Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

The charts show software dev gaining more jobs under the COVID demand and stimulus swing, and then losing more as those went away and monetary policy got tighter than even it had been even before the COVID stimulus.<p>The easiest explanation for the whole chart is &quot;Software dev is more reactive to the monetary policy environment than most other industries, because more of it is funded by new capital investment -- whether VC money or otherwise -- instead of ongoing operations of stable firms compared to most other industries.&quot;<p>Trying to add other explanations is fun, but there&#x27;s not a lot of evidence for any of them, or even that more explanations are needed.

FRED wants the implication to be AI related, but it seems pretty clear that all&#x2F;most of this decline is related to their interest rate policies creating a raft of bullshit companies funded by too many dollars chasing ever more far-fetched returns...

The number of job postings means nothing. 75% of the job postings are either scam or ghost postings.

People underestimate just how much of the industry was total garbage, pre-AI, pre-pandemic, the signs were all there in 2015. Who remembers &quot;the average tenure of a software engineer in the SF bay area is 18 months&quot;. Was it ever really sustainable? That means that after just 18 months you&#x27;ll get an offer from a company more fantastical than the one you&#x27;re currently at, which has even more frothing-at-the-mouth investors and converted some of that into higher salary for you. And your current employer can&#x27;t hope to match it, because they have already been written off by investors. We have a LONG way to fall to reach the true software industry value.

Kind of strange to see no mention of outsourcing in an otherwise detailed analysis

I am not sure how things work in US but, living in an Eastern European country, I can say that salaries started growing, almost reaching western european levels, after which many foreign companies closed offices and moved to cheaper countries like India and Pakistan.

When I was hired during the pandemic, I was the ~140th hire. In 2 years, that number ballooned to 700 people. Billion dollar acquisition later, I have to fill-out paperwork, fight other teams, perform a ritual sacrifice, only to have everyone reject my candidates that are deemed too expensive.<p>The demand for engineers during the pandemic may have been artificial, but there is still need for people today. Some companies don&#x27;t hire because they were built to be sold.

&gt;I’m sure that LLMs are a leading cause of the fall in software developer job postings<p>I can&#x27;t agree with the conclusion. I can come with tens of examples of when using AI doesn&#x27;t work.<p>Also, software engineering means much more than writing code.

This analysis is more of an excuse for speculation about applications of LLMs in software engineering, than an analysis of the factors leading up to this.<p>The headline doesn’t tell the whole story. SE openings precipitated in the year that followed the peak. Compared to that massive decline, openings over the last year have been relatively stable but on a downward trajectory.<p>Most of us are personally familiar with the reasons for this. Companies overhired during COVID and the demand for engineers was met by higher CS enrolment and to smaller extent, boot camps. But then remote work made companies realize that they could hire all over the world. Right now Netflix is only hiring engineers in Poland and other Faang companies are mostly interested in South America.<p>Focus on AI shifts investment in technology into that field, regardless of whether it makes sense or not. Likewise management expects that AI will drive up engineer productivity.<p>There has been no significant decline in software engineering positions since the advent of AI as all the factors I mentioned above still apply in the post 2023 period.

Companies have moved away from tech innovation driving growth. Instead they’ve realized they’re defending mature, boring business models. They need to keep the lights on with some good-enough engineers.<p>Just think how much the investor narrative has shifted from early 2020s. Back then everyone talked about the business areas they were expanding into using tech. Now, investors get hyped up when you do the same thing, at lower cost. Less about growth, more about predictability. Which makes sense. Do investors view Amazon as a high tech company (as in 2020 and before) or a predictable business? dare I say utility?<p>It explains layoffs, forced RTO, etc. They simply don’t care if even their best leave. Their MBA executives know optimization&#x2F;keeping the lights on - and less about innovation.

In all of my software career I have only worked for a company that actually produced software twice. One was as a contractor to Intuit and the other was Bank of America. Absolutely everybody else had these massive fleets of developers who struggled to put text on screen from a high centralized database to a web browser.<p>Few, maybe 15%, of those people really seemed like they could program. Everybody else talked about their favorite tech stack and their opinions on code styles. It kind of felt like code masturbation. A shrinking job market is not surprising.

We are in a period analogous to the end of the Dotcom bubble. The Internet is obviously going to change the world, but right now all it can do is pets.com, etoys.com, kozmo.com. People are out of work, and those with other alternatives or preferences will leave the tech industry. In 10 years entire new platforms and modes will exist that generate even more opportunities than before. Some variation of this wave has been surfed up and down since the invention and industrialization of computation.

No mention of Section 174...<p>Edit: I am an idiot, there is a mention. Or possibly the article was edited and I&#x27;m not an idiot, it does say there was an edit recently.

Why anchor it to the start of Covid? I&#x27;d really like to see a 10-year period.

&gt; Devs spot and fix hallucinations immediately, dismissing incorrect autocomplete suggestions<p>Bullshit. Spotting hallucinations requires expertise in the subject matter, and most devs wouldn&#x27;t be using LLMs if they intimately knew the programming languages and APIs the LLM is generating.<p>The reality is that spotting hallucinations often takes more effort than reading the source documentation and writing the code from scratch, since the dev also needs to review and check the code for correctness.

Look, this is harsh, but I’ve talked to a lot of people who run dev shops. None of them are hiring Juniors. And most of the Seniors they’re hiring are in Eastern Europe or Central &amp; South America.<p>With Cursor and Copilot, the days of $190k entry-level SWE roles in the US are GONE.

If AI makes a programmer say 25% more productive. Then a team of 4 can do the workload of a team of 5.

&gt; Devs spot and fix hallucinations immediately, dismissing incorrect autocomplete suggestions<p>Some hallucinations stay in codebases longer than others! If there were zero hallucinations there would really be no novel output. Some hallucinations are useful and some are not.

So mostly, because a lot of companies are &#x27;wait and see&#x27;?<p>Also, is this the downside of the &#x27;wait and see&#x27;<p>But, there could be a rebound from this.<p>&quot; Software by non-developers creates more opportunities for devs. Imagine a situation where the number of non-developers creating software increases by 10x or 100x, due to AI, thanks to non-technical people creating software with AI tools and agents. &quot;<p>Just like with arts&#x2F;video editing.<p>There could be a rebound when so many people start creating things with AI,<p>THEN realize it is actually a bit harder than they thought, and boom, need to hire video or software engineers to finish what they started.

You&#x27;d think to sustain these ridiculous PE ratios, tech companies would be investing in product development more than ever before. Now is not a time to do less work.

Dupe: (6 points, 2 hours ago) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43121113">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43121113</a>

Development always slows down in down turns and times of uncertainty - companies hoard their money and don&#x27;t want to start on new projects.

doesnt this just reflect interest in indeed.com

- Interest rates<p>- Offshoring, nearshoring<p>- Generative AI<p>- Coding camps<p>- Better and more open source libraries. More high level open source libraries<p>- Low code and no code<p>- Easier to use technology, more documentation

The graph is very interesting! The number of Indeed openings looks like it&#x27;s basically leveled off at the initial early covid number over the last year; it&#x27;s not rising, but at least it&#x27;s not falling anymore. That seems like pretty optimistic news for developers! Total compensation is still pretty high, I hear. And it seems likely that if humans aren&#x27;t replaced wholesale by AGI, the opportunities for building valuable new software are likely to increase a lot over the next few years.<p>Smaller teams and more bootstrapping (as opposed to venture-funded rapid growth) seems likely to reduce the reliance on recruiters who are a plague on the industry, with few exceptions.<p>On the other hand, maybe a lot of tasks you could previously get a lot of leverage on with a simple Perl script will just be done directly by LLMs. Not if they&#x27;re customer-facing, maybe, but in cases where you just need to get some data in a different format or something.

Are we still going through backlog at same rate but with fewer engineers with AI? Can we expect an &quot;induced demand&quot; for more nice to have features which require more engineers?<p>Assuming that AI coding is already helping the average dev with shipping more.

I don&#x27;t think this means what they think it means: a _lot_ of job postings get filled before they get counted. Think about it, there have been a lot of layoffs. Many of these people have friends that can refer them to jobs before they are posted.<p>A better graph would be of the number of people who self-report as being employed as software developer. I doubt that would show the same decline--there have not been many stories of people abandoning the profession because they could not find employment...

Funny because I don&#x27;t remember a downturn in software engineering jobs pre-COVID. My recollection is that it was easy street for STEM types until the inflation hit.

Huh, I&#x27;ve suddenly been getting calls from recruiters for the first time since COVID, so I have no clue what is going on with the market.

Everyone wants to say it will get better based on what happened in 2000 and 2008. I was around both times.<p>In 2000, none of the ideas ended up being bad. They were just too early and internet wasn’t ubiquitous.<p>But even then, if you were working as a standard enterprise dev for a profitable business - banks, insurance, companies, etc, outside of Silicon Valley, jobs were plentiful. I was a Windows dev living in Atlanta with 4 years of experience and had no issue of getting offers.<p>Things improved when internet became ubiquitous both at home and in their pockets with smart phones and the App Store by 2012.<p>On the B2B side, there was the rise of SaaS.<p>There will be no next doubling of jobs to absorb all of the people looking. Every application gets literally 1000 applications within the first day of posting.<p>It’s going to take at least a decade for the supply&#x2F;demand to balance out.<p>No Section 174 is not to blame either.

Are SAAS and frameworks getting that good that we need software plumbers and fewer software engineers?

Yet there is no let up in diluting software engineering labor pool with thousands of H1Bs amidst the already distressed labor market from American job seeker perspective.

&gt; Indeed<p>I thought it was the MySpace of job boards.

yet hiring is as difficult as it&#x27;s even been

Yeah... I&#x27;m getting few blips on my linkedin&#x2F;email. Fortunate to have a job I enjoy, hoping I can ride the wave.

Two years ago, the cheapseats: &quot;It&#x27;s FUD.&quot;<p>Today: &quot;I know this pain! It&#x27;s real.&quot;<p>Rough out there.

honestly it hasn&#x27;t felt this bad since dotcom

Wait, weren’t we just having a developer shortage? Honestly it’s so hard to keep up with these things.

&quot;Programming languages are simpler than human languages&quot;<p>this is a very stupid thing to say. The formal structure of a language doesn&#x27;t easily determine the complexity of what can be done with a language, nor is it a way of predicting the difficulty of expressing an equivalent idea vs other formal or natural languages.

I’ve been receiving emails from reps at companies lately. Some are from companies that didn’t hire me after getting laid off in 2022 for petty&#x2F;unclear reasons. I had written some of them off as fake job postings. Now between that experience, this supposed decline, and ghost job postings I’m not sure if it’s a serious email or not.