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.
The easiest explanation for the whole chart is "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."
Trying to add other explanations is fun, but there's not a lot of evidence for any of them, or even that more explanations are needed.
How are sec 175 changes in the US not also a top explanation? This has a massive cost to small businesses and startups trying to hire software engineers, and a big impact to any team trying to grow.
Because the data doesn't match. The author addresses this in his blog post -- essentially every country has the same graph of SWE jobs, but only the US has sec 175.
> How are sec 175 changes in the US not also a top explanation?
You mean the change from deductible as a current expense to five-year amortization under changes to Sec 174? In an easy money situation, the way it increases tax liability in year one while decreasing in year 2-5 is not a big deal, it becomes more of an issue as the cost of financing goes up, so the main effect is to increase the already-high sensitivity of software development to tightening credit.
... partly because it's quicker to get started with software projects?
No expensive machines or lab equipment, sometimes not even office space needed, just people with laptops
But the cycle wave length should ... Be similar to how many years people spend studying? That doesn't seem to be the case here?
Quoting the Wikipedia link:
"high salaries in a particular sector lead to an increased number of students studying the relevant subject; when these students enter the job market at the same time after several years of studying, their job prospects and salaries are much worse due to the new surplus of applicants."
Maybe you could say it's related to investors' pork cycle (of different/unknown wavelength) not students' pork cycle :-)
Or maybe just one-time opportunism: low interest rates etc
I tend to agree with you, if only because the swing in Europe on the IT job market has had less amplitude and is more spread out, similar to the difference in stimulus policy.
I believe many software tools work like a vice for beurocrats making the beurocracy way less efficient.
Like, forcing some not very edge case friendly set of text field validation rules onto the beurocrats such that he can't just do what he tries to do as he could with paper work.
In many orgs. nowadays the processes seem to be made to fit the computer programs not the needs of the beurocracy.
And even if they produce "real" products. How many of them are needed. How many of them are redoing the same thing. And how many could in perfect world be done more efficiently by resusing some common solution.
Jobs funded by speculative investment that are highly sensitive to monetary policy are pretty orthogonal to the kind of thing addressed by "bullshit jobs" theory. They may be societally harmful or low-social-value more often than other jobs, but generally for very different reasons than bullshit jobs. They are "lottery ticket" jobs, where many are wasted, some are very valuable, and its hard to predict in advance which are which (for investor value; for various reasons endemic to capitalism more generally, this is a very imperfect proxy for social value, but that problem is also mostly orthogonal to the kind off harmful job "bullshit jobs" addresses.)
FRED wants the implication to be AI related, but it seems pretty clear that all/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...
Returns are no longer the actual goal. The actual goal is the perception of far reaching future returns. The perception of those returns is much more valuable than the actual returns. Because the wealthy don't want profits and dividends that get taxed. They want ever increasing stock prices so they can continuously grow their asset base to borrow against so they can never sell said assets this triggering capital gains taxes.
e.g. because of Big VC (a16z, other firms with dozens or hundreds of investing staff), VCs don't stick around firms long enough for real returns (cash distributed) to matter. If you're at a place and your stuff is marked up 10x after 4 years, you just hop to become a GP and try to ride the next markup wave. Even if these people exit VC after 10 years that is still 10 years of deals that all flopped.
This might not even be the individual VC's fault -- there may just be too many venture dollars chasing too few power law returns, so you get a surge of startups circa 2019-2022 that all disappear
Investing for distant future returns is not bad and favours long-term thinking over short-term profit. It is closer to the best (though abstract) metric, net positive value created, which naturally translates to ROI in an ideal world.
The problem is that in this non-ideal world value creation can become completely detached from returns: when instead of investing into people creating value, or distant future returns, or even medium term returns, it becomes about investing into other people investing in it—not too different from a pyramid scheme and various pump-and-dumps.
Companies with actual profits can, and do, simply buy back their own stock. Inflating market expectation of future cashflows is not the only way to realize asset appreciation.
Wants is maybe too strong, but I've seen this chart in a couple of different substacks / editorials, which I assumed is the fed's press office shopping this story around because "AI taking jobs" is zeitgeist-y right now.
Then, assuming that the fake job posters are still there and that they now have AI help as well, the fall in the number of postings is more concerning.
Sometimes the position is simply shit. “My” job ad is open again. Looks like the third guy lasted there 6 months too. Every day new agency posts the same job. But Python developer, who can fix custom hardware from the 90s in the night shift is rare. And the salary was very average too.
I don't know how this isn't considered SEC fraud by publicly traded companies.
the whole point is to obfuscate growth or decline to blur the ability of business intelligence units to make prediction about the company.
it's a scam for applicants, and a scam on the market.
I'm not convinced H1B issues are related, though I'm sure there are fake adverts for jobs that are unfillable to get H1Bs in, too. Unfortunately Musk, Ramaswamy, and DOGE are all about cheap workers.
The scams and fake job postings on the market are also increasing rapidly, outpacing the growth of overall job listings. This trend is significantly affecting the accuracy of employment and job availability tracking.
Any H1B related postings are a tiny fraction of the postings by recruiters and recruitment agencies trying to build up their databases, and companies wanting to look like they’re continuing to grow.
People underestimate just how much of the industry was total garbage, pre-AI, pre-pandemic, the signs were all there in 2015. Who remembers "the average tenure of a software engineer in the SF bay area is 18 months". Was it ever really sustainable? That means that after just 18 months you'll get an offer from a company more fantastical than the one you'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'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.
Our company just let go of all our remote LATAM hires. We paid high end in their LCOL areas.
They were somewhere between ok and not good. Felt like we got about what we paid for - their cost was about 50% of a US dev. They were as productive as a low end US dev, so in some cases ok value but since hiring low performers tends to hurt a team overall they weren’t worth it.
We’re a mid range company (decent cash comp, not much else since startup). I’m sure if you’re paying more you can do better. But that’s how it’s always been hasn’t it?
As a Brazilian dev living in Europe, one thing people just don't get about offshoring is that good devs have options, even in poorer countries. Companies offshoring usually offshore crappy projects, crappy projects attract bad talent.
Also really top devs (at least in Brazil) can make more than 50k USD per year (fluctuates widely based on exchange rates) at Brazilian companies, it is cheaper than US but the tail-end of talent can still be expensive.
If you really want to attract good devs in cheaper areas the best way is to just open a branch of your office there, pay top-salary and don't just use it a dump ground for the projects no one at home wants to take. So treat them the same as at home. I had a roommate who worked in one of those companies that take offshoring projects, lets just say it is not the best talent pool and the good devs there leave fast.
This is the usual ebb and flow of offshoring in the tech industry that's been going on since the 90s.
There has never been a scalable arbitrage for tech talent by going over to another geo, and there won't be one in the foreseeable future. What US HCoL talent gets paid is unfortunately the fair and natural market rate for that caliber of talent, at least if you need to hire more than like 10 people.
> I’m sure if you’re paying more you can do better. But that’s how it’s always been hasn’t it?
I’ve been hearing about outsourcing destroying jobs since the 90s and that’s how it’s always gone: the suits salivated at the prospect of cutting wages by, say, 90% and had total write-offs because of it, because they missed that even in a poor country people have options and anyone smart enough to be a good developer is also smart enough to recognize that their skills are worth more. Outsourcing has some big costs related to communications so while you could find decent people at 50-70% of local labor rates, coordination overhead makes that a net loss even before you hit things like the security risks.
Part of the problem there is that the business people really want to think that they understand their business so well that they can give perfect instructions, and it takes a certain humility to recognize that more time goes into knowledge transfer and discovering the true needs than might be obvious.
Interesting… 50% of US dev cost is like what if you don’t mind saying? 100k?
I found the biggest issue with these engagements is the trust with remote developers.
My workplace is mostly hiring LATAM and parts of Europe at this point. Occasionally NA but mostly for higher level engineering positions to backfill roles for people who left.
Hailing from a popular outsourcing destination I can attest to the fact that layoffs happened here as well, but now the same people are being rehired for 10-15% less. No growth whatsoever though.
I don't mean to spread FUD, but as an interviewer at a FAANG in the US, I have mostly been interviewing candidates in LATAM (Brazil and Mexico). Same for some of my other coworkers.
The boring reality is that the price of labor roughly reflects the productivity companies typically get. Because if there is ever some clear win in some location, people start hiring there, and things start to balance out again.
everything provided by offshoring to india is just an expensive tech debt full of spaghetti code. it simply doesn't work and causes harm to the customers. but because cheap it keeps getting sold. working with indians is a nightmare bar none. and i'm saying this as someone who has been to india and is also personally intrigued by its culture. but it's conway's law all the way - visit places like mumbai or delhi and this is what you'll get ... chaos that kind of works.
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.
Where in Eastern Europe? At least from my perspective (I've done hiring at several companies, albeit just hiring individual remote workers rather than open a local office) developers in Poland and Czechia are still very competitively priced (less expensive than north/western Europe and A LOT less expensive than the US).
That's pretty weird. Usually, less companies mean less demand for labor. If supply is the same, that means price-for-labor (salaries) would go down. Unless, this was accompanied by people leaving (reduction in supply). Do you have an explanation for this?
It's a pretty common place to get outsourced devs from. But it doesn't have the conglomerate offices like India, so you have to do more to get a team from there. The people are basically the same so same level education, same-ish salaries, same English understanding, etc.
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.
The demand for engineers during the pandemic may have been artificial, but there is still need for people today. Some companies don't hire because they were built to be sold.
I don't disagree with you but a different view that could support the OP hypothesis could be that prior to the AI boom we could see that 90% of the capital went into "normal" software engineering jobs while maybe only 10% of the capital went into the ML market.
Now in the AI boom era, 90% of the capital goes into the AI while 10% goes into SE jobs. That could explain the drop in SE jobs.
> Also, software engineering means much more than writing code.
What if it speeds up the part of pumping out widgets in the widget factory, shipping Spring Boot / Laravel / whatever projects more quickly and therefore individual devs becoming more productive on cookie cutter projects (without necessarily getting more money for it either).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I apologize, and I'm embarrassed, I thoughtlessly repeated what my friend from Netflix said in a casual conversation. He specified that his larger org at netflix is hiring only engineers from Poland. That said, I believe the point I made stands.
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.
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?
It explains layoffs, forced RTO, etc. They simply don’t care if even their best leave. Their MBA executives know optimization/keeping the lights on - and less about innovation.
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.
> 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
It certainly feels this way if your only perspective on the tech industry comes from headlines and social media.
Step outside of the doomerism whirlwind that is internet headlines and it's a very different story. There are a lot of companies doing great things and delivering products that people use, but they don't make for catchy headlines. So you don't hear about them.
I don't think it's doomerism. I started my career during the dotcom boom. I think we are right now in a transition period that is little bit of the start of the boom (just add AI! is the new "just add Internet!") and also a bit of the scorched earth after the initial boom, when all the tourists (CS is easy money!) are rerouted to other careers if at all possible.
This also means it is a great time to start a small, profitable business because labor is undervalued.
If the analogy is LLMs are today's equivalent of the web, I'm skeptical. Internet-based communication replaced technology like telephones and fax machines for synchronous and asynchronous telecommunication. People like and need to talk to other people. It was clearly valuable from day 1. What is the equivalent value proposition for LLMs? They make for really cool and splashy demos. But practical usage doesn't seem to keep pace with the hype. Why is it such a safe assumption that this is just like the invention of the Internet (or, as Sundar Pichai put it, the invention of fire)?
I have personally written VBA macros (or hell - just a decent Excel spreadsheet...) that have put people out of their jobs. I didn't know this at the time, I was just a young gun able to see how to make some slow repetitive jobs, faster.
Later moved to Oracle / SQL Server / C# / microservices / CICD etc etc) but hell, that was my whole career 2002-2012 across various companies. Making cool tools for smart people, things the accelerated the company in smal;l but measurable ways, that unbeknownst to me would absolutely have directly resulted in a team of 3-5 being reduced to a team of 1, or a team of 1 not being expanded to be a team of 3-5.
I’m not sure that’s the case even if in retrospect we can clearly argue this
In 1998, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences, infamously predicted that “the growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s” [1] and even though that turned out to be spectacularly wrong it shows the attitude in the early days wasn’t one of absolute certainty.
And certainly the current AI boom is most visibly known for LLMs but there is a lot more happening beyond chatbots.
Like half of software jobs are Doing Something so that management feels like they are innovative thought leaders of the tech community, while the other half of the software jobs are keeping the unsexy business critical software working.
Even if everything being done with LLMs is useless, if you can do the same amount of useless with half as many developers, it's bad news for us.
The internet created vast new opportunities for software engineers to create value.
Generative AI is about replacing software engineers in creating that value.
These are very different things.
Except now orders more magnitude of internet connected high knowledge third worlders are not only chomping at the bit for these jobs but qualified for them, and remote work is now largely accepted.
The final phase of this is where Americans start moving to some hut in the Congo to survive off the market wages offered when the supply side of the supply/demand curve blows up.
Author of the article - and analyzed the likely impact of Section 174 in detail a year back [1], in Jan 2024, when it became clear that it was not being reversed like most assumed it would be.
I originally didn’t mention this because S174 impacts the US and US-HQ’d companies. In this data other countries like Germany, UK, France all see a similar drop. Also, S174 impact likely really started from early 2024, when companies impacted had to pay high taxes and realized the change is here to stay with no end in sight. Doesn’t explain the drop since 2022.
Updated the article to make this clear though. It was not in the original version - thanks for the note!
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.
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.
Bullshit. Spotting hallucinations requires expertise in the subject matter, and most devs wouldn't be using LLMs if they intimately knew the programming languages and APIs the LLM is generating.
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.
This happened to me quite recently. I didn't spot the hallucination, trusted the LLM output and introduced a problem into the application I'd never introduce if I didn't use LLMs in the first place. Then my co-workers did the same thing because the LLM guided them in the same broken way as it guided me.
That's a big, massive if. I think the more experienced you are, the less net productivity you gain. If you're more senior, is probably very low or even negative. I use ChatGPT every day pretty much, but it has wasted quite a bit of my time.
When it does save me time, it's almost just some boilerplate I didn't have to Google or type out. Honestly, I feel like gen AI pleataued a year or more ago.
LLMs are just really convincing bullshit generators. They look impressive on the surface, and the times when they spit out a whole bunch of useful boilerplate feels like magic, but that stuff isn't super useful for a majority of the work you spend your time doing. Throwing more money at these companies is not magically going to yield AGI. I think the AI CEOs are basicallly selling us a lie.
One of my co-workers is going all in with one of them in his IDE, as part of a pilot program for using it at our company, and ever since it seems like he's gotten dumber, but by outside metrics he's probably "more productive": Merge requests that don't work (in a whole variety of ways), going really fast by opening new merge requests without fixing the old ones, local changes with no thought to the larger structure, and so on. About half the time I feel like I'm spending more time commenting on these merge requests than if I'd just done it from scratch.
I think experiences are highly variable based on the person and stack. I'd say I've gotten a ~50% productivity boost. I'm quite senior, make FAANG money.
I work in typescript, rust, and go - mostly typescript. LLM coding is an order of magnitude better at typescript than these other languages. To contrast, LLMs seem mostly useless for rust.
I also use cursor, which is a big jump over other code assistants.
And finally I understand how to prompt LLMs accurately. This is a new tool and from interacting with coworkers in the same codebase I can say many smart people have not yet learned how to use the tools effectively.
But if you just assume that everyone catches up to where I am today with cursor + typescript the change is massive.
I disagree. The more senior you are, the easier it is to generate something and be convinced that "ok, this is good enough" or "aight, I see these things that need to be changed instantly". Frankly, compared to others, I don't have that much experience (about 10+ish years), but it saves quite a lot of time for me.
It takes a bit time to build intuition around the workflow, but when you get going, it seems surprisingly useful. I was a skeptic before as well, btw.
>Juniors need to learn by falling on their face a few times, if companies don't want to train them then they'll never become seniors.
It's rare that anyone gets trained by a company who doesn't already know something and is pivoting to a new role. It's unfortunate but that's just the way it's always been. Juniors have to be proactive and bust their ass to become mid level, usually by learning new stuff at home through building stuff on their own and reading obsessively. The hardest part for a junior to get is their first paid job, and more often than not, that first job will be at a shit hole. Juniors should take advantage of it and really bust their ass to impress them and improve themselves. Once they get a couple of strong learning years under their belts, it gets a bit easier.
If you are a junior and the company is paying you to learn stuff, consider yourself extremely lucky.
Companies are in desperate need of strong talent. To succeed, juniors need to force themselves to become strong talent.
If there is a finite amount of software to be written in the world, and an increase in productivity of developers than that amount of software is done with less people. Also, if AI allows an non-software person say an marketing person, write a python script to query a few databases. Than the 10 person business data science team might not need a body as they no longer have to deal with the 10% lower level stuff.
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.
The term "hallucinations" has always frustrated me. The marketing there makes sense, but an LLM that hallucinates is an LLM doing exactly what it was designed for -predicting what a human might say in response.
Facts don't really play a part there, if a response is factual its only a sign that the training set largely agreed on the facts (meaning the correlation of token sequence was high).
You'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.
The graph is very interesting! The number of Indeed openings looks like it's basically leveled off at the initial early covid number over the last year; it's not rising, but at least it'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't replaced wholesale by AGI, the opportunities for building valuable new software are likely to increase a lot over the next few years.
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.
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're customer-facing, maybe, but in cases where you just need to get some data in a different format or something.
Funny because I don'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.
Are we still going through backlog at same rate but with fewer engineers with AI? Can we expect an "induced demand" for more nice to have features which require more engineers?
Assuming that AI coding is already helping the average dev with shipping more.
I don'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.
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...
So mostly, because a lot of companies are 'wait and see'?
Also, is this the downside of the 'wait and see'
But, there could be a rebound from this.
" 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. "
Just like with arts/video editing.
There could be a rebound when so many people start creating things with AI,
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.
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 & South America.
With Cursor and Copilot, the days of $190k entry-level SWE roles in the US are GONE.
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.
If H1Bs were so destructive to the software industry, why would the software industry, which has the highest prevalence of H1Bs, be the industry with the highest growth in salaries for basically the past 2 decades?
Also, the idea that eliminating H1Bs will bring more jobs makes absolutely no sense.
If a company is asked to eliminate all their H1B positions, what do you think is more likely:
- they hire a completely new employee in the U.S. at a similar, or if the critics are right and H1B is suppressing salaries, higher salary, or
- they hire the exact same person but now with that person back in their home country and pay them a tiny fraction of what they were paying them in the U.S.?
There may be a handful of jobs where the employee needs to be in the U.S. where sure, a few more Americans will get jobs. But the overwhelming jobs will simply move abroad with the H1 employee, and along with that a whole bunch of dollars that were being spent within the U.S. and was paying US taxes will move abroad and be spent abroad and pay taxes abroad.
“why would the software industry, which has the highest prevalence of H1Bs, be the industry with the highest growth in salaries for basically the past 2 decades?”
Maybe because that’s just not true? Salaries have generally been stagnant over the last 20 years in real terms for most in the industry.
Most developers do not work at FAANG positions, and even those positions are only found in the extremely high cost of living areas like Silicon Valley.
Companies are always free to hire people from wherever they want. However, it could be foreseeable that “American” companies that are largely overseas, maybe at a disadvantage when it comes to taxes or other benefits conferred by the US government. Such companies may find that their products are subject to tariffs when trying to sell those products back in the United States or other active measures to prevent offshore positions. There is a risk as section 147 changes already has shown.
I believe the American public’s appetite to disincentivize and tax the American companies that ship jobs overseas while simultaneously benefiting from the protection, infrastructure and US government contracts directly or indirectly will only increase in the coming years.
Everyone wants to say it will get better based on what happened in 2000 and 2008. I was around both times.
In 2000, none of the ideas ended up being bad. They were just too early and internet wasn’t ubiquitous.
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.
Things improved when internet became ubiquitous both at home and in their pockets with smart phones and the App Store by 2012.
On the B2B side, there was the rise of SaaS.
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.
It’s going to take at least a decade for the supply/demand to balance out.
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/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.
"Programming languages are simpler than human languages"
this is a very stupid thing to say. The formal structure of a language doesn'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.
Speaking specifically about the "language" part - while there is a formal specification for C++, many pieces are implementation dependent. Then there is actual undefined behavior that is part of a specification.
Actual programs implemented in a language can be ambiguous. consider multi-threaded programs where data arrive at different times in different threads, leading to different outcomes. Or just pure ambiguity of intent. Or a program which incorporates undefined behavior intentionally.
Formal and natural languages may overlap in some ways but it is ridiculous to compare them in this way and claim a probabilistic model is better at the formal language. Translation tasks are an example where LLMs perform extremely well, I would argue much better than in programming. Should I make the claim it's because of some intrinsic attribute of natural language vs formal language?
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.
The easiest explanation for the whole chart is "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."
Trying to add other explanations is fun, but there's not a lot of evidence for any of them, or even that more explanations are needed.
How are sec 175 changes in the US not also a top explanation? This has a massive cost to small businesses and startups trying to hire software engineers, and a big impact to any team trying to grow.
Because the data doesn't match. The author addresses this in his blog post -- essentially every country has the same graph of SWE jobs, but only the US has sec 175.
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> How are sec 175 changes in the US not also a top explanation?
You mean the change from deductible as a current expense to five-year amortization under changes to Sec 174? In an easy money situation, the way it increases tax liability in year one while decreasing in year 2-5 is not a big deal, it becomes more of an issue as the cost of financing goes up, so the main effect is to increase the already-high sensitivity of software development to tightening credit.
Or, to put it in another way, the amplitude of the pork cycle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle) is higher for software developers than for other jobs.
I had not heard of the pork cycle and thought this was going to be about the factoid that the McRib only exists when pork is cheap.
... partly because it's quicker to get started with software projects?
No expensive machines or lab equipment, sometimes not even office space needed, just people with laptops
But the cycle wave length should ... Be similar to how many years people spend studying? That doesn't seem to be the case here?
Quoting the Wikipedia link:
"high salaries in a particular sector lead to an increased number of students studying the relevant subject; when these students enter the job market at the same time after several years of studying, their job prospects and salaries are much worse due to the new surplus of applicants."
Maybe you could say it's related to investors' pork cycle (of different/unknown wavelength) not students' pork cycle :-)
Or maybe just one-time opportunism: low interest rates etc
I tend to agree with you, if only because the swing in Europe on the IT job market has had less amplitude and is more spread out, similar to the difference in stimulus policy.
Zurich IT market died after COVID. Not sure about other hubs.
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The most likely explanation is fraud
Kind of makes you wonder what percentage of software devs are actually working the famed "bullshit jobs"?
I believe many software tools work like a vice for beurocrats making the beurocracy way less efficient.
Like, forcing some not very edge case friendly set of text field validation rules onto the beurocrats such that he can't just do what he tries to do as he could with paper work.
In many orgs. nowadays the processes seem to be made to fit the computer programs not the needs of the beurocracy.
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And even if they produce "real" products. How many of them are needed. How many of them are redoing the same thing. And how many could in perfect world be done more efficiently by resusing some common solution.
Jobs funded by speculative investment that are highly sensitive to monetary policy are pretty orthogonal to the kind of thing addressed by "bullshit jobs" theory. They may be societally harmful or low-social-value more often than other jobs, but generally for very different reasons than bullshit jobs. They are "lottery ticket" jobs, where many are wasted, some are very valuable, and its hard to predict in advance which are which (for investor value; for various reasons endemic to capitalism more generally, this is a very imperfect proxy for social value, but that problem is also mostly orthogonal to the kind off harmful job "bullshit jobs" addresses.)
By the time our work hits stable/ongoing operations, it's well on the path to outsourcing
... to begin the loop again
FRED wants the implication to be AI related, but it seems pretty clear that all/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...
Returns are no longer the actual goal. The actual goal is the perception of far reaching future returns. The perception of those returns is much more valuable than the actual returns. Because the wealthy don't want profits and dividends that get taxed. They want ever increasing stock prices so they can continuously grow their asset base to borrow against so they can never sell said assets this triggering capital gains taxes.
I think you're almost right
I suspect its more a structural issue
e.g. because of Big VC (a16z, other firms with dozens or hundreds of investing staff), VCs don't stick around firms long enough for real returns (cash distributed) to matter. If you're at a place and your stuff is marked up 10x after 4 years, you just hop to become a GP and try to ride the next markup wave. Even if these people exit VC after 10 years that is still 10 years of deals that all flopped.
This might not even be the individual VC's fault -- there may just be too many venture dollars chasing too few power law returns, so you get a surge of startups circa 2019-2022 that all disappear
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Investing for distant future returns is not bad and favours long-term thinking over short-term profit. It is closer to the best (though abstract) metric, net positive value created, which naturally translates to ROI in an ideal world.
The problem is that in this non-ideal world value creation can become completely detached from returns: when instead of investing into people creating value, or distant future returns, or even medium term returns, it becomes about investing into other people investing in it—not too different from a pyramid scheme and various pump-and-dumps.
Companies with actual profits can, and do, simply buy back their own stock. Inflating market expectation of future cashflows is not the only way to realize asset appreciation.
Too bad that business model ended with the collapse of ZIRP economy...
The 10% interest they would have to pay on the loans is almost as much as the capital gains would be.
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Almost every company that announced layoffs said, "We're 're-organizing' to focus on AI", but not "We're over-productive because of AI."
I don't think this is FRED but rather Gergely making the implications but yes
FRED is just a descriptive tool: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/06/business/economy/fred-eco...
> FRED wants the implication to be AI related,
Where is there any indication that FRED wants this?
Wants is maybe too strong, but I've seen this chart in a couple of different substacks / editorials, which I assumed is the fed's press office shopping this story around because "AI taking jobs" is zeitgeist-y right now.
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Does FRED editorialize? Do you have any links?
And add to that many companies moving their IT department to low cost countries.
Tax changes in Section 174 (both advantageous years ago, and terrible recently) also play a huge part.
That interest rates started to rise right when the tax changes to make it less advantageous happened? 1-2 punch.
Article covers that, 174 is US, changes are worldwide.
The number of job postings means nothing. 75% of the job postings are either scam or ghost postings.
Also the same jobs are advertised multiple times, with completely different wording, by multiple recruitment companies.
Then, assuming that the fake job posters are still there and that they now have AI help as well, the fall in the number of postings is more concerning.
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Sometimes the position is simply shit. “My” job ad is open again. Looks like the third guy lasted there 6 months too. Every day new agency posts the same job. But Python developer, who can fix custom hardware from the 90s in the night shift is rare. And the salary was very average too.
I don't know how this isn't considered SEC fraud by publicly traded companies.
the whole point is to obfuscate growth or decline to blur the ability of business intelligence units to make prediction about the company.
it's a scam for applicants, and a scam on the market.
I'm not convinced H1B issues are related, though I'm sure there are fake adverts for jobs that are unfillable to get H1Bs in, too. Unfortunately Musk, Ramaswamy, and DOGE are all about cheap workers.
It's the trend that matters, not the absolute numbers
The scams and fake job postings on the market are also increasing rapidly, outpacing the growth of overall job listings. This trend is significantly affecting the accuracy of employment and job availability tracking.
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Some are H1B fraud where they already have the person they want and advertise and interview to fool USCIS.
That should change by tomorrow. The EEOC is going to crack down on companies cheating H-1B and posting ghost positions: https://x.com/USTechWorkers/status/1892771344540193076
Any H1B related postings are a tiny fraction of the postings by recruiters and recruitment agencies trying to build up their databases, and companies wanting to look like they’re continuing to grow.
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Not gonna happen, I wish there was a way to measure outside of boasts on Twitter.
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People underestimate just how much of the industry was total garbage, pre-AI, pre-pandemic, the signs were all there in 2015. Who remembers "the average tenure of a software engineer in the SF bay area is 18 months". Was it ever really sustainable? That means that after just 18 months you'll get an offer from a company more fantastical than the one you'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'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
Our company just let go of all our remote LATAM hires. We paid high end in their LCOL areas.
They were somewhere between ok and not good. Felt like we got about what we paid for - their cost was about 50% of a US dev. They were as productive as a low end US dev, so in some cases ok value but since hiring low performers tends to hurt a team overall they weren’t worth it.
We’re a mid range company (decent cash comp, not much else since startup). I’m sure if you’re paying more you can do better. But that’s how it’s always been hasn’t it?
As a Brazilian dev living in Europe, one thing people just don't get about offshoring is that good devs have options, even in poorer countries. Companies offshoring usually offshore crappy projects, crappy projects attract bad talent.
Also really top devs (at least in Brazil) can make more than 50k USD per year (fluctuates widely based on exchange rates) at Brazilian companies, it is cheaper than US but the tail-end of talent can still be expensive.
If you really want to attract good devs in cheaper areas the best way is to just open a branch of your office there, pay top-salary and don't just use it a dump ground for the projects no one at home wants to take. So treat them the same as at home. I had a roommate who worked in one of those companies that take offshoring projects, lets just say it is not the best talent pool and the good devs there leave fast.
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>Felt like we got about what we paid for
This is the usual ebb and flow of offshoring in the tech industry that's been going on since the 90s.
There has never been a scalable arbitrage for tech talent by going over to another geo, and there won't be one in the foreseeable future. What US HCoL talent gets paid is unfortunately the fair and natural market rate for that caliber of talent, at least if you need to hire more than like 10 people.
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> I’m sure if you’re paying more you can do better. But that’s how it’s always been hasn’t it?
I’ve been hearing about outsourcing destroying jobs since the 90s and that’s how it’s always gone: the suits salivated at the prospect of cutting wages by, say, 90% and had total write-offs because of it, because they missed that even in a poor country people have options and anyone smart enough to be a good developer is also smart enough to recognize that their skills are worth more. Outsourcing has some big costs related to communications so while you could find decent people at 50-70% of local labor rates, coordination overhead makes that a net loss even before you hit things like the security risks.
Part of the problem there is that the business people really want to think that they understand their business so well that they can give perfect instructions, and it takes a certain humility to recognize that more time goes into knowledge transfer and discovering the true needs than might be obvious.
Always has been, especially since countries opened up their work visas.
There are great engineers around the world but why would they accept ten beans an hour if they can take a plane to a different country and earn fifty?
The talent from LATAM are not just sitting in the rainforest waiting for your phonecall.
Y'all hiring in NA? I'm a Senior dev looking for a role!
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Interesting… 50% of US dev cost is like what if you don’t mind saying? 100k? I found the biggest issue with these engagements is the trust with remote developers.
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My workplace is mostly hiring LATAM and parts of Europe at this point. Occasionally NA but mostly for higher level engineering positions to backfill roles for people who left.
Hailing from a popular outsourcing destination I can attest to the fact that layoffs happened here as well, but now the same people are being rehired for 10-15% less. No growth whatsoever though.
I don't mean to spread FUD, but as an interviewer at a FAANG in the US, I have mostly been interviewing candidates in LATAM (Brazil and Mexico). Same for some of my other coworkers.
It's happening, and happening fast.
Many of the founders I know (who started companies in the past 3 years) are primarily hiring in LATAM too.
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It's been happening for half a century or so.
The boring reality is that the price of labor roughly reflects the productivity companies typically get. Because if there is ever some clear win in some location, people start hiring there, and things start to balance out again.
everything provided by offshoring to india is just an expensive tech debt full of spaghetti code. it simply doesn't work and causes harm to the customers. but because cheap it keeps getting sold. working with indians is a nightmare bar none. and i'm saying this as someone who has been to india and is also personally intrigued by its culture. but it's conway's law all the way - visit places like mumbai or delhi and this is what you'll get ... chaos that kind of works.
Amen no one wants to talk about it for some reason.
Because it doesn't really play a big factor. India has been around forever with an educated, cheap workforce that knows English really well.
Outsourcing is a cost savings measure. It's a symptom, not the cause of the issue
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.
Where in Eastern Europe? At least from my perspective (I've done hiring at several companies, albeit just hiring individual remote workers rather than open a local office) developers in Poland and Czechia are still very competitively priced (less expensive than north/western Europe and A LOT less expensive than the US).
That's pretty weird. Usually, less companies mean less demand for labor. If supply is the same, that means price-for-labor (salaries) would go down. Unless, this was accompanied by people leaving (reduction in supply). Do you have an explanation for this?
The salaries were growing. After that, some companies left for countries where they found cheaper labor.
India salaries are growing too. The top end of Indian devs get paid more, in India, than many US devs at the lower / medium end
no one is moving to Pakistan
It's a pretty common place to get outsourced devs from. But it doesn't have the conglomerate offices like India, so you have to do more to get a team from there. The people are basically the same so same level education, same-ish salaries, same English understanding, etc.
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.
The demand for engineers during the pandemic may have been artificial, but there is still need for people today. Some companies don't hire because they were built to be sold.
>I’m sure that LLMs are a leading cause of the fall in software developer job postings
I can't agree with the conclusion. I can come with tens of examples of when using AI doesn't work.
Also, software engineering means much more than writing code.
I don't disagree with you but a different view that could support the OP hypothesis could be that prior to the AI boom we could see that 90% of the capital went into "normal" software engineering jobs while maybe only 10% of the capital went into the ML market.
Now in the AI boom era, 90% of the capital goes into the AI while 10% goes into SE jobs. That could explain the drop in SE jobs.
That can be a valid point, sure. But the AI bubble will burst just like the dotcom bubble. Maybe some money will return into SE jobs.
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> Also, software engineering means much more than writing code.
What if it speeds up the part of pumping out widgets in the widget factory, shipping Spring Boot / Laravel / whatever projects more quickly and therefore individual devs becoming more productive on cookie cutter projects (without necessarily getting more money for it either).
That's been the case with libraries and frameworks since forever and all it does is rise demand for devs because of Jevons paradox.
the quote doesn't state what you intend to refute.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Right now Netflix is only hiring engineers in Poland
This is patently false. Source: I’m an engineering manager at Netflix who’s hiring in the US and whose peers are all doing the same.
I apologize, and I'm embarrassed, I thoughtlessly repeated what my friend from Netflix said in a casual conversation. He specified that his larger org at netflix is hiring only engineers from Poland. That said, I believe the point I made stands.
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.
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?
It explains layoffs, forced RTO, etc. They simply don’t care if even their best leave. Their MBA executives know optimization/keeping the lights on - and less about innovation.
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.
> 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
It certainly feels this way if your only perspective on the tech industry comes from headlines and social media.
Step outside of the doomerism whirlwind that is internet headlines and it's a very different story. There are a lot of companies doing great things and delivering products that people use, but they don't make for catchy headlines. So you don't hear about them.
I don't think it's doomerism. I started my career during the dotcom boom. I think we are right now in a transition period that is little bit of the start of the boom (just add AI! is the new "just add Internet!") and also a bit of the scorched earth after the initial boom, when all the tourists (CS is easy money!) are rerouted to other careers if at all possible.
This also means it is a great time to start a small, profitable business because labor is undervalued.
At the end of the dotcom boom there were also a lot of companies doing good work.
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Where do you hear about them
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If the analogy is LLMs are today's equivalent of the web, I'm skeptical. Internet-based communication replaced technology like telephones and fax machines for synchronous and asynchronous telecommunication. People like and need to talk to other people. It was clearly valuable from day 1. What is the equivalent value proposition for LLMs? They make for really cool and splashy demos. But practical usage doesn't seem to keep pace with the hype. Why is it such a safe assumption that this is just like the invention of the Internet (or, as Sundar Pichai put it, the invention of fire)?
I have personally written VBA macros (or hell - just a decent Excel spreadsheet...) that have put people out of their jobs. I didn't know this at the time, I was just a young gun able to see how to make some slow repetitive jobs, faster.
Later moved to Oracle / SQL Server / C# / microservices / CICD etc etc) but hell, that was my whole career 2002-2012 across various companies. Making cool tools for smart people, things the accelerated the company in smal;l but measurable ways, that unbeknownst to me would absolutely have directly resulted in a team of 3-5 being reduced to a team of 1, or a team of 1 not being expanded to be a team of 3-5.
The same will happen (IS happening) with LLM's.
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> It was clearly valuable from day 1
I’m not sure that’s the case even if in retrospect we can clearly argue this
In 1998, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences, infamously predicted that “the growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s” [1] and even though that turned out to be spectacularly wrong it shows the attitude in the early days wasn’t one of absolute certainty.
And certainly the current AI boom is most visibly known for LLMs but there is a lot more happening beyond chatbots.
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...
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Like half of software jobs are Doing Something so that management feels like they are innovative thought leaders of the tech community, while the other half of the software jobs are keeping the unsexy business critical software working.
Even if everything being done with LLMs is useless, if you can do the same amount of useless with half as many developers, it's bad news for us.
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It seems to me that I can research and study much faster as a result of using ChatGPT's Deep Research, FWIW.
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The internet created vast new opportunities for software engineers to create value. Generative AI is about replacing software engineers in creating that value. These are very different things.
Software engineers also create value by recognizing opportunity.
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Except now orders more magnitude of internet connected high knowledge third worlders are not only chomping at the bit for these jobs but qualified for them, and remote work is now largely accepted.
The final phase of this is where Americans start moving to some hut in the Congo to survive off the market wages offered when the supply side of the supply/demand curve blows up.
No mention of Section 174...
Edit: I am an idiot, there is a mention. Or possibly the article was edited and I'm not an idiot, it does say there was an edit recently.
Author of the article - and analyzed the likely impact of Section 174 in detail a year back [1], in Jan 2024, when it became clear that it was not being reversed like most assumed it would be.
I originally didn’t mention this because S174 impacts the US and US-HQ’d companies. In this data other countries like Germany, UK, France all see a similar drop. Also, S174 impact likely really started from early 2024, when companies impacted had to pay high taxes and realized the change is here to stay with no end in sight. Doesn’t explain the drop since 2022.
Updated the article to make this clear though. It was not in the original version - thanks for the note!
[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/
There is mention of Section 174, last paragraph before the "Comparison with other industries" heading.
Wow I just googled this and it's the first time I'm hearing about it!
Why anchor it to the start of Covid? I'd really like to see a 10-year period.
There's a 25 year graph at the end of the article.
Indeed released a dataset, and it doesn't go back any farther than that. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
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.
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.
> Devs spot and fix hallucinations immediately, dismissing incorrect autocomplete suggestions
Bullshit. Spotting hallucinations requires expertise in the subject matter, and most devs wouldn't be using LLMs if they intimately knew the programming languages and APIs the LLM is generating.
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.
This happened to me quite recently. I didn't spot the hallucination, trusted the LLM output and introduced a problem into the application I'd never introduce if I didn't use LLMs in the first place. Then my co-workers did the same thing because the LLM guided them in the same broken way as it guided me.
If AI makes a programmer say 25% more productive. Then a team of 4 can do the workload of a team of 5.
That's a big, massive if. I think the more experienced you are, the less net productivity you gain. If you're more senior, is probably very low or even negative. I use ChatGPT every day pretty much, but it has wasted quite a bit of my time.
When it does save me time, it's almost just some boilerplate I didn't have to Google or type out. Honestly, I feel like gen AI pleataued a year or more ago.
LLMs are just really convincing bullshit generators. They look impressive on the surface, and the times when they spit out a whole bunch of useful boilerplate feels like magic, but that stuff isn't super useful for a majority of the work you spend your time doing. Throwing more money at these companies is not magically going to yield AGI. I think the AI CEOs are basicallly selling us a lie.
One of my co-workers is going all in with one of them in his IDE, as part of a pilot program for using it at our company, and ever since it seems like he's gotten dumber, but by outside metrics he's probably "more productive": Merge requests that don't work (in a whole variety of ways), going really fast by opening new merge requests without fixing the old ones, local changes with no thought to the larger structure, and so on. About half the time I feel like I'm spending more time commenting on these merge requests than if I'd just done it from scratch.
I think experiences are highly variable based on the person and stack. I'd say I've gotten a ~50% productivity boost. I'm quite senior, make FAANG money.
I work in typescript, rust, and go - mostly typescript. LLM coding is an order of magnitude better at typescript than these other languages. To contrast, LLMs seem mostly useless for rust.
I also use cursor, which is a big jump over other code assistants.
And finally I understand how to prompt LLMs accurately. This is a new tool and from interacting with coworkers in the same codebase I can say many smart people have not yet learned how to use the tools effectively.
But if you just assume that everyone catches up to where I am today with cursor + typescript the change is massive.
I disagree. The more senior you are, the easier it is to generate something and be convinced that "ok, this is good enough" or "aight, I see these things that need to be changed instantly". Frankly, compared to others, I don't have that much experience (about 10+ish years), but it saves quite a lot of time for me.
It takes a bit time to build intuition around the workflow, but when you get going, it seems surprisingly useful. I was a skeptic before as well, btw.
And you will only get this advantage using senior programmers, all the more reason most juniors are fucked.
Juniors need to learn by falling on their face a few times, if companies don't want to train them then they'll never become seniors. Lovely cycle
>Juniors need to learn by falling on their face a few times, if companies don't want to train them then they'll never become seniors.
It's rare that anyone gets trained by a company who doesn't already know something and is pivoting to a new role. It's unfortunate but that's just the way it's always been. Juniors have to be proactive and bust their ass to become mid level, usually by learning new stuff at home through building stuff on their own and reading obsessively. The hardest part for a junior to get is their first paid job, and more often than not, that first job will be at a shit hole. Juniors should take advantage of it and really bust their ass to impress them and improve themselves. Once they get a couple of strong learning years under their belts, it gets a bit easier.
If you are a junior and the company is paying you to learn stuff, consider yourself extremely lucky.
Companies are in desperate need of strong talent. To succeed, juniors need to force themselves to become strong talent.
Then that one programmer goes on a sick leave and all of the sudden you're missing the output of two people.
It makes the competition 25% more productive too.
If there is a finite amount of software to be written in the world, and an increase in productivity of developers than that amount of software is done with less people. Also, if AI allows an non-software person say an marketing person, write a python script to query a few databases. Than the 10 person business data science team might not need a body as they no longer have to deal with the 10% lower level stuff.
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> Devs spot and fix hallucinations immediately, dismissing incorrect autocomplete suggestions
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.
The term "hallucinations" has always frustrated me. The marketing there makes sense, but an LLM that hallucinates is an LLM doing exactly what it was designed for -predicting what a human might say in response.
Facts don't really play a part there, if a response is factual its only a sign that the training set largely agreed on the facts (meaning the correlation of token sequence was high).
You'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.
It’s about competition. If everyone else is outsourcing, the bar is a lot lower.
Dupe: (6 points, 2 hours ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121113
Development always slows down in down turns and times of uncertainty - companies hoard their money and don't want to start on new projects.
The graph is very interesting! The number of Indeed openings looks like it's basically leveled off at the initial early covid number over the last year; it's not rising, but at least it'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't replaced wholesale by AGI, the opportunities for building valuable new software are likely to increase a lot over the next few years.
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.
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're customer-facing, maybe, but in cases where you just need to get some data in a different format or something.
This smells like AI.
No, I'm pretty sure Gergely Orosz is a real person. He's been blogging at that domain name since 02015: https://web.archive.org/web/20151112212434/http://blog.pragm...
I would imagine as high as 1 in 5 here is AI. this one was just lazy prompt engineering or QC afterwards
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Funny because I don'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.
Are we still going through backlog at same rate but with fewer engineers with AI? Can we expect an "induced demand" for more nice to have features which require more engineers?
Assuming that AI coding is already helping the average dev with shipping more.
I don'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.
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...
Huh, I'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.
doesnt this just reflect interest in indeed.com
So mostly, because a lot of companies are 'wait and see'?
Also, is this the downside of the 'wait and see'
But, there could be a rebound from this.
" 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. "
Just like with arts/video editing.
There could be a rebound when so many people start creating things with AI,
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.
- Interest rates
- Offshoring, nearshoring
- Generative AI
- Coding camps
- Better and more open source libraries. More high level open source libraries
- Low code and no code
- Easier to use technology, more documentation
yet hiring is as difficult as it's even been
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 & South America.
With Cursor and Copilot, the days of $190k entry-level SWE roles in the US are GONE.
Are SAAS and frameworks getting that good that we need software plumbers and fewer software engineers?
> Indeed
I thought it was the MySpace of job boards.
Yeah... I'm getting few blips on my linkedin/email. Fortunate to have a job I enjoy, hoping I can ride the wave.
Two years ago, the cheapseats: "It's FUD."
Today: "I know this pain! It's real."
Rough out there.
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.
This is so backwards it’s incredible.
If H1Bs were so destructive to the software industry, why would the software industry, which has the highest prevalence of H1Bs, be the industry with the highest growth in salaries for basically the past 2 decades?
Also, the idea that eliminating H1Bs will bring more jobs makes absolutely no sense.
If a company is asked to eliminate all their H1B positions, what do you think is more likely:
- they hire a completely new employee in the U.S. at a similar, or if the critics are right and H1B is suppressing salaries, higher salary, or
- they hire the exact same person but now with that person back in their home country and pay them a tiny fraction of what they were paying them in the U.S.?
There may be a handful of jobs where the employee needs to be in the U.S. where sure, a few more Americans will get jobs. But the overwhelming jobs will simply move abroad with the H1 employee, and along with that a whole bunch of dollars that were being spent within the U.S. and was paying US taxes will move abroad and be spent abroad and pay taxes abroad.
“why would the software industry, which has the highest prevalence of H1Bs, be the industry with the highest growth in salaries for basically the past 2 decades?”
Maybe because that’s just not true? Salaries have generally been stagnant over the last 20 years in real terms for most in the industry.
Most developers do not work at FAANG positions, and even those positions are only found in the extremely high cost of living areas like Silicon Valley.
Companies are always free to hire people from wherever they want. However, it could be foreseeable that “American” companies that are largely overseas, maybe at a disadvantage when it comes to taxes or other benefits conferred by the US government. Such companies may find that their products are subject to tariffs when trying to sell those products back in the United States or other active measures to prevent offshore positions. There is a risk as section 147 changes already has shown.
I believe the American public’s appetite to disincentivize and tax the American companies that ship jobs overseas while simultaneously benefiting from the protection, infrastructure and US government contracts directly or indirectly will only increase in the coming years.
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So much for "America First" am I right?
Everyone wants to say it will get better based on what happened in 2000 and 2008. I was around both times.
In 2000, none of the ideas ended up being bad. They were just too early and internet wasn’t ubiquitous.
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.
Things improved when internet became ubiquitous both at home and in their pockets with smart phones and the App Store by 2012.
On the B2B side, there was the rise of SaaS.
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.
It’s going to take at least a decade for the supply/demand to balance out.
No Section 174 is not to blame either.
honestly it hasn't felt this bad since dotcom
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Wait, weren’t we just having a developer shortage? Honestly it’s so hard to keep up with these things.
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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/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.
Are they inviting you to apply?
And what happens if you do?
What's your field?
"Programming languages are simpler than human languages"
this is a very stupid thing to say. The formal structure of a language doesn'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.
> this is a very stupid thing to say
Well, it does have the virtue of being straightforwardly true. For example, programming languages can't be ambiguous.
> programming languages can't be ambiguous
This is "straightforwardly" false.
Speaking specifically about the "language" part - while there is a formal specification for C++, many pieces are implementation dependent. Then there is actual undefined behavior that is part of a specification.
Actual programs implemented in a language can be ambiguous. consider multi-threaded programs where data arrive at different times in different threads, leading to different outcomes. Or just pure ambiguity of intent. Or a program which incorporates undefined behavior intentionally.
Formal and natural languages may overlap in some ways but it is ridiculous to compare them in this way and claim a probabilistic model is better at the formal language. Translation tasks are an example where LLMs perform extremely well, I would argue much better than in programming. Should I make the claim it's because of some intrinsic attribute of natural language vs formal language?
> programming languages can't be ambiguous
Yes, in C++ we call it "unspecified behavior" and "undefined behavior"
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