What My Inbox Tells Me About the Tech Market
A few days ago I went through six years of recruiter emails and counted them. I wasn't sure what I'd find, but the patterns that emerged were striking enough that I wanted to share them. Since my own visibility and activity stayed roughly constant during this period, I figure the volume of messages reflects something about market demand rather than anything I did differently. It's not scientific, but it's real data.
The Numbers
In 2019 I had almost nothing. Just 2 messages in the last two months of the year. I was just getting started.
2020 brought 110 messages total, but they weren't evenly distributed. The first quarter was quiet with 14 messages. Then Q2 exploded to 74. That's March through June, right when COVID hit. After that initial surge, things calmed down again.
2021 started really slow but finished strong. The second half of the year brought 98 messages per quarter. Something had shifted.
Then came 2022. The first half was extraordinary. February through June, I was getting 60 to 90 messages per month. 91 in March alone. 408 messages in six months. I'd never seen anything like it.
And then it stopped.
July 2022: 7 messages. August: 6. The drop was nearly vertical. From over 200 messages in Q2 to 13 in Q3. A 94% collapse in one quarter.
2023 was the quietest year in my entire dataset. 46 messages for the whole year. Some months had zero.
2024 showed modest recovery. 196 messages spread fairly evenly across the year. Not booming, but breathing again.
2025, at least through November, has been strong. 394 messages so far, with September hitting 53. That's approaching 2022 levels, though the pattern is different. It's more sustained and less frantic.
What I Think It Means
I'm going to be careful here, because the data shows patterns, not causes.
The Q2 2020 spike happened when COVID forced everyone remote. Whether that created sudden demand for contractors or just shifted existing demand, I can't say for certain. But something changed in those months.
The 2022 collapse lines up with when economic uncertainty hit Europe. Interest rates, energy crisis, war in Ukraine. But I can't prove those caused recruiters to stop emailing me. I just know the timing matches.
The 2023 silence coincided with headlines about tech layoffs and budget freezes. Again, I'm seeing correlation, not proving causation.
What I can say with confidence is that my inbox tracked something real about the market. The timing of the boom and the crash wasn't random. Whatever drove it, I was measuring a signal, not noise.
Where Things Stand
2025 feels different from both the frenzy of early 2022 and the silence of 2023. The messages are coming steadily rather than in waves. Whether that means sustainable recovery or just a different phase of the cycle, I'll find out.
Sometimes the simplest data tells you more than any industry report.