13 ms·

Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

255 points by m3h 2y ago

gnabgib 2y ago
Dupe: (6 points, 2 hours ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121113
righthand 2y ago
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.
- m3h 2y ago
  Are they inviting you to apply? And what happens if you do?
- AlexCoventry 2y ago
  What's your field?
neilv 2y ago
Why anchor it to the start of Covid? I'd really like to see a 10-year period.
- mverv 2y ago
  There's a 25 year graph at the end of the article.
- geor9e 2y ago
  Indeed released a dataset, and it doesn't go back any farther than that. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
xk3 2y ago
> 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.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  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).
andro_dev 2y ago
The number of job postings means nothing. 75% of the job postings are either scam or ghost postings.
- selcuka 2y ago
  Also the same jobs are advertised multiple times, with completely different wording, by multiple recruitment companies.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    I had an interview process frozen because of a hiring freeze a few months back. Then news of layoffs occured, predictably. Last week I see the exact job I applied to posted yet again. Ghost jobs really need to be punished. If you aren't actively talking to candidates within X days of posting or are reposting a job before Y days, there needs to be some disincenive to not do that.
  - m3h 2y ago
    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.
    - selcuka 2y ago
      Maybe recruiters are also losing their jobs, so the number of duplicates are now less?
  - lnsru 2y ago
    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.
- willmadden 2y ago
  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 https://x.com/USTechWorkers/status/1892771344540193076
hooverd 2y ago
> Indeed I thought it was the MySpace of job boards.
streptomycin 2y ago
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.
- nbbaier 2y ago
  There is mention of Section 174, last paragraph before the "Comparison with other industries" heading.
- throwaway638637 2y ago
  Wow I just googled this and it's the first time I'm hearing about it!
- gregdoesit 2y ago
  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/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/
ipnon 2y ago
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.
- NeverFade 2y ago
  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.
  - aorloff 2y ago
    Software engineers also create value by recognizing opportunity.
    - ty6853 2y ago
      Opportunity: you can buy $1500 in shingles, put them on someone's roof yourself in 4 days, and clear $5000 profit -- somewhere where rents/mortgage are under $1500 a month and a nice restaurant meal for two is under $50. It's rapidly looking like nerding out while pining for the old days where engineering knowledge and education was valuable is maladaptive. The sunk cost fallacy can be real.
    - yolovoe 2y ago
      You can replace software engineers with anything else here. Most VPs and higher leadership I see at FAANGs (who're arguably the ones recognizing opportunity) come from a PM or other non-software background. As much as I'd like to believe we're special, it doesn't seem like we are any special. We have no protection. It's best to start hedging and learning other skills. Or focus on making as much money as possible ASAP so you have some financial safety net to fall back to as AI and Trump/Musk and offshoring has increased in recent years. All of us need an escape plan ready. I don't mean to spread FUD. Just hedge please. I assume I have at most a decade of tech career left in the best case. A couple years in the worst case.
tehjoker 2y ago
doesnt this just reflect interest in indeed.com
sleepybrett 2y ago
honestly it hasn't felt this bad since dotcom
wombat-man 2y ago
Yeah... I'm getting few blips on my linkedin/email. Fortunate to have a job I enjoy, hoping I can ride the wave.
softwaredoug 2y ago
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.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Yes and no. They are more or less trying to drain their workforce, yes. But they are also investing very hard in AI, which is about as speculative as you can get at the moment. Keep just enough (and maybe reduce that amount by 10%) to keep the mature tech running and then throw any extra power into the AI hype bubble. So it's a bit of both extremes at once.
austin-cheney 2y ago
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.
throwaway638637 2y ago
Kind of strange to see no mention of outsourcing in an otherwise detailed analysis
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- yolovoe 2y ago
  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.
  - jprokay13 2y ago
    Many of the founders I know (who started companies in the past 3 years) are primarily hiring in LATAM too.
    - yolovoe 2y ago
      That's a good point. I used to work at a SF startup before the FAANG about 4-5 years back. All the engineers there have unfortunately been replaced with those in LATAM too. LATAM engineers were making like $80-$90K in USD, which is apparently really good money there, whereas US engineer asked for base pay twice that. So it seems like a win-win deal for the cofounders and LATAM engineers. Just not so great for those of us in the US.
      - addicted 2y ago
        This was unsurprising when American employees decided to use the significant power they gained over the pandemic to insist on WFH. Whether working collaboratively in an office was beneficial or not, employers certainly believed it to be so. They believed it so much that employers, pre pandemic, were willing to hire employees a single time zone away from SF, and then pay them a significant one time amount along with a much higher annual salary to relocate them to SF. This belief in higher productivity when teams were geographically collocated was the entire basis for which employers were willing to pay American employees several multiples of what they would pay employees abroad. But the same employees who were benefiting from this decided they didn’t want to keep that advantage anymore. And now since WFH has become the norm in the US, employers are realizing there’s no need to pay to keep employees in the U.S. and outsourcing to significantly cheaper locations instead.
scarface_74 2y ago
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.
29athrowaway 2y ago
- 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
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
chadcmulligan 2y ago
Development always slows down in down turns and times of uncertainty - companies hoard their money and don't want to start on new projects.
mattkw 2y ago
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.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  >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 When was the peak of AI? My impression was around 2022, and the crash started the next year. I don't think AI is the cause so much as projected economic headwinds and S174. But I can see AI being indirectly responsible. Not because of replacing jobs, but because Companies want to redirect dev funds saved into powering AI servers. I believe Meta said as much at the beginning of 2025 (or maybe it was Google?)
- jfasi 2y ago
  > 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.
  - mattkw 2y ago
    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.
tqi 2y ago
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...
- xk3 2y ago
  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-economic-data-fandom.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/06/business/economy/fred-eco...
- suraci 2y ago
  Almost every company that announced layoffs said, "We're 're-organizing' to focus on AI", but not "We're over-productive because of AI."
- kennyloginz 2y ago
  Does FRED editorialize? Do you have any links?
- lazide 2y ago
  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.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Article covers that, 174 is US, changes are worldwide.
    - lazide 2y ago
      The US is the largest software dev market by far, and these changes ripple out. Outsourced dev costs still get the same tax treatment for US companies, so while reducing the costs reduces the problem for US companies, it doesn’t change that the problem exists. This impacts all other markets.
qwertyuiop_ 2y ago
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.
- TheAmazingRace 2y ago
  So much for "America First" am I right?
- addicted 2y ago
  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.
  - qwertyuiop_ 2y ago
    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.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Easy to tax physical goods, hard to tax "underpaid" service work. Is DeepMind an American company? It's owned by Google, but it was founded in, and is still HQed in, the UK, but has offices worldwide. How much appetite do you recon Canada, France, Germany, and the UK have for America's trillion-dollar-club at this point? Now sure, you could demand any corporations selling in the US, even if not based there, hand over payroll etc. documents and then tax them at whatever the multiplier is to go from that country's salary to US salaries… if you don't mind that means some countries are banned by existing privacy laws from doing business with you, or that even this is easily gamed, or that American exceptionalism is increasingly overstaying its welcome.
readwritebuild 2y ago
Two years ago, the cheapseats: "It's FUD." Today: "I know this pain! It's real." Rough out there.
RayVR 2y ago
"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.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > 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.
  - Lockal 2y ago
    > programming languages can't be ambiguous Yes, in C++ we call it "unspecified behavior" and "undefined behavior"
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      Those occur when you've made an unambiguous statement that has no valid semantics. ("God should get a promotion."†) They don't occur when you've made an ambiguous statement ("We saw her duck.") As I noted above, it isn't possible to make an ambiguous statement. † I'm aware that that isn't an unambiguous statement. This is for the simple reason that it's next to impossible to make an unambiguous statement in a natural language; that's why legal documents use so many clauses. I'm relying on the reader here to realize which meaning I had in mind, which is the way all natural language works.
      - Lockal 2y ago
        The case "God should get a promotion" if I understand correctly, is soundness (as in Rust) issue, with equivalent in C: `int increment(int x) { x + 1; }` - sound, not valid. The case with legal documents is equivalent in C sequence points for comma operator with something like `print(i++, i++)`. Imagine Boeing documentation with text "In case of blinking indicator press button A and stop immediately". Button "A and stop"? Button "stop" after button A? Authors can hope that a sane human can resolve this ambiguity, but if it is done by compiler/interpreter/robot, it can have an avalanche effect.
aitchnyu 2y ago
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.
sklivvz1971 2y ago
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...
roncesvalles 2y ago
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.
- lazide 2y ago
  It’s about competition. If everyone else is outsourcing, the bar is a lot lower.
foxfired 2y ago
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.
vonzepp 2y ago
If AI makes a programmer say 25% more productive. Then a team of 4 can do the workload of a team of 5.
- rcpt 2y ago
  It makes the competition 25% more productive too.
  - vonzepp 2y ago
    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.
    - kersheck 2y ago
      I think if there is a finite amount (debatable), we're still nowhere near close to reaching that outer limit. An increase in developer productivity could mean the team does more with the same people, or builds more product that requires hiring more engineers to support.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- ramon156 2y ago
  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
  - Clubber 2y ago
    >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.
DeathArrow 2y ago
>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.
- KronisLV 2y ago
  > 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).
  - IsTom 2y ago
    That's been the case with libraries and frameworks since forever and all it does is rise demand for devs because of Jevons paradox.
- menaerus 2y ago
  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.
  - DeathArrow 2y ago
    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.
    - menaerus 2y ago
      It might burst but it may take years for that and until then it's going to be a struggle for most people in non-ML engineering jobs. But it might not burst at all? The trends in AI developments for the past few years are a bit concerning IMO.
imiric 2y ago
> 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.
- ManlyBread 2y ago
  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.
DeathArrow 2y ago
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.
- brutus1213 2y ago
  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?
  - DeathArrow 2y ago
    The salaries were growing. After that, some companies left for countries where they found cheaper labor.
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  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
- ido 2y ago
  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).
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  no one is moving to Pakistan
  - aprilthird2021 2y ago
    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.
threwaway235 2y ago
Wait, weren’t we just having a developer shortage? Honestly it’s so hard to keep up with these things.
- oldpersonintx 2y ago
  [dead]
dragonwriter 2y ago
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.
- fieldcny 2y ago
  The most likely explanation is fraud
- rob74 2y ago
  Or, to put it in another way, the amplitude of the pork cycle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle) is higher for software developers than for other jobs.
  - madcaptenor 2y ago
    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.
  - cutemonster 2y ago
    ... 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
kragen 2y ago
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.
- throw83288 2y ago
  This smells like AI.
  - red-iron-pine 2y ago
    I would imagine as high as 1 in 5 here is AI. this one was just lazy prompt engineering or QC afterwards
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - kragen 2y ago
      You may not have read the guidelines for contributing to this site, but https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html specifically says: > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. (...) Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. (...) Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. Your comment flagrantly violates all three of these rules. This trivial cryptogram contains more details: Tiqy mcif ufobrtohvsf'g dwgg-ghwbywbu oggvczs, mci dihfwr dirrzs ct dig.
fjjjrjj 2y ago
Are SAAS and frameworks getting that good that we need software plumbers and fewer software engineers?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
donatj 2y ago
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.
zman0225 2y ago
yet hiring is as difficult as it's even been
phendrenad2 2y ago
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.
ryandvm 2y ago
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.
turnsout 2y ago
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.
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
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.
Woodsandra 2y ago
[dead]

255 points by m3h 2y ago

Dupe: (6 points, 2 hours ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121113 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43121113

righthand 2y ago

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.

m3h 2y ago
Are they inviting you to apply? And what happens if you do?
AlexCoventry 2y ago
What's your field?

neilv 2y ago

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

mverv 2y ago
There's a 25 year graph at the end of the article.
geor9e 2y ago
Indeed released a dataset, and it doesn't go back any farther than that. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

xk3 2y ago

> 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.

_heimdall 2y ago
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).

andro_dev 2y ago

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

selcuka 2y ago
Also the same jobs are advertised multiple times, with completely different wording, by multiple recruitment companies.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  I had an interview process frozen because of a hiring freeze a few months back. Then news of layoffs occured, predictably. Last week I see the exact job I applied to posted yet again. Ghost jobs really need to be punished. If you aren't actively talking to candidates within X days of posting or are reposting a job before Y days, there needs to be some disincenive to not do that.
- m3h 2y ago
  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.
  - selcuka 2y ago
    Maybe recruiters are also losing their jobs, so the number of duplicates are now less?
- lnsru 2y ago
  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.
willmadden 2y ago
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 https://x.com/USTechWorkers/status/1892771344540193076

hooverd 2y ago

> Indeed I thought it was the MySpace of job boards.

streptomycin 2y ago

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.

nbbaier 2y ago
There is mention of Section 174, last paragraph before the "Comparison with other industries" heading.
throwaway638637 2y ago
Wow I just googled this and it's the first time I'm hearing about it!
gregdoesit 2y ago
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/ https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/section-174/

ipnon 2y ago

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.

NeverFade 2y ago
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.
- aorloff 2y ago
  Software engineers also create value by recognizing opportunity.
  - ty6853 2y ago
    Opportunity: you can buy $1500 in shingles, put them on someone's roof yourself in 4 days, and clear $5000 profit -- somewhere where rents/mortgage are under $1500 a month and a nice restaurant meal for two is under $50. It's rapidly looking like nerding out while pining for the old days where engineering knowledge and education was valuable is maladaptive. The sunk cost fallacy can be real.
  - yolovoe 2y ago
    You can replace software engineers with anything else here. Most VPs and higher leadership I see at FAANGs (who're arguably the ones recognizing opportunity) come from a PM or other non-software background. As much as I'd like to believe we're special, it doesn't seem like we are any special. We have no protection. It's best to start hedging and learning other skills. Or focus on making as much money as possible ASAP so you have some financial safety net to fall back to as AI and Trump/Musk and offshoring has increased in recent years. All of us need an escape plan ready. I don't mean to spread FUD. Just hedge please. I assume I have at most a decade of tech career left in the best case. A couple years in the worst case.

tehjoker 2y ago

doesnt this just reflect interest in indeed.com

sleepybrett 2y ago

honestly it hasn't felt this bad since dotcom

wombat-man 2y ago

Yeah... I'm getting few blips on my linkedin/email. Fortunate to have a job I enjoy, hoping I can ride the wave.

softwaredoug 2y ago

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.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
Yes and no. They are more or less trying to drain their workforce, yes. But they are also investing very hard in AI, which is about as speculative as you can get at the moment. Keep just enough (and maybe reduce that amount by 10%) to keep the mature tech running and then throw any extra power into the AI hype bubble. So it's a bit of both extremes at once.

austin-cheney 2y ago

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.

throwaway638637 2y ago

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

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
yolovoe 2y ago
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.
- jprokay13 2y ago
  Many of the founders I know (who started companies in the past 3 years) are primarily hiring in LATAM too.
  - yolovoe 2y ago
    That's a good point. I used to work at a SF startup before the FAANG about 4-5 years back. All the engineers there have unfortunately been replaced with those in LATAM too. LATAM engineers were making like $80-$90K in USD, which is apparently really good money there, whereas US engineer asked for base pay twice that. So it seems like a win-win deal for the cofounders and LATAM engineers. Just not so great for those of us in the US.
    - addicted 2y ago
      This was unsurprising when American employees decided to use the significant power they gained over the pandemic to insist on WFH. Whether working collaboratively in an office was beneficial or not, employers certainly believed it to be so. They believed it so much that employers, pre pandemic, were willing to hire employees a single time zone away from SF, and then pay them a significant one time amount along with a much higher annual salary to relocate them to SF. This belief in higher productivity when teams were geographically collocated was the entire basis for which employers were willing to pay American employees several multiples of what they would pay employees abroad. But the same employees who were benefiting from this decided they didn’t want to keep that advantage anymore. And now since WFH has become the norm in the US, employers are realizing there’s no need to pay to keep employees in the U.S. and outsourcing to significantly cheaper locations instead.

scarface_74 2y ago

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.

29athrowaway 2y ago

- 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

deleted 2y ago

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chadcmulligan 2y ago

Development always slows down in down turns and times of uncertainty - companies hoard their money and don't want to start on new projects.

mattkw 2y ago

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.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
>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 When was the peak of AI? My impression was around 2022, and the crash started the next year. I don't think AI is the cause so much as projected economic headwinds and S174. But I can see AI being indirectly responsible. Not because of replacing jobs, but because Companies want to redirect dev funds saved into powering AI servers. I believe Meta said as much at the beginning of 2025 (or maybe it was Google?)
jfasi 2y ago
> 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.
- mattkw 2y ago
  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.

tqi 2y ago

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...

xk3 2y ago
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-economic-data-fandom.html https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/06/business/economy/fred-eco...
suraci 2y ago
Almost every company that announced layoffs said, "We're 're-organizing' to focus on AI", but not "We're over-productive because of AI."
kennyloginz 2y ago
Does FRED editorialize? Do you have any links?
lazide 2y ago
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.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Article covers that, 174 is US, changes are worldwide.
  - lazide 2y ago
    The US is the largest software dev market by far, and these changes ripple out. Outsourced dev costs still get the same tax treatment for US companies, so while reducing the costs reduces the problem for US companies, it doesn’t change that the problem exists. This impacts all other markets.

qwertyuiop_ 2y ago

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.

TheAmazingRace 2y ago
So much for "America First" am I right?
addicted 2y ago
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.
- qwertyuiop_ 2y ago
  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.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Easy to tax physical goods, hard to tax "underpaid" service work. Is DeepMind an American company? It's owned by Google, but it was founded in, and is still HQed in, the UK, but has offices worldwide. How much appetite do you recon Canada, France, Germany, and the UK have for America's trillion-dollar-club at this point? Now sure, you could demand any corporations selling in the US, even if not based there, hand over payroll etc. documents and then tax them at whatever the multiplier is to go from that country's salary to US salaries… if you don't mind that means some countries are banned by existing privacy laws from doing business with you, or that even this is easily gamed, or that American exceptionalism is increasingly overstaying its welcome.

readwritebuild 2y ago

Two years ago, the cheapseats: "It's FUD." Today: "I know this pain! It's real." Rough out there.

RayVR 2y ago

"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.

thaumasiotes 2y ago
> 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.
- Lockal 2y ago
  > programming languages can't be ambiguous Yes, in C++ we call it "unspecified behavior" and "undefined behavior"
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Those occur when you've made an unambiguous statement that has no valid semantics. ("God should get a promotion."†) They don't occur when you've made an ambiguous statement ("We saw her duck.") As I noted above, it isn't possible to make an ambiguous statement. † I'm aware that that isn't an unambiguous statement. This is for the simple reason that it's next to impossible to make an unambiguous statement in a natural language; that's why legal documents use so many clauses. I'm relying on the reader here to realize which meaning I had in mind, which is the way all natural language works.
    - Lockal 2y ago
      The case "God should get a promotion" if I understand correctly, is soundness (as in Rust) issue, with equivalent in C: `int increment(int x) { x + 1; }` - sound, not valid. The case with legal documents is equivalent in C sequence points for comma operator with something like `print(i++, i++)`. Imagine Boeing documentation with text "In case of blinking indicator press button A and stop immediately". Button "A and stop"? Button "stop" after button A? Authors can hope that a sane human can resolve this ambiguity, but if it is done by compiler/interpreter/robot, it can have an avalanche effect.

aitchnyu 2y ago

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.

sklivvz1971 2y ago

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...

roncesvalles 2y ago

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.

lazide 2y ago
It’s about competition. If everyone else is outsourcing, the bar is a lot lower.

foxfired 2y ago

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.

vonzepp 2y ago

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

rcpt 2y ago
It makes the competition 25% more productive too.
- vonzepp 2y ago
  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.
  - kersheck 2y ago
    I think if there is a finite amount (debatable), we're still nowhere near close to reaching that outer limit. An increase in developer productivity could mean the team does more with the same people, or builds more product that requires hiring more engineers to support.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
ramon156 2y ago
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
- Clubber 2y ago
  >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.

DeathArrow 2y ago

>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.

KronisLV 2y ago
> 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).
- IsTom 2y ago
  That's been the case with libraries and frameworks since forever and all it does is rise demand for devs because of Jevons paradox.
menaerus 2y ago
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.
- DeathArrow 2y ago
  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.
  - menaerus 2y ago
    It might burst but it may take years for that and until then it's going to be a struggle for most people in non-ML engineering jobs. But it might not burst at all? The trends in AI developments for the past few years are a bit concerning IMO.

imiric 2y ago

> 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.

ManlyBread 2y ago
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.

DeathArrow 2y ago

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.

brutus1213 2y ago
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?
- DeathArrow 2y ago
  The salaries were growing. After that, some companies left for countries where they found cheaper labor.
aprilthird2021 2y ago
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
ido 2y ago
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).
red-iron-pine 2y ago
no one is moving to Pakistan
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  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.

threwaway235 2y ago

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

oldpersonintx 2y ago
[dead]

dragonwriter 2y ago

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.

fieldcny 2y ago
The most likely explanation is fraud
rob74 2y ago
Or, to put it in another way, the amplitude of the pork cycle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle) is higher for software developers than for other jobs.
- madcaptenor 2y ago
  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.
- cutemonster 2y ago
  ... 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

kragen 2y ago

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.

throw83288 2y ago
This smells like AI.
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  I would imagine as high as 1 in 5 here is AI. this one was just lazy prompt engineering or QC afterwards
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - kragen 2y ago
    You may not have read the guidelines for contributing to this site, but https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html specifically says: > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. (...) Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. (...) Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. Your comment flagrantly violates all three of these rules. This trivial cryptogram contains more details: Tiqy mcif ufobrtohvsf'g dwgg-ghwbywbu oggvczs, mci dihfwr dirrzs ct dig.

fjjjrjj 2y ago

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

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

donatj 2y ago

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.

zman0225 2y ago

yet hiring is as difficult as it's even been

phendrenad2 2y ago

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.

ryandvm 2y ago

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.

turnsout 2y ago

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.

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

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.

Woodsandra 2y ago

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