by m3h on 2/21/25, 1:11 AM with 269 comments
by dragonwriter on 2/21/25, 8:37 AM
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.
by tqi on 2/21/25, 5:46 AM
by andro_dev on 2/21/25, 2:21 AM
by phendrenad2 on 2/21/25, 12:54 PM
by throwaway638637 on 2/21/25, 2:58 AM
by DeathArrow on 2/21/25, 8:20 AM
by foxfired on 2/21/25, 7:36 AM
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.
by DeathArrow on 2/21/25, 8:11 AM
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.
by mattkw on 2/21/25, 4:11 AM
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.
by softwaredoug on 2/21/25, 2:53 AM
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.
by austin-cheney on 2/21/25, 2:55 AM
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.
by ipnon on 2/21/25, 2:42 AM
by streptomycin on 2/21/25, 2:38 AM
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.
by neilv on 2/21/25, 2:08 AM
by imiric on 2/21/25, 8:11 AM
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.
by turnsout on 2/21/25, 2:56 PM
With Cursor and Copilot, the days of $190k entry-level SWE roles in the US are GONE.
by vonzepp on 2/21/25, 7:55 AM
by xk3 on 2/21/25, 2:13 AM
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.
by FrustratedMonky on 2/21/25, 8:14 PM
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.
by roncesvalles on 2/21/25, 6:47 AM
by gnabgib on 2/21/25, 1:12 AM
by chadcmulligan on 2/21/25, 3:24 AM
by tehjoker on 2/21/25, 2:47 AM
by 29athrowaway on 2/21/25, 3:14 AM
- 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
by kragen on 2/21/25, 8:46 AM
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.
by aitchnyu on 2/21/25, 6:44 AM
Assuming that AI coding is already helping the average dev with shipping more.
by sklivvz1971 on 2/21/25, 6:44 AM
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...
by ryandvm on 2/21/25, 2:34 PM
by donatj on 2/21/25, 9:29 AM
by scarface_74 on 2/21/25, 3:06 AM
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.
by fjjjrjj on 2/21/25, 8:51 AM
by qwertyuiop_ on 2/21/25, 5:48 AM
by hooverd on 2/21/25, 2:25 AM
I thought it was the MySpace of job boards.
by zman0225 on 2/21/25, 9:54 AM
by wombat-man on 2/21/25, 2:51 AM
by readwritebuild on 2/21/25, 6:29 AM
Today: "I know this pain! It's real."
Rough out there.
by sleepybrett on 2/21/25, 2:47 AM
by threwaway235 on 2/21/25, 8:33 AM
by RayVR on 2/21/25, 6:42 AM
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.
by righthand on 2/21/25, 1:34 AM