7 ms·

Job Postings for Software Engineers Are Rapidly Rising

233 points by delichon 6mo ago

deleted 6mo ago
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enraged_camel 6mo ago
Title is editorialized and the report is from two months ago.
- emp17344 6mo ago
  https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE The chart is continuously updated, and postings are still on the rise as of last week. Your criticism is moot.
jdw64 6mo ago
Personally, I prefer vibe coding in the sense of stitching things together at the function-to-method level. Unlike people who take the extreme position that vibe coders are useless, I do think LLMs often write individual functions or methods better than I do. But in a way, that does not fundamentally change the nature of the work. Even before LLMs, many functions and methods were effectively assembled from libraries, Stack Overflow snippets, documentation examples, and copied patterns. The real limitation comes from the nature of transformer-based LLMs and their context windows. Agentic coding has a ceiling. Once the codebase reaches a scale where the agent can no longer hold the relevant structure in context, you need a programmer again. At that point, software engineering becomes necessary: knowing how to split things according to cohesion and coupling, using patterns to constrain degrees of freedom, and designing boundaries that keep the system understandable. In my experience, agentic coding is useful for building skeletons. But if you let the agent write everything by itself, the codebase tends to degrade. The human role is to divide the work into task units that the agent can handle well. Eventually, a person is still needed. If you make an agent do everything, it tends to create god objects, or it strangely glues things together even when the structure could have been separated with a simpler pattern. Thinking about it now, this may be exactly why I was drawn to books like EIB: they teach how to constrain freedom in software design so the system does not collapse under its own flexibility.
- wombat-man 6mo ago
  The models are improving. The software that harnesses them is also improving. It wasn't that long ago that the models were quite bad at a lot of the tasks that they are excelling at today. I do agree there's probably a ceiling to what we can get out of these, but I also don't think we have quite hit that point yet.
  - jdw64 6mo ago
    I agree with what you said. And perhaps my belief that “people like me are still needed” is just a desperate form of self-persuasion. If AI replaces everything, then I become unnecessary. So maybe I am simply trying to convince myself that developers like me are still needed. That said, realistically, I still think there are limits unless the essence of architecture itself changes. I also acknowledge part of your perspective. Those of us who are not in the AI field tend to experience AI progress not as a linear or continuous process, but as a series of discrete events, such as major model releases. Because of that, there is inevitably a gap in perspective. People inside the industry, at least those who are not just promoting hype, often seem to feel that technological progress is exponential. But since we are not part of that industry, we experience it more episodically, as separate events. At the same time, capital has a self-fulfilling quality. If enough capital concentrates in one direction, what looked like linear progress may suddenly accelerate in an almost exponential way. However, even that kind of model can eventually hit a specific limit. I do not know when that limit will arrive, because I am not an AI industry insider. More precisely, I am closer to someone who uses Hugging Face models, builds around them, and serves them, rather than someone working on AI R&D itself.
    - tharkun__ 6mo ago
      “people like me are still needed” is just a desperate form of self-persuasion. No, no it's not. I've seen what "PM armed with an LLM" will do. Trust me, if you're a decent enough Full Stack software engineer that can take an idea and run with it to implement it, you'll have a leg up over the PM with the idea that has no idea how to "do computers". Most of what these PMs can produce nowadays turns boardroom heads, sure. But it's just that: visuals and just enough prototype functionality that it fools the people you're demoing to. Seen enough of these in the recent past. Will there be some PMs that can become "software developers" while armed with an LLM? Sure! But that's not the majority. On the other hand, yes there are going to be "software developers" that will be out of a job because of LLMs, because the devs that were FS and could take an idea from 0-1 with very little overhead even in the past can now do so much faster and further without handing off to the intermediates and juniors. They mentor their LLM intern rather than their intermediates and juniors. The perpetual intermediate devs with 20 years of experience are the ones that are gonna have a larger and larger problem I'd say. The Staff engineer that was able to run circles around others all along? They'll teach their LLM intern into an intermediate rather than having to "10 times" a bunch of perpetual intermediates with 20 years of experience.
deleted 6mo ago
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dontgetfired 6mo ago
90% of the job ads I see have the word "AI" in them. It can be a startup hoping for a get-rick-quick opportunity from the AI hype, or an established company. Both types expect you to spend as many tokens as possible so that the AI bubble doesn't burst (presumably because leadership has a financial interest in this). Your actual productivity isn't important. If you point out that you're much faster writing code on your own in 90% of cases, you will be told you're not good at AI, you're not prompting it correctly and that generally you're not AI-native and that you'll be left behind. To be precise, token usage is a performance metric, so you'll be let go if Claude is not running continuously 8 hours a day. I'd like to know how many places have mandates to write 100% of your code using AI, as well as to max out your AI agent's plan. For some reason nobody talks about it even though I know several companies around the world that are forcing this on their employees. If you're looking for a job then you don't have a choice, it's better to have an income. But if you're looking to change jobs to get away from AI to actually be productive and gain experience then it's a very bad job market.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- ai_slop_hater 6mo ago
  "AI-native" lmao, what a term
- nine_k 6mo ago
  "AI" is everywhere, because it's the fashion. A lot of jobs do not require AI mastery, or even heavy use. I'm searching for a job for many months, and I do see the uptick quite clearly.
  - dontgetfired 6mo ago
    > "AI" is everywhere, because it's the fashion. Fashion is when developers jump on the next web framework because they got bored of the old one. But when you get fired for not enough token usage, that's something else. When bosses start demanding you write 100% of your code using AI, and then a few months later Anthropic reports 30% increase in usage, that's not fashion. People who invested in AI are putting a lot of pressure on developers to ensure their investment pays off.
trhway 6mo ago
our labor market is cyclic, relatively short busts and long initially-slow-and-faster-and-faster booms. We had busts of 2000-2003, 2008-2010(11?), 2022- i guess 2026. I wasn't in US in 199x, yet i guess beginning of the 199x also was a bit tough. Unavoidable AI-based productivity growth, in software and in all the other industries, will lead to the software, specifically AI in this case, not just eating the wold, it would be devouring it. Such AI revolution will mean even more need for software engineers, just like the Personal Computer revolution and the Internet revolution did in their times. Of course the software engineering will get changed like it did in those previous revolutions.
- otabdeveloper4 6mo ago
  > Unavoidable AI-based productivity growth There is no productivity growth attributed to AI. In fact, serious attempts to measure AI performance show that even if AI makes some code entry tasks faster, total product delivery times are, in fact, increased. (This should be obvious once you realize coding AIs are technical debt generation machines.)
  - PeterHolzwarth 6mo ago
    There's no "productivity growth attributed to AI" -- yet. I think we've gone beyond anecdotal evidence of experience engineers finding true value in this new tech. It may not have registered yet, but skilled people are unequivocally finding value in these tools. I agree that we have yet to settle down on the true costs involved (which will probably end up at "slightly less than a junior engineer" or something like that) - but we are months beyond the idea that it's all smoke and mirrors and no one is getting value out of it.
    - delusional 6mo ago
      > but skilled people are unequivocally finding value in these tools. Sure, whatever. That would be anecdotal evidence.
      - 6mo ago
DeathArrow 6mo ago
So there will be again waves of hiring developers only for companies to realize after 5 years that they have too many employees and fire them again?
- killingtime74 6mo ago
  Like James Franco said in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, "First time?"
PeterHolzwarth 6mo ago
On the off chance you care - you can keep javascript disabled on this article, and just a No Style page style to read it.
misiek08 6mo ago
Companies hiring more people to build AI based, self-healing and self-developing systems faster? „We don’t need those old programmers, we need new people who know how to build harnesses around AI”. Hiring those „old” programmers, but from other companies.
legitster 6mo ago
I foresee the need for engineers to be really "wavy". I have personally never been busier or more productive. It's like all the "work" of my work has disappeared. There are no more blockers and I can just run free and get as much done as I want and the only thing slowing me down is Jira. The real downturn is going to be the SaaS apocalypse. In the next year or two there will be a reckoning where all these expensive low-code/no-code middleware applications suddenly don't make sense. So I think it will be less about the ranks of engineers being thinned out unilaterally, and more about large swathes of products being obsolete.
- ed_elliott_asc 6mo ago
  Which SaaS companies/products do you think are at risk?
  - tossandthrow 6mo ago
    We are already in the works of removing 2: backoffice software that we moved to an in house react app and a library that has a license fee. None of these are really because of cost. But more because we can get a superior product by doing so.
  - rwmj 6mo ago
    None of them because those who think SaaS companies are just a bunch of bad code that is going to be quickly rewritten have no clue what they're talking about. No sane company is going to vibecode a replacement for Salesforce, because then they have a half-assed, buggy, broken pile of code they have to maintain, instead of outsourcing that problem along with legal, compliance and support to someone else. It's honestly tiresome to keep having to debunk this with people who have no clue at all how large companies operate.
    - lbreakjai 6mo ago
      Nobody's going to vibecode an internal salesforce. On the other hand, the barrier for ex-salesforce engineers to take their knowledge and build a competitor with the 20% of the features that represent 80% of the usage is dramatically lower. I think the SaaS landscape will look vastly different in five years.
Animats 6mo ago
What did they write that article with? The year is 2026. The unemployment rate just printed 4.28%, AI capex is 2% of GDP (650bn), AI adjacent commodities are up 65% since Jan-23 and approximately 2,800 data centers are planned for construction in the US. In spite of the current displacement narrative – job postings for software engineers are rising rapidly, up 11% YoY. ... We wrote last week that we see the near-term dynamics around the AI capex story as inflationary, but given markets are focused on the forward narrative, we outline a more constructive take on the end state below. Before that, however, it’s worth reflecting that the imminent disintermediation narrative rests on the speed of diffusion. The chart "Job Postings For Software Engineers Are Rapidly Rising" seems to show a rise from 65 to 71 for "Indeed job postings" from October 2025 to March 2025. That's a 9% increase. Then they inflate that by extrapolating it to a year. The graph exaggerates the change by depressing the zero line to way off the bottom and expanding the scale. This could just be noise. The chart "Adoption Rate of Generative AI at Work and Home versus the Rate for Other Technologies" has one (1) data point for Generative AI. This article bashes some iffy numbers into supporting their narrative. Suggested reading: [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics
- choppaface 6mo ago
  While I like that you debunked the article . . . I want to hear an argument for where the SWE job market can grow in a post-Claude world. I might expect something like: “CEOs are naturally greedy. So after trimming the team, they then recognized (versus “replacing” people with AI) they could actually accomplish _more_ with more engineers, each empowered with AI. But I do like folks calling out the OP for being AI spam.
  - Animats 6mo ago
    I'm not sure whether it's AI spam, or somebody at an investment company who actually writes like that. It's an exaggerated version of the style in McKinsey reports. They're addressing a very important question, and one for which there is surprisingly little hard data. It's too soon to try to see a trend from low-quality data. Three years of this data might be meaningful.
baq 6mo ago
Nobody wants to hire a new team member when it takes 3 months to train them and at the same time a new opus comes out by then. I suspect hiring will pick up when capability of the models stops growing so quickly or gaps between start widening. Obviously the problem capabilities are not slowing down and gaps get shorter…
- krzyk 6mo ago
  Model capabilities are rising slower compared to model pricings. Recent price increases made hiring juniors cheaper and in the short run, not to mention in the long run.
sakopov 6mo ago
I know this is anecdotal but after almost 2 years of no activity, I have been absolutely hounded by recruiters for nearly a month. They show up in my LinkedIn feed and I get multiple emails a week asking to interview. What in the world changed? It doesn't look like the job market's improved much. In fact I see more layoffs than ever before.
- jesse_dot_id 6mo ago
  LLMs need a competent engineer to create code that doesn't suck. Reality is catching up to the hype.
  - wg0 6mo ago
    Absolutely true. LLMs need a really experienced engineer that has great intuition about the system design. Otherwise good luck getting things done in a business environment where people and processes depend on the software you produce. Thugs of AI thought reality won't catch up to them they're untouchables.
    - ygrr 6mo ago
      And it takes years of doing it the ‘old way’ to build intuition. Many firms are implicitly assuming the models will keep improving to the point where all these problems go away. But what if they don’t?
- ai_slop_hater 6mo ago
  How many years of professional experience do you have?
- nacozarina 6mo ago
  Same, and it has been enormously satisfying telling ppl pitching low-grade offers and multiple interview rounds to get rekt.
- jedberg 6mo ago
  I have an alternate explanation. With the rise of AI recruiters, there is no cost to them to contact you. They don't even have to do the search and compose the message. They're basically reaching out to everyone. At first I found the AI recruiters impressive, because they tricked me. I thought the recruiter had really done their homework and read my profile deeply! Now I know that an AI is reading it, picking random things to highlight, and then composing a message. But they're not real. They're just trying to connect to you so that they can say you are in their network when they go to sell their services to hiring managers.
theiz 6mo ago
What I see use an immense amount of bugs and security issues that can be found much easier now then even before, because of AI. Also I see less trust in using AI in direct coding, because there are many examples of code additions that breach the safety of software in enterprises. Now to solve this, it requires for actual humans to do coding. And with that, it is probably true that more use of AI in coding leads to more SE's required to oversee ensure security. I personally see the big benefit of AI tooling to be in testing, security checking, documenting, etc. rather then coding itself.
- princevegeta89 6mo ago
  Using coding agents, it feels like always working under a blanket where you cannot see beyond it, and there is this thick mask blocking you from knowing what's going on. it unfortunately projects a very bad impression that things can be built very quickly and that systems can be designed in a robust and maintainable manner. But even with the best models that I've used, that is not true. When the number of features reaches a decent figure, the hallucinations grow, and more often than not, we have no idea what the AI agent is writing. Pull requests become meaningless because there is too much code to review, and AI is handling it anyway. So it's basically taking the eyes off engineers in general. There are many bugs waiting to be uncovered. Compare this scenario to the absence of all these coding agents. All engineers would know the codebase very well, how the flows happen, and how to do a deep dive. I have a very bad feeling about this unproductive direction in general. It's good for writing small modules, but companies seem to be expecting to churn out a lot of code in a very short amount of time. An overwhelmingly large number of engineers have close to zero satisfaction with their work. A lot of firefighting happens across the board. There is a ubiquitous use of AI everywhere in reading documents, writing documents, and wherever hallucinations occur, critical information is also being missed. It's not a surprise at the end of the day, but this entire situation has put us in a very messy overall circumstance.
trilogic 6mo ago
We also try to understand it here: https://hugston.com/news/the-west-strategic-battle-defeat-that-may-cost-the-entire-ai-race-war https://hugston.com/news/the-west-strategic-battle-defeat-th...
nfcampos 6mo ago
The title of the submission is an almost comical example of hn navel-gazing - of the many interesting things in the article surely the job prospects of hn readers should not be near the top of the list
jimmypk 6mo ago
[flagged]
xbmcuser 6mo ago
This just means big layoffs are coming in this sector and they are astroturfing before hand so that they can show this stat that jobs are available Meta and Microsoft just started the ball rolling and it will accelerate over the next 2 years.
wg0 6mo ago
Basically - I anticipate a 3x rise in software engineering salaries in next five years if the dumb rhetoric of "oh coding is solved problem" rhetoric continued because of the collapse in supply side.
- roncesvalles 6mo ago
  And the hockeystick trend of new code being written. There is literally no better time to be studying CS than today, yet the average person believes the exact opposite.
  - enraged_camel 6mo ago
    That's because unemployment among new CS grads is the highest it has ever been.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
  - nunez 6mo ago
    This is the career version of "buy the dip"
dbg31415 6mo ago
Are salaries rising too?
obie2 6mo ago
They have short positions in AI right?

233 points by delichon 6mo ago

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

enraged_camel 6mo ago

Title is editorialized and the report is from two months ago.

emp17344 6mo ago
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE The chart is continuously updated, and postings are still on the rise as of last week. Your criticism is moot.

jdw64 6mo ago

Personally, I prefer vibe coding in the sense of stitching things together at the function-to-method level. Unlike people who take the extreme position that vibe coders are useless, I do think LLMs often write individual functions or methods better than I do. But in a way, that does not fundamentally change the nature of the work. Even before LLMs, many functions and methods were effectively assembled from libraries, Stack Overflow snippets, documentation examples, and copied patterns. The real limitation comes from the nature of transformer-based LLMs and their context windows. Agentic coding has a ceiling. Once the codebase reaches a scale where the agent can no longer hold the relevant structure in context, you need a programmer again. At that point, software engineering becomes necessary: knowing how to split things according to cohesion and coupling, using patterns to constrain degrees of freedom, and designing boundaries that keep the system understandable. In my experience, agentic coding is useful for building skeletons. But if you let the agent write everything by itself, the codebase tends to degrade. The human role is to divide the work into task units that the agent can handle well. Eventually, a person is still needed. If you make an agent do everything, it tends to create god objects, or it strangely glues things together even when the structure could have been separated with a simpler pattern. Thinking about it now, this may be exactly why I was drawn to books like EIB: they teach how to constrain freedom in software design so the system does not collapse under its own flexibility.

wombat-man 6mo ago
The models are improving. The software that harnesses them is also improving. It wasn't that long ago that the models were quite bad at a lot of the tasks that they are excelling at today. I do agree there's probably a ceiling to what we can get out of these, but I also don't think we have quite hit that point yet.
- jdw64 6mo ago
  I agree with what you said. And perhaps my belief that “people like me are still needed” is just a desperate form of self-persuasion. If AI replaces everything, then I become unnecessary. So maybe I am simply trying to convince myself that developers like me are still needed. That said, realistically, I still think there are limits unless the essence of architecture itself changes. I also acknowledge part of your perspective. Those of us who are not in the AI field tend to experience AI progress not as a linear or continuous process, but as a series of discrete events, such as major model releases. Because of that, there is inevitably a gap in perspective. People inside the industry, at least those who are not just promoting hype, often seem to feel that technological progress is exponential. But since we are not part of that industry, we experience it more episodically, as separate events. At the same time, capital has a self-fulfilling quality. If enough capital concentrates in one direction, what looked like linear progress may suddenly accelerate in an almost exponential way. However, even that kind of model can eventually hit a specific limit. I do not know when that limit will arrive, because I am not an AI industry insider. More precisely, I am closer to someone who uses Hugging Face models, builds around them, and serves them, rather than someone working on AI R&D itself.
  - tharkun__ 6mo ago
    “people like me are still needed” is just a desperate form of self-persuasion. No, no it's not. I've seen what "PM armed with an LLM" will do. Trust me, if you're a decent enough Full Stack software engineer that can take an idea and run with it to implement it, you'll have a leg up over the PM with the idea that has no idea how to "do computers". Most of what these PMs can produce nowadays turns boardroom heads, sure. But it's just that: visuals and just enough prototype functionality that it fools the people you're demoing to. Seen enough of these in the recent past. Will there be some PMs that can become "software developers" while armed with an LLM? Sure! But that's not the majority. On the other hand, yes there are going to be "software developers" that will be out of a job because of LLMs, because the devs that were FS and could take an idea from 0-1 with very little overhead even in the past can now do so much faster and further without handing off to the intermediates and juniors. They mentor their LLM intern rather than their intermediates and juniors. The perpetual intermediate devs with 20 years of experience are the ones that are gonna have a larger and larger problem I'd say. The Staff engineer that was able to run circles around others all along? They'll teach their LLM intern into an intermediate rather than having to "10 times" a bunch of perpetual intermediates with 20 years of experience.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

dontgetfired 6mo ago

90% of the job ads I see have the word "AI" in them. It can be a startup hoping for a get-rick-quick opportunity from the AI hype, or an established company. Both types expect you to spend as many tokens as possible so that the AI bubble doesn't burst (presumably because leadership has a financial interest in this). Your actual productivity isn't important. If you point out that you're much faster writing code on your own in 90% of cases, you will be told you're not good at AI, you're not prompting it correctly and that generally you're not AI-native and that you'll be left behind. To be precise, token usage is a performance metric, so you'll be let go if Claude is not running continuously 8 hours a day. I'd like to know how many places have mandates to write 100% of your code using AI, as well as to max out your AI agent's plan. For some reason nobody talks about it even though I know several companies around the world that are forcing this on their employees. If you're looking for a job then you don't have a choice, it's better to have an income. But if you're looking to change jobs to get away from AI to actually be productive and gain experience then it's a very bad job market.

deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
ai_slop_hater 6mo ago
"AI-native" lmao, what a term
nine_k 6mo ago
"AI" is everywhere, because it's the fashion. A lot of jobs do not require AI mastery, or even heavy use. I'm searching for a job for many months, and I do see the uptick quite clearly.
- dontgetfired 6mo ago
  > "AI" is everywhere, because it's the fashion. Fashion is when developers jump on the next web framework because they got bored of the old one. But when you get fired for not enough token usage, that's something else. When bosses start demanding you write 100% of your code using AI, and then a few months later Anthropic reports 30% increase in usage, that's not fashion. People who invested in AI are putting a lot of pressure on developers to ensure their investment pays off.

trhway 6mo ago

our labor market is cyclic, relatively short busts and long initially-slow-and-faster-and-faster booms. We had busts of 2000-2003, 2008-2010(11?), 2022- i guess 2026. I wasn't in US in 199x, yet i guess beginning of the 199x also was a bit tough. Unavoidable AI-based productivity growth, in software and in all the other industries, will lead to the software, specifically AI in this case, not just eating the wold, it would be devouring it. Such AI revolution will mean even more need for software engineers, just like the Personal Computer revolution and the Internet revolution did in their times. Of course the software engineering will get changed like it did in those previous revolutions.

otabdeveloper4 6mo ago
> Unavoidable AI-based productivity growth There is no productivity growth attributed to AI. In fact, serious attempts to measure AI performance show that even if AI makes some code entry tasks faster, total product delivery times are, in fact, increased. (This should be obvious once you realize coding AIs are technical debt generation machines.)
- PeterHolzwarth 6mo ago
  There's no "productivity growth attributed to AI" -- yet. I think we've gone beyond anecdotal evidence of experience engineers finding true value in this new tech. It may not have registered yet, but skilled people are unequivocally finding value in these tools. I agree that we have yet to settle down on the true costs involved (which will probably end up at "slightly less than a junior engineer" or something like that) - but we are months beyond the idea that it's all smoke and mirrors and no one is getting value out of it.
  - delusional 6mo ago
    > but skilled people are unequivocally finding value in these tools. Sure, whatever. That would be anecdotal evidence.
    - 6mo ago

DeathArrow 6mo ago

So there will be again waves of hiring developers only for companies to realize after 5 years that they have too many employees and fire them again?

killingtime74 6mo ago
Like James Franco said in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, "First time?"

PeterHolzwarth 6mo ago

On the off chance you care - you can keep javascript disabled on this article, and just a No Style page style to read it.

misiek08 6mo ago

Companies hiring more people to build AI based, self-healing and self-developing systems faster? „We don’t need those old programmers, we need new people who know how to build harnesses around AI”. Hiring those „old” programmers, but from other companies.

legitster 6mo ago

I foresee the need for engineers to be really "wavy". I have personally never been busier or more productive. It's like all the "work" of my work has disappeared. There are no more blockers and I can just run free and get as much done as I want and the only thing slowing me down is Jira. The real downturn is going to be the SaaS apocalypse. In the next year or two there will be a reckoning where all these expensive low-code/no-code middleware applications suddenly don't make sense. So I think it will be less about the ranks of engineers being thinned out unilaterally, and more about large swathes of products being obsolete.

ed_elliott_asc 6mo ago
Which SaaS companies/products do you think are at risk?
- tossandthrow 6mo ago
  We are already in the works of removing 2: backoffice software that we moved to an in house react app and a library that has a license fee. None of these are really because of cost. But more because we can get a superior product by doing so.
- rwmj 6mo ago
  None of them because those who think SaaS companies are just a bunch of bad code that is going to be quickly rewritten have no clue what they're talking about. No sane company is going to vibecode a replacement for Salesforce, because then they have a half-assed, buggy, broken pile of code they have to maintain, instead of outsourcing that problem along with legal, compliance and support to someone else. It's honestly tiresome to keep having to debunk this with people who have no clue at all how large companies operate.
  - lbreakjai 6mo ago
    Nobody's going to vibecode an internal salesforce. On the other hand, the barrier for ex-salesforce engineers to take their knowledge and build a competitor with the 20% of the features that represent 80% of the usage is dramatically lower. I think the SaaS landscape will look vastly different in five years.

Animats 6mo ago

What did they write that article with? The year is 2026. The unemployment rate just printed 4.28%, AI capex is 2% of GDP (650bn), AI adjacent commodities are up 65% since Jan-23 and approximately 2,800 data centers are planned for construction in the US. In spite of the current displacement narrative – job postings for software engineers are rising rapidly, up 11% YoY. ... We wrote last week that we see the near-term dynamics around the AI capex story as inflationary, but given markets are focused on the forward narrative, we outline a more constructive take on the end state below. Before that, however, it’s worth reflecting that the imminent disintermediation narrative rests on the speed of diffusion. The chart "Job Postings For Software Engineers Are Rapidly Rising" seems to show a rise from 65 to 71 for "Indeed job postings" from October 2025 to March 2025. That's a 9% increase. Then they inflate that by extrapolating it to a year. The graph exaggerates the change by depressing the zero line to way off the bottom and expanding the scale. This could just be noise. The chart "Adoption Rate of Generative AI at Work and Home versus the Rate for Other Technologies" has one (1) data point for Generative AI. This article bashes some iffy numbers into supporting their narrative. Suggested reading: [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics

choppaface 6mo ago
While I like that you debunked the article . . . I want to hear an argument for where the SWE job market can grow in a post-Claude world. I might expect something like: “CEOs are naturally greedy. So after trimming the team, they then recognized (versus “replacing” people with AI) they could actually accomplish _more_ with more engineers, each empowered with AI. But I do like folks calling out the OP for being AI spam.
- Animats 6mo ago
  I'm not sure whether it's AI spam, or somebody at an investment company who actually writes like that. It's an exaggerated version of the style in McKinsey reports. They're addressing a very important question, and one for which there is surprisingly little hard data. It's too soon to try to see a trend from low-quality data. Three years of this data might be meaningful.

baq 6mo ago

Nobody wants to hire a new team member when it takes 3 months to train them and at the same time a new opus comes out by then. I suspect hiring will pick up when capability of the models stops growing so quickly or gaps between start widening. Obviously the problem capabilities are not slowing down and gaps get shorter…

krzyk 6mo ago
Model capabilities are rising slower compared to model pricings. Recent price increases made hiring juniors cheaper and in the short run, not to mention in the long run.

sakopov 6mo ago

I know this is anecdotal but after almost 2 years of no activity, I have been absolutely hounded by recruiters for nearly a month. They show up in my LinkedIn feed and I get multiple emails a week asking to interview. What in the world changed? It doesn't look like the job market's improved much. In fact I see more layoffs than ever before.

jesse_dot_id 6mo ago
LLMs need a competent engineer to create code that doesn't suck. Reality is catching up to the hype.
- wg0 6mo ago
  Absolutely true. LLMs need a really experienced engineer that has great intuition about the system design. Otherwise good luck getting things done in a business environment where people and processes depend on the software you produce. Thugs of AI thought reality won't catch up to them they're untouchables.
  - ygrr 6mo ago
    And it takes years of doing it the ‘old way’ to build intuition. Many firms are implicitly assuming the models will keep improving to the point where all these problems go away. But what if they don’t?
ai_slop_hater 6mo ago
How many years of professional experience do you have?
nacozarina 6mo ago
Same, and it has been enormously satisfying telling ppl pitching low-grade offers and multiple interview rounds to get rekt.
jedberg 6mo ago
I have an alternate explanation. With the rise of AI recruiters, there is no cost to them to contact you. They don't even have to do the search and compose the message. They're basically reaching out to everyone. At first I found the AI recruiters impressive, because they tricked me. I thought the recruiter had really done their homework and read my profile deeply! Now I know that an AI is reading it, picking random things to highlight, and then composing a message. But they're not real. They're just trying to connect to you so that they can say you are in their network when they go to sell their services to hiring managers.

theiz 6mo ago

What I see use an immense amount of bugs and security issues that can be found much easier now then even before, because of AI. Also I see less trust in using AI in direct coding, because there are many examples of code additions that breach the safety of software in enterprises. Now to solve this, it requires for actual humans to do coding. And with that, it is probably true that more use of AI in coding leads to more SE's required to oversee ensure security. I personally see the big benefit of AI tooling to be in testing, security checking, documenting, etc. rather then coding itself.

princevegeta89 6mo ago
Using coding agents, it feels like always working under a blanket where you cannot see beyond it, and there is this thick mask blocking you from knowing what's going on. it unfortunately projects a very bad impression that things can be built very quickly and that systems can be designed in a robust and maintainable manner. But even with the best models that I've used, that is not true. When the number of features reaches a decent figure, the hallucinations grow, and more often than not, we have no idea what the AI agent is writing. Pull requests become meaningless because there is too much code to review, and AI is handling it anyway. So it's basically taking the eyes off engineers in general. There are many bugs waiting to be uncovered. Compare this scenario to the absence of all these coding agents. All engineers would know the codebase very well, how the flows happen, and how to do a deep dive. I have a very bad feeling about this unproductive direction in general. It's good for writing small modules, but companies seem to be expecting to churn out a lot of code in a very short amount of time. An overwhelmingly large number of engineers have close to zero satisfaction with their work. A lot of firefighting happens across the board. There is a ubiquitous use of AI everywhere in reading documents, writing documents, and wherever hallucinations occur, critical information is also being missed. It's not a surprise at the end of the day, but this entire situation has put us in a very messy overall circumstance.

trilogic 6mo ago

We also try to understand it here: https://hugston.com/news/the-west-strategic-battle-defeat-that-may-cost-the-entire-ai-race-war https://hugston.com/news/the-west-strategic-battle-defeat-th...

nfcampos 6mo ago

The title of the submission is an almost comical example of hn navel-gazing - of the many interesting things in the article surely the job prospects of hn readers should not be near the top of the list

jimmypk 6mo ago

[flagged]

xbmcuser 6mo ago

This just means big layoffs are coming in this sector and they are astroturfing before hand so that they can show this stat that jobs are available Meta and Microsoft just started the ball rolling and it will accelerate over the next 2 years.

wg0 6mo ago

Basically - I anticipate a 3x rise in software engineering salaries in next five years if the dumb rhetoric of "oh coding is solved problem" rhetoric continued because of the collapse in supply side.

roncesvalles 6mo ago
And the hockeystick trend of new code being written. There is literally no better time to be studying CS than today, yet the average person believes the exact opposite.
- enraged_camel 6mo ago
  That's because unemployment among new CS grads is the highest it has ever been.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
- nunez 6mo ago
  This is the career version of "buy the dip"

dbg31415 6mo ago

Are salaries rising too?

obie2 6mo ago

They have short positions in AI right?