, or coincidence?
Not exactly correct. While the global crypto market cap is currently around a trillion dollars (and was higher in the recent past), this is vastly different than it being the case that a trillion dollars was invested in crypto (i.e., "siphoned out" of the rest of the economy).
In fact, according to one estimate, in 2021 global crypto investment was $30.2 billion [1]. (I don't quickly see estimates for 2022.) For comparison, US gross private domestic investment across all industries was $4.1 trillion in 2021 [2] and globally it was several times that. While $30 billion is nothing to sneeze at when considered on its own, crypto investment is a rounding error when compared with global investment.
[1] https://home.kpmg/xx/en/home/media/press-releases/2022/02/to... [2] See Table 1.1.5. Gross Domestic Product at https://apps.bea.gov/iTable/iTable.cfm?reqid=19&step=3&isuri...
Inflation adjusted nothing the government is selling is earning other than I-bonds (individual yearly buy limit of $15K). With Trump's energy output restriction deal with Saudi and others expiring inflation may slow, but the situation of gas in Europe over the winter seems poised to keep it up (CPI doesn't include energy directly, but it feeds back in).
My pet theory is that everyone is just tired, so damned tired, and seeps into everything.
If you stop looking for 4 weeks, you're not employed but not "unemployed" (in their numbers).
We could have low unemployment but high underemployment and end up with a similar softening of consumer demand just because people don't have the discretionary income to buy stuff. Underemployment combined with inflation is extra painful.
When this point of unemployment is hit, it always acts as an inflection point before the trend reverses and unemployment goes up.
With the major exception of the pandemic/remote work, the world is not markedly different than it was in 2013 or 2003. What makes it seems like 2023 is so different?
Otherwise when I look around it seems like the restaurants are busy, people are taking holidays (even those who wouldn't usually), and people as a whole seem better off than they've been in a while...
It kind of seems like the view of the economy is being manipulated, because here on the street everything looks hunky dory.
Some people. The lower classes are definitely struggling a lot more recently, especially given the rental market going bonkers.
Depending on your personal financial circumstances, it may be many months before you end up "seeing this with your own eyes". Inflation won't eat up your savings over night - but over a period of 5-10 years, combined with increasing energy prices, interest rates, costs of living and salary stagnation? A lot can change. It's a boiling frog situation...
Economies don't roll-over in a month, sometimes it takes years. But this cycle has peaked. Inflation and rising interest rates will cause all kinds of issues, including the highest mortgage rates in 30 years.
I post every month on the "who wants to be hired?" thread except for when the 1st of the month falls on a weekend or a national holiday in the US. Why? Because the number of people reading the thread, and the number of people posting on "who is hiring?" threads dips precipitously when the 1st of the month falls on the weekend or a national holiday in the US.
Most of the outreach I get from founders through "who wants to be hired?" is low-effort "we'll pay you in exposure!" or "well you can't live on what we're paying in any major meotropolitan area but think of the equity when we IPO!" but occasionally there is a diamond in the rough that reaches out. My current job was one of those diamonds.
The difference between entrepreneurs who "get it" when selling their company on the "who is hiring thread?" and those that don't is stark. And even more stark is the difference between entrepreneurs selling their company to prospective hires on the "who is hiring thread?" vs developers selling their skillset on the "who wants to be hired?" thread. It is the difference between selling features vs selling benefits writ large.
Also, can you expand a bit more on the "those who get it" vs "those who don't"? What are you looking for here? What do you mean selling features vs. benefits?
"Who is hiring" never worked out for me, as the geographic limitations are too strict or confusingly worded. Looking through 400 posts to figure out which are actually open to hire someone from europe is not as promising as looking through dedicated job portals.
I tend to comment on topics I wouldn't want to discuss in a professional setting and so I'm pretty unlikely to ever bother with a "who wants to be hired?" thread.
Sidenote: we're not a big company, we hire single-digit new people per year. I have no idea how to scale this success up, ie if we'd advertise way more aggressively elsewhere the % would likely go down.
I also recently interviewed for another position advertised via Who's Hiring. I didn't take the offer, but it was a very close decision.
I had enough success to try again the next time I am looking for a new gig.
Having said that, in the last ~2 years, we've had FAR less success with these threads. Didn't post in the last one cuz it just didn't feel worth it.
Archive reasons: (4) Underqualified (4) Work Authorization (1) Unresponsive
I found the post you linked to overly verbose as these bloggers often are. They make lists and sections and go on tangents on what could be a 300-500 word essay. I think he could have excluded the backstory and just focused on how important it is that your partner be onboard the FIRE/extreme frugality lifestyle. So I think it’s poorly written and not an enjoyable article. However, it’s a pretty damn important message and difficult to talk about until someone prominent that is serving as a poster child for the FIRE niche like MMM goes through it publicly.
He's kicking someone else when they are down, but that seems to be petty revenge in retribution for perceived attacks.
Of course results can be skewed. Seems unlikely in this case, but it's easy enough to verify. I mean if I was going to criticize the data, I'd probably just verify it myself first, and then question intent. Thinking about it, I could verify post counts for a hand full of these pretty easily using the dev console. No one even questioned the data though, it was more along the lines of; what's the hidden agenda...
The difference in goods is a mere quantitative difference. (Amazon sells literally everything.) Still, the amount and diversity of crap managed by Amazon is much greater than that of North Korea (comparing net sales vs. GDP). "It seems that there is simply too much in an economy for one entity to wholly plan" has to be tongue-in-cheek if it's not simply a mindless mantra. It's a staggering ideological contradiction whose poles the Hacker News crowd must oscillate between. On one hand, we're on the cusp of generalized artificial intelligence, and on the other we can't figure out the linear algebra needed to maintain a input-output table that changes over time.
But the difference in competition is a qualitative difference. The laws that determine the "competition" between teams at Amazon are different (opposite, even) than the laws of competition between capitalist firms. This is an empirical question. We can certainly imagine Amazons teams undercutting each other's "prices" in order to maximize private "profit," leading to a centralization and concentration of "capital" in the hands of a "monopolistic" team, but this simply does not happen in practice. The categories of intra-firm operation are totally different than those of inter-firm operation.
The BLS collect and categorizes this data in every conceivable way. You can see, for example, that the duration of unemployment is actually quite low compared to previous recessions: https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/duration-of-...
The labor force participate rate would (theoretically) capture this:
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
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.
Revenue is the area of the rectangle "price times volume". (Profit is "revenue minus costs".) Businesses want to maximize the area of that rectangle.
If a business thinks they can keep the area of that rectangle the same by increasing the price dimension, that will cause buyers to react by shrinking the volume dimension. That might yield the same effective area for the rectangle, but then also might not.
Inflation-indexed long term US treasuries are now earning positive rates of interest. See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFII30 -- it's not necessarily a high rate (currently 1.74% after inflation with a 30-year term), but when you have millions or billions to invest, it's certainly not nothing.
> (CPI doesn't include energy directly, but it feeds back in).
CPI does directly include energy, including gas [1]. You may be thinking of "core CPI" which excludes energy and food prices.
The explicit goal of expanding the money supply in 2009 was to drive inflation in order to combat deflation. It didn't work. We ended up with a decade+ long period of low/no inflation.
Even today, the USD is growing stronger relative to other currencies. So in spite of this continued money supply expansion, Americans are experiencing inflation the least of anyone in the developed world.
There's also the matter that people treat econ 101 as facts but the truth of the matter is economics is really fuzzy and there are no hard rules and there are always (ALWAYS) exceptions. Even what I said can happen or can not. I was just pointing out that it ,,can'' happen. It's all very statistical. But you may notice that the real world very much does not follow anywhere near the econ 101 models. It's like doing physics where everything is a spherical cow. Truth of the matter is that if we actually understood economics we wouldn't run into situations like this. It isn't like economies benefit from major downturns and inflation. It'd be like knowingly shooting yourself in the foot. Over and over again.
[0] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/033115/how-does-law...
As to your first: if people expect prices to increase tomorrow, they don't save today; they spend today, to lock in value prior to inflation. And even if people actually did as you claim and saved funds today despite their expectations of higher prices tomorrow, guess what: seller's can't eat expectations. They need actual sales. And in your scenario, the people aren't buying.
The spike was in March which was the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States/shelter-in-place, which was a time of odd behavior and so a spike wouldn't be too weird.
It turns out that dang posted a special whoishiring soon after which was massively popular: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22665398
I thought I filtered out nonstandard threads in the query:
WITH whoishiring_threads AS (
SELECT id FROM `bigquery-public-data.hacker_news.full`
WHERE `by` = "whoishiring"
AND REGEXP_CONTAINS(title, "Ask HN: Who is hiring?")
)
Data science is fun like that, and surprisingly not the first time I've made that particular query mistake.
More pernicious than ? is . though. Not that it matters in your case, but a lot of matches really can be "oops, a one character substitution totally matches, too".
Although in my work I tend to use REGEXP_CONTAINS() as an efficient multifilter for different inputs, which speeds things up too.
There was a combination of large companies needing programmers to enable remote work or process changes due to the pandemic, stimulus funds causing a lot of VC funding to hit startups, hiring binges at FAANG companies, and everyone suddenly being remote-friendly.
The currency in Zimbabwe is so unreliable that barter has become the principal way of saving and storing wealth.
Zimbabwe has “cow banks.” You take your cash salary, and give it to the cow bank. The cow bank uses the cash to buy a cow.
The cow is put into a pen. You can make surprise visits to ensure the cows are alive, healthy, and not being “shared” with other customers.
Interest rates are based on the fertility rates of cattle, not central bank policies.
More like owning a pet horse.
That does have some relevance to the US because the federal government can borrow+spend way more than a small country with a bad credit score - but since the interest rates they borrow at are coupled to the Fed rate, rising rates should in theory slow that down.
Furthermore, most money in the USA isn't even reserves, but rather bank deposits. Theoretically bank deposits are supposedly somehow constrained by reserves, but that hasn't really been true for well over a decade. Raising rates doesn't directly impair banks ability to originate as many new loans and corresponding deposits as they care to. Conceivably, higher rates could reduce the demand for loans from credit-worthy borrowers, or even reduce the pool of credit-worthy borrowers directly, but I'm not sure it doesn't end up being a wash after accounting for inflation.
Personally I suspect most of the effects that we do see are related to hysteresis rather than a fundamental transmission mechanism from interest rates. That is to say, the shocking effects we see from rate increases aren't due to a fundamental change, but rather a lag while market participants to catch up with the new rules of the game.
Another important factor is the prestige media using all of its persuasive powers to convince market participants that Fed actions will result in a downturn. There certainly is a large psychological component to economic activity.
No no no no no. It means that Congress created the Fed, and Congress can destroy the Fed. Congress can also change its charter.
But Congress is capable of creating and destroying independent agencies.
“I buy that car and fill it with gas. You drive it.”
The real problem isn't any particular position, velocity, nor even acceleration. Those can all be planned for. It's the 4th time-derivative, jerk, that messes us up.
We are intervening to make the economy smaller than if we didn't intervene. I think that qualifies as "shrinking" even if the growth is what is shrinking and not the overall economy.
Literally nothing can be planned for. Compare the Fed dot plots at any given meeting since 2008 with actual rates a year, or three years hence. Look at the BoE and BoJ flail wildly around right now, absolutely shocked by the consequences of their own actions less than a year ago.
These people have arguably a worse predictive ability than the canonical South Park Chicken ritual.
Central Banking is the only industry I know of in which you can be catastrophically wrong, always, and retain job security. Great gig, if you can swing it.
The only party that can act right now is the Fed, and the only move the Fed has in increasing interest rates.
Price control doesn't fly in any economic system. Putting a legal floor or ceiling on the price anything doesn't affect what it actually costs to produce it.
https://www.nber.org/research/data/us-business-cycle-expansi...
The term is used to describe economic conditions in various countries.
The NBER is not part of the designation.
Indeed, it would be impossible for an economist to observe that Egypt, for instance, was in a recession as the NBER issues no opinions on the Egyptian economy.
No, conditioning the definition of a recession on the NBER was a silly political stunt by the current admin. Don’t go along with these redefinitions… it’s silly and illogical.
Historically, here in the US we haven't used the Egyptian definition of recession when talking about the US economy, so what you think about their definition is irrelevant.
That isn't to say that we're not currently in a recession, but economists don't know yet, and neither do you.
Totally agree, and it's good to know that anyone besides myself sees it. For me personally, I'm educated and know I have the skills to be on that first side of the divide, but it makes me feel very nervous/sad, because I know a lot of the stuff going on at the lower-wage end of the scale is unsustainable, and it makes me very worried for the future of our society. In the sense of how modern people want to live their lives, people in the service industries are extremely undervalued, and everyone deserves a fair wage for fair work and the ability to live in a dignified way.
I complain about everyone expecting a tip on their POS terminals and prices constantly rising, but in the spirit of my above point, they probably deserve it. We need a return to sanity regarding the returns of being a business owner.
This is also a huge complaint of mine in specific situations. If I go to an NBA game or concert, buy a beer for $12, and the POS has a tip thing, I want to scream. I want to scream at the vending group to just pay the people more money. The profit margin on the beer is insane, give your workers some of the money rather than try to pass the buck on to the consumer you’re already gouging.
But to exclude it for a bit, my personal, super anecdotal and biased view is that those years were very different.
2003 had low hope for a better future, but there was a lot of action in the fallout of 9/11. It felt like we were at least trying, even if it ended up being a horrible try.
2013 I felt hope for a better future, but there wasn't a lot of action to make that a reality.
2023 and there's zero hope for a better future and we're doing nothing about it.
We need at least hope or action.
I think many can agree that climate change is one of the higher priority efforts, and in the last few years, we've seen some major progress.
In the US, renewables make up the vast majority of new generating capacity, by far and solar deployments are growing at a rapid pace. We were still deploying significant amounts of coal plants 10 years ago, nowadays, it's basically zero. [https://www.seia.org/solar-industry-research-data]. China has doubled its solar deployments in the last year.
Wind deployments are accelerating [https://www.iea.org/reports/wind-electricity]
EVs are gaining marketshare at a fast pace, many countries/states are banning ICE sales in the near future. [https://www.virta.global/en/global-electric-vehicle-market]
Cost of lithium batteries has fallen by 89% since 2010 [https://cleanpower.org/facts/clean-energy-storage/]
US passed the IRA which has the potential to really accelerate these changes.
Still not enough of course, but we are seeing significant progress compared to 2013.
Nothing seems to be very different for the last 20 years, which also means things aren't getting any better. That's tiring.
Any time I hear someone talk about how everyone is tired now and they weren't before it smacks of "I'm the main character" syndrome in that they're going through the same thing every generation on Earth has gone through for millennia - getting older - but suddenly it's a crisis because it's them going through it.
The public is “data structure” illiterate. They’re educated with spoken traditions coupled to vague imagery of hierarchical power structures of history and the work place. I am not sure it’s intentional, more of a Duning-Kruger thing.
As usual any sustained shift in the appropriation of agency is up to the public. Science shows us how to build things, but no theory states “we must build rockets to nowhere.” But “keep your hands off muh capitalism click clack” gets in the way of sincere discussion of fully automated logistics.
Protectionism of spoken tradition in human memory is not going away anytime soon. It’s innate to our biology.
If you own oil or soy futures, you can go get the product if you like (to everyone's inconvenience). This is not far off.
Depends on what time scale we're thinking about. True in the short-term, but I think the long-term expectation is that growth will be more stable, and therefore greater, with this short-term intervention.
> I think that qualifies as "shrinking"
Yes, and no. Yes, in that oh-so-important technical, relative sense. No, in that it's not the best choice of words.
It's certainly likely, bordering on probable, that a lot of the people getting tips now that didn't get tips 4-5 years ago are making good money without tips and that's just extra.
For a specific example, I go to a local Subway every now and then, and they advertise hiring at $18/hr to start, more for part time, less desirable shifts, etc. Their POS lets you tip 18%, 20%, 25%, or "Skip" ($0) unless you do custom. I obviously don't know their revenue but they've been in business years while others in the same shopping center have come and gone, so they've got to be doing decent volume. There's no reason to think they're not getting several dollars and hour (e.g. several thousand dollars a year) in tips beyond their salary. It's not because they're underpaid, it's because people will tip if you make that the default.
https://www.amazon.com/Civilization-Capitalism-15th-18th-Cen...
https://www.amazon.com/Wheels-Commerce-Civilization-Capitali...
https://www.amazon.com/Perspective-World-Civilization-Capita...
I strongly recommend these books.
If you're interest is more about the classical Western period, I recommend:
https://www.amazon.com/Ancient-Economy-Sather-Classical-Lect...
Inflation does have the risk of getting out of hand and being even harder to control. The risk analysis is that whatever pain increasing the rates would cause it pales in comparison to having hyperinflation.
As far as the lack of a pushback: My guess is a combination of apathy and the fact that it doesn't affect the average person quite as much as inflation.