22% Drop in Programming Jobs

To save you wasting 10 minutes: The distinction between programmer and software developer in government definition, led to &quot;programming&quot; jobs dropping by 22%. This doesn&#x27;t affect the &quot;Software development&quot; industry which saw only a 0.3% drop.<p>It is really a click bait.

It&#x27;s not AI:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;IHLIDXDETPSOFTDEVE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;IHLIDXDETPSOFTDEVE</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;IHLIDXAUTPSOFTDEVE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;IHLIDXAUTPSOFTDEVE</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;IHLIDXUSTPITOPHE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fred.stlouisfed.org&#x2F;series&#x2F;IHLIDXUSTPITOPHE</a><p>Companies and VC&#x27;s with unrealistic valuations will spin it as such.

&gt;&gt; while programmers do in fact program, they “work from specifications drawn up by software and web developers or other individuals.” That seems like a clue.<p>I wonder if this conclusion is drawn from keyword searches on job postings. It is true that not many position titles these days include &quot;programmer&quot; - usually it is software engineer or developer. Of course, there is no difference other than terminology has shifted.

22% drop in programming jobs, but only a 0.3% drop in developer jobs. It&#x27;s an interesting point of differentiation. I imagine there&#x27;s a lot more developers than programmers when you&#x27;re being pedantic about it.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;6lt46" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;6lt46</a>

When I entered the job market back in ye olde 1980s there really weren&#x27;t &#x27;software developers&#x27;, we were all &#x27;computer programmer&#x27;.<p>Because the higher level stuff; design, devops, agile, hadn&#x27;t been invented yet.

This article is so ridiculous it really make me think of Gilman Amnesia Effect and makes me question other newspaper reporting. I definitely won&#x27;t be trusting anything I read in WP&#x27;s &quot;Department of Data&quot; column from now on.<p>The claim that the level of programmers is now as low as it was in the 80&#x27;s is ridiculous.<p>The author could instead make and article about the terminology change over time but that would be a boring topic for a general purpose newspaper.

As expected, the end of the ZIRP has hit startups hard.

I remember looking at BLS statistics 10-15 years ago and pondered why they meant by &quot;programmer&quot; vs &quot;software developer&quot; jobs. After all, even back then, programmers were on the decline.<p>Is a &quot;programmer&quot; someone who enters machine code instructions via toggle switches? I suppose that could have been a job in the 50s perhaps.

This number feels too low..<p>I have some amazing developer friends in the U.S. that are still out of a job, 9 months later.

This article is like someone starting to do a stats problem, realizing they screwed up and then going &quot;OK done!&quot;

How was the increase in descries in the last 10 years? During corona was a peak, now it goes down.

In the past week, I used Cursor to make significant changes to a larger project, which led me to cancel a contract with a consulting firm. Then, almost spontaneously, I built a digital requests platform with thirty forms for our company—an MVP that turned out to be quite solid.<p>On the weekend, I put together a site for my spouse where she can submit URLs from paywalled articles, receive an AI-generated summary, and get an archive.is link—just a fun side project. And since I was on a roll, I also built a new UI for my thousands of notes in Obsidian: a three-pane viewer with a list, note preview, and folder navigation.<p>All of this, simply because I can. It really makes me wonder what this means for the software job market. This article offers some perspective.