Friday's employment data has experts trying to parse the implications of what happened with jobs in October. It's tough, because things are moving in various directions and trying to guess what the Federal Reserve might do with future interest rate hikes is difficult.

The 261,000 jobs created in October is historically strong; economists had expected a number closer to 200,000, according to the New York Times. But as Economic Policy Institute president Heidi Shierholz noted on Twitter, that jobs number is far off the average pace of 539,000 per month from the first quarter of 2022.

Meanwhile, the increased unemployment rate, at 3.7 percent, is "up for the wrong reasons"—meaning fewer people are working and fewer are looking for work—according to a tweet from Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. When people aren't looking for work, federal data treats them as no longer part of the workforce. If they are no longer in the workforce, they don't count as unemployed.