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22% Drop in Programming Jobs
- belter 2y agoIt's not AI: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXDETPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXDETPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXAUTPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXAUTPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPITOPHE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPITOPHE Companies and VC's with unrealistic valuations will spin it as such.
- rbultje 2y agoThere's also section-174, which big corporations don't care about but kills smaller businesses left and right.
- jordanb 2y agoI hear a lot of static about this on hacker news and nowhere else. I work for a large company and we were already capitalizing the time we spent developing software. From an accounting perspective it makes sense that software development effort produces a semi-durable asset that a company can use, sell, etc. For smaller companies, the math is the same. For startups very specifically, who expect to go to the moon or go bust in 5 years, I can believe that having a lower initial burn rate (because they could represent all developer salaries as opex and deduct in the immediate calendar year) was beneficial. Also, the tax law changes actually disincentivize offshoring software development by requiring an absurdly long amortization schedule for foreign-developed software. Yet offshoring is currently as intense as it has ever been since the early 2000s. (If we expect the tax law changes to have a big effect on developer hiring, we would expect a decrease in offshoring given the disincentives).
- belter 2y agoYeah 174 is crazy: https://youtu.be/1ecu0YsCGxg https://youtu.be/1ecu0YsCGxg
- hhh 2y agoI mean, section 174 was a big deal to the large corp I'm in when it was getting started. We had to clarify R&D time separately.
- kfk 2y agoI wonder how much of this drop can be simply explained as having reached a certain industry maturity. I assume at some point most of the fundamentals are in place, so we need less people?
- AlchemistCamp 2y agoProgramming isn't an industry, per se. It's a skill, like accounting, sales, communications or law. There are definitely many businesses for which it's a core strength, but any large company has some need for it.
- jordanb 2y agoMaturity is definitely an issue. If you listen to what the industry is selling these days it's pretty much just AI. Before that it was DeFi and VR. There hasn't been a new smartphone since.. the smartphone. I have more thoughts here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41495082 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41495082
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- brianwawok 2y agoI think programmer is the last job I would replace with AI.
- fancyfredbot 2y agoThat sounds like something a programmer would say.
- JKCalhoun 2y agoThat's funny, but I also don't doubt that the industry, should it pursue this path, is going to be on a hiring spree to get engineers back to fix the mess they've wrought a few years from now.
- deletedie 2y ago"Pursuing this path" kicked-off 2 years ago when the tech industry collectively conducted the first round of unprecedented-in-scale (until the following year) 'right-sizing'.
- fancyfredbot 2y agoIt's the idea programmers should be last which is kind of arrogant/funny. First we replace judges, doctors, police, generals, state officials, politicians, etc etc, and only then the programmer, the true foundation of our society! (It shouldn't need stating that replacing any of these professionals with AI systems as they exist today is a terrible idea. Yes, even the politicians)
- surgical_fire 2y agoI probably wouldn't replace any of those with a system that excels in generating plausibly sounding bullshit. LLMs are good at processing natural language. I think only a few human tasks are suitable to be fully replaced with AI. Things like translation might be a good candidate, with some proofreading.
- somenameforme 2y agoFRED enables combining (and tweaking/scaling/etc) charts pretty easily on their site. Check out the 'edit graph' button. You can use the ID's of the individual charts (like IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE) when searching for a table to add. Here are those 4 tables combined: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1EDHP https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1EDHP
- belter 2y agoNice tip. Thanks.
- csomar 2y agohttps://archive.is/6lt46 https://archive.is/6lt46
- onion2k 2y ago22% drop in programming jobs, but only a 0.3% drop in developer jobs. It's an interesting point of differentiation. I imagine there's a lot more developers than programmers when you're being pedantic about it.
- rendaw 2y agoWhat's the difference between programming and software development? I can't read the article.
- tucnak 2y agoI imagine it's counting the PM's, infrastructure and support staff...
- onion2k 2y agoFrom the article In the government’s schema, programmers do the grunt work while the much more numerous — and much faster-growing — software developers enjoy a broader remit. They figure out what clients need, design solutions and work with folks such as programmers and hardware engineers to implement them.
- jmclnx 2y agoAt one time these were called System Analyst. Is that no longer a thing ?
- SpicyLemonZest 2y agoGovernment statistics consider "system analyst" to be a third, different thing (https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/computer-systems-analysts.htm https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...). "Computer systems analysts study an organization’s current computer systems and design ways to improve efficiency."
- infecto 2y agoIt is, at least from the visual of different "coding" type jobs there is still a slide for System Analyst. I have no idea what most of the differences are.
- csomar 2y agoTo save you wasting 10 minutes: The distinction between programmer and software developer in government definition, led to "programming" jobs dropping by 22%. This doesn't affect the "Software development" industry which saw only a 0.3% drop. It is really a click bait.
- infecto 2y agoAgree on the click bait title but it did not save me a click. For those wondering more. There is some distinction, which I still do not fully comprehend between "programming" which is grunt work and "developer" which is ingesting requirements and coding on top of working with "programmers" to implement a client needs. If someone has more insight on the distinction I would love to understand because it could be interesting if programmer was the initial stepping stone into developer.
- jt2190 2y agoU.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) definitions: “Computer Programmer”: https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes151251.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/2023/may/oes151251.htm “Software Developer”: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm
- ziddoap 2y ago>The distinction between programmer and software developer in government definition To save the click on what this means specifically: "In the government’s schema, programmers do the grunt work while the much more numerous — and much faster-growing — software developers enjoy a broader remit. They figure out what clients need, design solutions and work with folks such as programmers and hardware engineers to implement them."
- trescenzi 2y agoIt is clickbait, assuming you don’t know the distinction between a developer and a programmer. If you do it’s actually a pretty solid title. I’d argue it’s worth a read because the main point is very good. I think the core distinction is important and gets at what LLMs are and are not good at. LLMs are good at translating clear specifications into common programming languages. That is what a programmer, by the BLS’ definition, does. The hard part of being a software dev never has been writing the code. They are claiming that the act of programming is in the process of being replaced. That seems somewhat likely. However they aren’t saying that overall tech industry jobs nor even software dev jobs are decreasing.
- littlestymaar 2y agoAs expected, the end of the ZIRP has hit startups hard.
- thr0w 2y agoAnd will continue to, I think. There's probably a long tail of startups that raised near the end of zirp and will have their runway diminish over the course of the next few years.
- oldpersonintx 2y ago[dead]
- osigurdson 2y ago>> while programmers do in fact program, they “work from specifications drawn up by software and web developers or other individuals.” That seems like a clue. I wonder if this conclusion is drawn from keyword searches on job postings. It is true that not many position titles these days include "programmer" - usually it is software engineer or developer. Of course, there is no difference other than terminology has shifted.
- aantix 2y agoThis number feels too low.. I have some amazing developer friends in the U.S. that are still out of a job, 9 months later.
- drpossum 2y agoMaybe your judgement about your developer friends or your trust of in the ability of the industry to evaluate developers is wrong.
- submeta 2y agoIn the past week, I used Cursor to make significant changes to a larger project, which led me to cancel a contract with a consulting firm. Then, almost spontaneously, I built a digital requests platform with thirty forms for our company—an MVP that turned out to be quite solid. On the weekend, I put together a site for my spouse where she can submit URLs from paywalled articles, receive an AI-generated summary, and get an archive.is link—just a fun side project. And since I was on a roll, I also built a new UI for my thousands of notes in Obsidian: a three-pane viewer with a list, note preview, and folder navigation. All of this, simply because I can. It really makes me wonder what this means for the software job market. This article offers some perspective.
- profsummergig 2y agoVery cool. The AI-generated summary, do you have to pay for an API for that or are these kinds of services available free these days?
- submeta 2y agoI use my openai api key. Only my wife an I use the site. In my case the app sends the summary to my Obsidian vault as well and creates a new note, if I ask it to. I feel like we're in crazy times. I feel like I can implement whatever I think of with a hundred devs at my fingertips. The only limit is my time and imagination.
- emorning3 2y agoWhen I entered the job market back in ye olde 1980s there really weren't 'software developers', we were all 'computer programmer'. Because the higher level stuff; design, devops, agile, hadn't been invented yet.
- osigurdson 2y agoI remember looking at BLS statistics 10-15 years ago and pondered why they meant by "programmer" vs "software developer" jobs. After all, even back then, programmers were on the decline. Is a "programmer" someone who enters machine code instructions via toggle switches? I suppose that could have been a job in the 50s perhaps.
- lIl-IIIl 2y agoThis article is so ridiculous it really make me think of Gilman Amnesia Effect and makes me question other newspaper reporting. I definitely won't be trusting anything I read in WP's "Department of Data" column from now on. The claim that the level of programmers is now as low as it was in the 80's is ridiculous. The author could instead make and article about the terminology change over time but that would be a boring topic for a general purpose newspaper.
- puppycodes 2y agoThis article is like someone starting to do a stats problem, realizing they screwed up and then going "OK done!"
- exiguus 2y agoHow was the increase in descries in the last 10 years? During corona was a peak, now it goes down.