Demand will only increase as more and more systems built the previous decade become legacy and a nightmare to extend/maintain, with companies desperately looking for talent that will accept this kind of work.
And regarding this AI code generation hype... this will be a disaster that will result in extremely bad codebases full of subtle bugs. People will make a career out of fixing whatever the f chatgpt15 generated. Just wait and see xD.
And these layoffs... are just a cycle phase, and it's not even that bad compared to previous busts btw.
They are not applying for the same jobs.
Software is still eating the world and growing year on year. It’s one of the fastest growing sectors. Our economies globally are made up of tech companies where software development remains a profit centre for the business.
Nothing to worry about.
In an economic downturn, every company wants to save money, so they can safely let those people go because every company is doing the same thing.
But downturns don’t last forever. When the economy picks up, these companies will start hiring like crazy again.
This has happened before and it will happen again.
There are jobs everywhere in the mid-level companies.
The actions of these giant monopolies are not a reflection on the career of software engineering. A large percentage of us will never work for them anyway by choice or by happenstance.
I'm a fairly unremarkable developer who works for a no-name tech company, but still make twice as much as my friends my age who are in law or accounting, even finance.
Only ones who even come close are in non-white collar jobs with unions and access to lots of overtime hours that they pick up. Their base pay isn't even close.
Yep, that's completely true.
>I'm a fairly unremarkable developer who works for a no-name tech company, but still make twice as much as my friends my age who are in law or accounting, even finance.
Yep.
>Only ones who even come close are in non-white collar jobs with unions and access to lots of overtime hours that they pick up. Their base pay isn't even close.
Yep. I would say that SWEs have even better working conditions than any union I have heard of.
And don't be discouraged by competition from more experienced engineers. Focus on your strengths and unique skills, and find a niche where you can excel. Don't worship these FAANG or w/e engineers; they're people firstly, and secondly they did just get laid off, so their generally applicable skills are almost certain to be rusty at least.