How do you guys think this will affect the software job market?
Lowered demand for consumer goods and services naturally mean that these companies will be trimming the fat on SaaS products, and infrastructure (unless it's truly critical for work, ie Zoom) which in turn means less technical jobs.
The first things on the chopping block, as we consider where to trim expenses, are those "expensive", useful, but not critical software systems with terms ending soon.
Except Zoom. That baby is keeping us rolling.
ColdFusion was a popular language, easy to learn, and as a result, led to a lot of folks getting really high paying jobs during the dot com boom. When work dried up, they didn't have the flexibility to do other jobs, because ColdFusion is all they knew.
In today's world, I think the front-end dev who just knows their favorite framework of choice will suffer. Not just the one-trick pony thing, but on a lot of apps these days, complex front-ends are a "nice to have". Tighter budgets and needs will force a refocusing of development priorities.
Arguably much the same (in my opinion, to a much lesser degree) could be said about frameworks like Ruby on Rails, if that's all you know. Flexibility is key.
However, in a downturn, software can be a powerful tool for streamlining. If you know at least one backend language and are devops-capable, you'll be better positioned. The jobs will be boring jobs, in boring companies, on boring infrastructure, but that's OK.
Regular companies with healthy projects, revenues and employee count sized according to their current need and not according to y+5 revenues -> will do just fine.