Software Engineers Say the Job Market Is Getting Much Worse | Hacker News Reader

Software Engineers Say the Job Market Is Getting Much Worse

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183 pointsUncleOxidant169 comments

The article's claim that AI is responsible for a shrinking job market is tenuous at best. Economic factors are much more relevant. Rising interest rates make tech companies less attractive to investors, and this filters through companies as smaller hiring budgets.[0] And we're seeing relatively high interest rates compared to a few years ago. I am far from convinced that efficiency gains from AI correlate with—much less cause—software engineering job cuts.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/23/technology/tech-interest-...

I agree. At present AI is a tool that engineers use for a marginal efficiency improvement. It isn't replacing anyone.

Marginal improvement? I'm not sure I can compete with that.

It may not be replacing anyone, but is it allowing 3 people to do the job of 4? I think so, and that reduces job opportunities for everyone.

Also, is AI allowing junior engineers to do the job of senior engineers? I think so too.

It also let's someone create a new business that's cheaper than before.

The size of the pie isn't fixed.

It feels more like AI is doing tasks that senior engineers would have pushed out to more junior engineers more than it's leveling up junior engineers

If anything it’s allowing senior engineers to do the job of junior engineers.

For sure. One person I talked to said using a code assistant was just like having a smart and eager, but really green junior to help them, but without so much of the hand holding an actual junior needs, and none of the mentorship requirements.

Software isn't a finite problem that gets solved. We make what we can, given our resources.

Commercial software used to be painstakingly written in assembly, with little more than simple text editors. An average Python programmer today is 10x more productive than that, yet there are vastly more developers now.

It's because the demand is larger.

If 99% of jobs are CRUD, and you have a tool that automates the creation of CRUD, say hello to driving Uber.

No, it isn't that simple. When the work becomes more efficient, the programmer also becomes more valuable, which increases demand for the programmer.

> 99% of jobs are CRUD

People say that, but I have yet to work on a CRUD project. That's despite 15 years in industry and being involved with dozens of projects.

My guess is that simple CRUD use cases are automated via Google Spreadsheets or similar solutions. Same as there are off the shelf solutions for a simple online store, so no one is writing that from scratch any more. What's left is writing the complex systems with unique requirements.

Yeah that's why all the programming jobs disappeared after 4GL languages made us more efficient, and then when intellisense happened the industry got even smaller. The real tragedy though was all these open source libraries.

100%. I set up some keybinds this morning, and just now the guy next to me was made redundant.

Kellyanne Conway is gonna have to tell us all about the Eclipse and Boost massacres

Think about the (grossly simplified and somewhat questionable) historical availability of: electronic gates -> binary -> assembly -> C -> Python. Each of these steps as allowed one engineer to do the work of an entire team at the previous step.

And yet here we are: as technology has made engineers massively more productive, the need for engineers has gone up massively. Simply because the gains in productivity have made more projects doable.

So the question is not whether AI will make engineers more productive. The question is whether it will allow more projects to be undertaken. I don't have the answer to that question...

There is no chance AI is making a junior engineer as effective as a senior engineer.

I agree with you: it’s not that what you are saying is true, but that a lot of the people hoarding the money are salivating about this idea. For them, it’s easy to test the hypothesis: “let’s just fire people; with ai, at best we’ll become as productive as before or even better, at worst we’ll just have to hire the people again”. I hope that we won’t be riding the ai hype peak for too much longer.

> It may not be replacing anyone, but is it allowing 3 people to do the job of 4? I think so, and that reduces job opportunities for everyone.

> Also, is AI allowing junior engineers to do the job of senior engineers? I think so too.

Downvoted into oblivion for stating the blindingly obvious ö

Are you using or have you used any of these AI tools for any length of time? Truthfully, no, I don't see it allowing 3 people to do 4 peoples' jobs, or for juniors to do the work of seniors. If I had to spitball a guess, I'd say there's potential for about a 10-15% productivity improvement on some tasks. Overall, as a senior/staff level software engineer, I can see these tools boosting my productivity maybe 5-10%. That's nowhere near "3 people doing the job of 4" levels.

Speaking of juniors doing the work of seniors, you've got it totally backwards. The people who benefit most from these tools are the more experienced, more capable people, not new grads fresh out of college. There are a ton of things a SWE does that no LLM will help you with -- at least not until virtual avatars get to the point where I can send fake me to a meeting and expect to still have my job at the end of said meeting. Being able to evaluate and understand the output of these tools is a key skill necessary for gaining a benefit from them, and that's precisely the skill that juniors, by definition, lack.

That said, this whole market dynamic of not hiring juniors at all right now is going to be a pain point for the industry at large in about 5 years if it keeps up. If you're a senior+ level SWE right now, that might end up being to your personal benefit, but it certainly won't benefit the tech industry when there aren't any mid-level engineers to hire, because we didn't cultivate, mentor, grow, and train them as juniors today.

Do you think compilers made demand for software engineers fall?

Yep, we haven’t been allowed to hire anyone new on my team in a year. Definitely no headcount for junior engineers. With the cost of licenses for SaaS apps for a single developer my company would rather hire one senior engineer versus 2 juniors.

Wow. What saas are you using that’s so expensive?

In my experience it's the sum of them, rather than just one. I have at least a few dozen tiles in Okta.

I remember years ago when moving to the cloud and SaaS was going to save so much money by letting companies do away with in house IT.

Now that the in house IT expertise is gone and the data is in closed SaaS you are locked in and it’s time to turn the screws.

The prices are definitely out of control if it's a significant fraction of the cost of a dev.

I’ve seen some crazy examples when things like Datadog become part of the stack or you have a really big “GitOps” operation with loads of SaaS things all chained together to deploy, audit, manage, etc. a build pipeline and a cloud deployment. Then there’s all the stuff like Zoom, Office, Google Workspace, and more that everyone needs.

It can get crazy fast, and once you let stuff into the stack it’s hard to get rid of it. This is particularly true when it becomes part of a process that is in turn tied up with compliance or is used by a lot of people.

Major source of “cost disease” creeping into our industry. I’ve taken to calling the overall phenomenon “low interest rate architecture.”

You may have a point there. I remember an exchange from a conversation I had with a recruiter a couple months ago where she talked about having to log in to literally 18 different systems to get her work done. Her company's solution was to implement SSO with Okta.

Okta is not a bad product by any means, and it certainly does work well. But, if SaaS costs are the problem, going from having 18 logins to remember to having a single login while paying for 19 SaaS tools seems like the opposite of a good idea to me.

Actually it’s worse. We still hire in house It to work with all the vendors. They get paid the same as before.

> when moving to the cloud and SaaS was going to save so much money by letting companies do away with in house IT.

I was amazed that anyone believed this at the start, and I'm even more amazed that anyone still believes it.

I never believed it. I remember telling people how this would turn out and getting kind of laughed at.

This industry is so fad driven. When something is the fad in tech it becomes heresy to question it.

I had a similar experience when everyone believed mobile would completely replace desktop/laptop systems. I explained why it wouldn’t, why it was for a different set of use cases, and was kind of scoffed at for that too.

The new generation has largely switched to exclusively using thier phones. I figure this will have some pretty negative consequences for computing, but was also inevitable given the state of things

People in the new generation who use computers to do real work don't use phones because you can't do very much in the way of real work on a phone. Developers also don't use phones because you can't develop (much) on a phone. They are pretty much pure consumption devices.

What's happened is that the phone has replaced the PC for casual consumer-level computer use, except maybe high-end gaming.

AI may not be actually responsible for layoffs and hiring freezes, but there are CEOs using it as an excuse. It's getting irritating that journalists keep citing AI as the cause anyway.

They are the actual stochastic parrots. If anything, ai is replacing content writers. These people have not been providing value - the contrary, have been part of the problem - for years.

So are the content writers stochastic parrots?

This 1000%. As an investor, if interest rates aren't zero, why would you put your money in a risky startup when you could park it in a load of other places and still get a decent return? It's also not 2007 anymore, the low hanging fruit has been picked, most things that can be digitised and turned into services have been. You're going to have to come up with something extremely original and brilliant or utilising some kind of new tech in order to succeed on a big scale.

It's got very little to do with AI. Other industries are far more affected by AI than software engineering e.g in my opinion, the amount of graphic designers and copy writers are both going to shrink massively.

> It's also not 2007 anymore, the low hanging fruit has been picked, most things that can be digitised and turned into services have been

I think there's plenty of low hanging fruit left, especially when it comes to improving current systems that we assume inherently have to suck simply because they always have.

Plus there's new fruit growing every day. There's potentially huge opportunities in improving social media right now. Who would have guessed 5 years ago we could see legitimate vulnerability in the major platforms?

Improving social media is low hanging fruit? How so?

Threads, ActivityPub, Bluesky, nostr. There's hasn't been this much of a shake up in over a decade. Will it be enough? Who knows. But I'm hopeful we'll come out with something healthier than what we've been doing with algorithmic curation.

IMO the problem wasn't with how social media was implemented, it just coincided with a culture shift to being always online that the world wasn't really ready for.

These alternatives are fine (I'm a fan of mastodon myself) but I feel they don't really address the issues of the frayed social fabric we're currently experiencing in our societies.

In other words: these platforms aren't encouraging dialogue, they simply accepted that we can't get along so they started these small clubs so we can all have our carefully curated echo chambers.

So no, fixing social media isn't a low hanging fruit, not even close.

According to this Kurzgesagt video [1] the problem isn't echo chambers, the problem is the opposite. Encouraging online dialog isn't the solution if he's right. He suggests we go back to smaller online communities and more IRL interaction.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuFlMtZmvY0

"Shakeup" is generous.

> It's also not 2007 anymore, the low hanging fruit has been picked, most things that can be digitised and turned into services have been

I would say this is somewhat true for "mostly software-contained" ideas, meaning things that don't take external domain knowledge besides software engineering

There is still plenty of things in multi-domain fields (software engineering + something else), like biotech. But being multi domain makes the barrier to entry MUCH higher for the main startup class of people (software engineers coming out of uni or big tech)

Yes but low-hanging fruit that can deliver 1000X returns on capital over a 5-10 year time horizon -- that's something different.

Most investors are tickled with 20x.

Same reason why people have always invested money into startups - the potential for greater returns than parking them in safer investments.

If anything I would expect a pop in demand for software engineers from ai. Those who know, know you can’t just ask chat gpt to integrate with the business by wiring a prompt.

Hi, can you please integrate your self into my business and increase my revenue by 20% and cut cost of workforce by 30%. Here are the master passwords to our aws account, jira, and payroll. Thanks! See you when in back from my 3 month vacation!

> Hi, can you please integrate your self into my business and increase my revenue by 20% and cut cost of workforce by 30%.

That's not how computers work...

I guarantee you that is how 99.9% of managers believe AI works, and how 90% of the services selling them on AI tell them it works.

Well . . . AI telling meat robots how to do glue code doesn't seem that far off the mark.

Then again, "telling meat robots how to do glue code" is the manager's job, isn't it?

That's the promise behind AI tho

Africa, LATAM, and parts of Asia are still for grabs.

I doubt it'll affect graphic designers much. Artists, yeah. But i haven't seen any model or tool that is even remotely doing any meaningful graphic design solution or work. Majority of graphic designers have been using stock assets for graphics anyway, so ai will be another better asset generator.

People are quick to forget. It was Twitter. Which was enabled by high interest rates.

Does anyone know to what degree the Section 174 changes are responsible for this market? It's been brought up separately in a few venues with dire warnings, but I've rarely seen it mentioned when people are talking about the current job market.

Pretty significantly.

Before I switched to my current career, I was a PM at a pretty large software company that had a massive layoff in our US HQ and pivoted hiring almost entirely to Eastern Europe, Israel, and India in anticipation of this.

Nowadays we only hire a handful of strategic roles in the US - everything else R&D wise is abroad. Other peer companies in our sector did the same.

We had other considerations too (eg. Lack of RoI on US talent) but 174 was a driving factor

Would you consider taking an R&D role in Europe if you were US talent?

I'm only answering in general, not personally, but this question is too vague. Would you take a job in your specialty in the US? If your answer is "yes", great! It's located in Nome, Alaska. Still interested?

There's a world of difference between living in Netherlands and Bulgaria, just like life in Honolulu is almost nothing like life in rural Alaska or NYC or rural Kansas.

Rural Alaska seems rather a nice isolated place for a typical HN commenter...

My dad did consider taking a medical job in Soldotna...

I am US talent, and nope. It's tough for new grads, but not too bad for experienced US citizens.

Worst case I can work for the State or Federal government (especially now that all critical Tech roles have been classified as GS-14/15 now) and still earn more than as senior leadership in Europe.

My problem is I have a few years of experience, but was in academia for a while, so I think it’s hard for them to evaluate me.

Can you expand on this: Lack of RoI on US talent ?

In my portion of the tech industry (Cybersecurity/Infra), there isn't enough talent in the US, so we'd end up paying a new grad roughly the same amount we could pay an 8200 veteran in Israel or a Flipkart security alum in India. The latter have more experience than the new grad, so we're getting RoI much quicker.

Why not relocate the whole operation to Israel or India then? Surely the costs must be cheaper there for your role as well.

Not working as a PM anymore, but it is happening. Within 5-7 years most Cybersecurity PMs will end up being in Israel+India, along with Eng staff. All that will be left in the US is PMM and Sales Engineering.

This is the model the newer gen of Cybersecurity Startups are following (eg. Wiz, Cyera, etc).

Made a comment above. If SEs understood or could deign to get involved in politics at all, this would be reformed. It's 1) enormous 2) Poorly understood/ discussed

Interest rates and AI impacts aren't mutually exclusive.

But has anyone here seen any evidence of AI impacting software jobs? Maybe my company is just behind the times, but I'm seeing no indication that AI is going to displace anyone. Copilot and GPT-4 are convenient and speed up certain parts of the job, but the parts they impact aren't where the bulk of my time was spent anyway.

What exactly are you expecting? That a company will post a job opening and then tell the candidates "On second thought we've passed you all up for AI"?

That's never gonna happen.

As far as you seeing no indication, I saw a job posting today on Indeed for a Software QA and one of the bullet points included working with AI tools. So you may not see it anecdotally but it's out there.

Actually, ya know what. I went and tracked that job posting down https://us-redhat.icims.com/jobs/100347/senior-software-qual...

It's from Red Hat... So yeah... It's significant

I can't honestly say for sure, but I would say there's a possibility that AI was a factor in at least some of the layoffs last spring. Once June / July rolled around though, no way.

Agreed. And lacking apparent growth area is another reason. We had social media and rapid development of e-commerce in the 2000s, mobile revolution in the 2010s. What do we have now that sweeps the entire industry? Gen AI? But many companies are still trying to figure out what Gen AI can truly revolutionize.

10 years ago we had everyone trying to find a legit use for blockchain.

Agreed, but Gen AI already has a lot of use cases, the challenges are with “taming” the technology - Rare hallucinations, RAG (or equivalent) figured out, more deterministic.

Assuming some of these challenges are solved, integrations will follow.

Imagine the web before CSS, JS, AJAX. That’s where we are with Gen AI.

No doubt Gen AI has lots of use cases. I'm just not sure if the use cases can lift the entire IT sector for the next N years like mobile or e-commerce used to do.

We still haven't found a good one yet, either.

yep true, if anything the ai hype is helping the market.

The article does not make that claim, read it. It states that those surveyed in the industry are concerned about AI's impact in the near future:

" More than 60 percent of those surveyed said they believed their company would hire fewer people because of AI moving forward."

It could be that the expectation that AI will be able to replace tech jobs in the near to medium term (or at least lead to greater programmer productivity) is in fact influencing current C-level hiring decisions. Interest rates have plateaued and the consensus is that they could start dropping in the 2nd half of 2024.

Another big factor (that doesn't get as much attention because it's wonkish) is the section of the TCJ Act of 2021 that forced software engineering to be amortized over 5 years instead of written off as an expense. Absolutely responsible for a huge pct of layoffs in 22 and 23.

Isn’t it of 2018, not 2021?

Of 2017 technically, although it was passed right at the end of the year.

This legislation is colloquially known as the "Trump tax cuts"

I agree. I find it hard to believe that anyone who's actually studied and probed the limitations of LLMs and AI art generators actually believes that AI is going to take anyone's job anytime soon. That might have spurred some of the layoffs last spring, but, today, I absolutely do not believe it is.

That said, I have heard crazy stories from some people, like one CTO who was saying that "90% of code in [their] company would be written by AI" by the end of this year. And, there definitely has been a very palpable slowdown in hiring.

Let's put it this way: I applied for 50 jobs the first week of last month and got very little response. I've had three on-sites that didn't seem terribly difficult, yet no offer. I've had another 2 or 3 opportunities basically evaporate in front of me as the companies decided they were not going to hire at all, or changed their mind about what they were looking for. Two years ago, I might have applied to a total of maybe 30 over 2-4 months, and I'd have gotten probably at least 12-15 interviews, most of which would have probably turned into on-sites.

I'm starting to get more activity in my inbox now that the first of the year's rolled around. Let's hope it holds up long enough for me to land an offer :-)

Generally speaking, people in charge shift a lot of blame for what may be pinned on them (interest rates in this instance) to other crises. Some of the manufacture of which can be traced back to said people. The case of Ai in this context is arguable. They did not create it, but are their hands clean of pushing Ai doomerism?

> The article's claim that AI is responsible for a shrinking job market is tenuous at best.

It serves its purpose as a clickbait

I came across this HN jobs scraper site that has a graph showing jobs over time. There's a very visible decline around the end of 2022. When I filter for my specific city it's even worse: the number of jobs has dropped to basically zero.

https://hnhiring.com/trends

In retrospect it was obvious this was coming with the Western economies being pumped up on steroids during the first few years of COVID-19.

Thanks. I've been using these sites as well to watch the trends:

https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/jobs/uk/senior%20software%20en...

https://www.trueup.io/job-trend

Thanks, these are great. Wish itjobswatch.co.uk had data for the US as well, but assuming trueup is using their own listing data it seems to be pretty globally diverse.

A tangent but I'm curious due to the language on this site: Is SWEng generally considered part of "IT" in the UK? Here in the states it seems most orgs consider IT strictly infra and "Dev"/"Engineering" is a separate thing. Some do place it within IT, but in my (limited) experience those orgs which do tend to have a running conflict with SWE fighting to get out of IT because of onerous policies which were perceived as not well-suited to their workflow.

In addition to AI and macroeconomic factors, I think it’s very much related to the Section 174 tax changes at least in large part.

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-75

This was discussed on HN the other day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38931860

OMG the 2017 tax bill continues to hurt the coastal masses.

Not sure why this is political. Software engineers live in non-coastal areas and red states and flyovers have plenty of startup successes these days.

This bill hurts small businesses just as much as startups too! And at a time when we need to be seeding the next generation of companies.

The majority of software engineers live in California, Washington, Massachusetts, New York, and Texas.

https://www.benfrederickson.com/github-developer-locations/

Just curious, what's the latest software startup that's in your words in a flyover state compared to an openai or databricks

Nothing compares to OpenAI at the moment. That argument is a classic example of false equivalence — to draw the two largest valley centric examples and the fastest growing company in the history of the Internet and ask me to find equivalence is asinine and a fools task.

It’s further false argument to say “the majority of developers are on the coasts” when the contention is whether there are successful companies elsewhere. The location of software engineering talent density will follow venture market funding availability, not companies that represent non-coastal success stories where that PE and VC money concentrates workers.

But there are plenty of companies.

https://www.cbinsights.com/research-unicorn-companies

> Software engineers live in non-coastal areas and red states and flyovers have plenty of startup successes these days.

There are plenty of software engineers in non-coastal areas and plenty of startups successes that aren’t on a US coastline, even if the majority are.

Apologies, I can’t reply to your comment. We are in too deep.

My best to you.

My original comment is that the 2017 tax bill hurt the coastal masses. That's it.

You then stated that there are software programmers everywhere and startups everywhere. I followed up with most programmers and startups are along the coast.

Not sure with what you disagree. It's like when State and Local Taxes were limited. It hurt California residents more than Idaho residents. It's not only coastal states but more costal states than non coastal states.

Edit: best wishes to you too

This may be a shock to you, but California, Washington, Massachusetts, New York, and Texas have small businesses and rural areas, too.

And GitHub accounts are not a particularly good proxy for "all developers." Many, many developers work in non-tech companies doing line-of-business software that will never see the outside of the building.

It may still be true that a majority of US developers live in those states, but that does not at all mean that political and societal shifts that affect developers are only something that happens on the coasts. (Hell, Texas isn't even on the East or West Coast—and I've literally never seen anyone talk about "coastal" people in that context and mean "Gulf Coast".)

And all of that is before even addressing your attempt to imply that not having a software startup that's comparable to two of the most influential recent startups is in some way indicative that an area's tech worker population isn't worth considering. That's on par with people thinking Apple is "doomed" because it doesn't come out with a new product as revolutionary as the iPhone every year. "Not the absolute top of the top" is not the same as "totally unworthy of attention".

When I look at the chart, I actually see a down trend long BEFORE COVID. It seems the current situation is a continuation of this trend from pre-pandemic.

wow. I'm the creator of hnhiring.com. Interestingly enough yesterday I made some tweaks to the trends page because it was quite slow, now it's much faster.

The thing I find interesting from an anecdotal perspective: the second half of 2022 and early 2023 were pretty brutal, with loads of layoffs popping up in my LinkedIn feed. However, at least for software engineers, things seemed to at least stabilize a bit around late spring or so of last year - it even looked a bit like some companies cut too deep, and I saw a bunch of my engineering colleagues find new jobs.

Since the start of this year, though, things seem to have soured. I've seen a bunch of fresh layoff announcements, and these ones genuinely surprised me because they were from companies I thought were doing well.

Just curious if anyone else has noticed a similar pattern.

Of course, they're dropping like flies and it seems like I see a new one on my LinkedIn feed daily. For what it's worth, it's generally not your CS/EE grads working with industrial controllers that are hard up for work, and that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.

Most likely a cascading effect of many factors: the longer downturn of the US economy, tax rate keeping high at least for another year or two and most importantly, I believe is the effect of Section 174 [1]

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-75

Don't know about the late spring rebound, but from my perspective as a freelance mercenary, the downturn around November 2022 was very abrupt. Almost over night I went from fighting off work with a stick to absolute crickets. Not only that, but existing long-time clients who were historically easy to work with suddenly became very difficult and started to ask pointed questions about my output.

I'm still struggling to find an explanation short of some cosmic shift in the collective unconscious.

> I'm still struggling to find an explanation short of some cosmic shift in the collective unconscious.

The end of free money and the rise in interest rates is essentially the root cause of all of this. Nov 2022 coincides exactly with when it became apparent that inflation wasn't just "transient" and the fed would need to keep rates high for an extended period to fight inflation. When that happens companies will pretty immediately pivot from a "grow at all costs" ethos to a "show your profits" mindset. Combine that with a general hangover from unrealistic, overly-hyped expectations during the pandemic ("people will spend every waking second online!!!"), and it makes sense that the change in sentiment was so abrupt.

> Nov 2022 coincides exactly with when it became apparent that inflation wasn't just "transient"

Have any sources on this I could check out? And yes, the pandemic was an absurd gold rush that was bound to crash at some point. It's just not clear to me that the cause was only about interest rates. Seems more like some confluence of chaotic factors.

Start with just a simple graph of the feds fund rate, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS. Rates were going up before then, but it's right about Sept/Oct when they reached a level that was a ~15 year high.

Rates weren't the only factor (and, of course, the increase in rates was caused by the inflation that was a result of both supply shocks and the government paying people a lot of money to do nothing), but I think they were the prime factor as to why it felt like things switched on a dime so quickly, because it was the forcing function that essentially caused all projects that could no longer compete with 5% t-bills to immediately get killed.

Yeah you look to be right about Sep-Nov, wow.

> government paying people a lot of money to do nothing

And a lot of money to do something. I later found out that a lot of my initial Covid-era clients were paying me from PPP loans.

I'm pretty sure the current shrink in the job market has nothing to do with AI.

It's not interest rates or AI. It's companies trying to suppress and ultimately lower wages paid to software engineers. Unless workers quit companies that are doing multiple rounds of layoffs and working people to death, it's not going to get any better.

Of all the wrong answers out there, this one is the most wrong. Man where do I even start with how wrong this is.

Businesses will spend money on in-house and outsourced software development if they have the money. The money generally comes from sales (real or prospective) and/or borrowing. If sales (or leads) are down, or borrowing costs are high, businesses will attempt to control costs by hiring less and/or performing layoffs.

In my business, a year ago it was absolutely raining work. The only reason we didn't grow more than we did is because we literally didn't have the manpower to review the resumes and do the interviews. A year later and the work has pulled back considerably, and we're in cost-control mode until we can make some deals.

So you’re controlling costs by laying off people (or at least admit companies control costs through layoffs, which is obvious), which will suppress wages. How am I wrong? Also your tone is incredibly combative.

Dear lord. Okay I will respond to your own words.

> It's not interest rates or AI.

We agree on the AI part. But high interest rates are definitely chilling business' ability to fund development, make payroll, all the things I talked about.

> It's companies trying to suppress and ultimately lower wages paid to software engineers.

If a business is doing this, it's because their engineers are overpaid relative to the value they generate. The business can react by raising prices (which get passed onto the consumer and, if enough businesses do this, comes back around as additional pressure to increase wages) or they can make workforce cuts that are either not replaced or are replaced with less expensive labor. So, I would say you are technically accurate here. But, by offering none of the "why" that I do, you leave the reader with the assumption that your "why" is that the business is motivated by the cuts themselves, because evil or something. Which of course is ridiculous.

> Unless workers quit companies that are doing multiple rounds of layoffs and working people to death, it's not going to get any better.

Yes, power to the people. I'll quit unless you pay me more money that you don't have, right before you were going to lay me off anyway. And I won't be able to collect unemployment as a result. Sounds like a plan.

The AI angle is so silly, the lump of labour fallacy will apparently never die. Every layoff article that comes out needs to include a pre and post-pandemic headcount, because many large software companies over the pandemic looked like this:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-faceboo...

The lump of labor is real.

Ask coal miners who couldn't reskill. The consensus is that we'd've been better off just putting them on UBI than through retraining.

Once they die, and the lump balances are cleared, only then does it "not exist".

Fortunately for the miners, economic prosperity is about to see a massive rebalancing from the coasts back to the interior.

Having been laid off myself in engineering leadership position towards end of 2022 so I can totally correlate this. I had FAANG offer but it was pulled back due to budget cuts towards end of 2022. I continued to interview. Got another offer in April 2023 but that was pulled back too because of indecision by leadership for more than a month. I then found a IC contracting role in the middle of 2023. The job market is even more tough for leadership positions. Also there are lot of people being silently laid off from smaller companies every month which doesn’t show up at trackers at layoffs.fyi.

I also had a FAANG offer just before the layoffs started. Have been applying again recently, but don't even get an interview anymore. It's probably time to stop thinking about those jobs, but unfortunately they're just about the only ones where I could get a better compensation.

Sigh, being a developer was so much better a few years back. Now it's all AI this, AI that.

The recent wave of generative AI hype has nothing to do with this hiring climate for developers.

I know, and not sure why you'd think I was implying that. What I meant was that a few years back you were hot shit just being a developer. Now days you need to have some flavour of AI going on in order to get the same treatment.

All things being equal, the simplest answer tends to be the correct one.

AI, Interest rates, economic this or that, are all complex issues with many different facets.

Software Engineer salaries were at an all-time high when the bottom dropped out of the job market for Software Engineers.

Paid too much. Explains the layoffs in companies doing well. Explains the sudden lack of interest in projects. Explains all of it. Simple.

Companies instituted a plan to drop the salaries of some of the most expensive tools they owned. Collusion? Unlikely. Lemmings is more likely. Well Company X did it. Maybe we should look into that ourselves. Do we need so many SEs?

Which is simpler? Earnings were too high and companies corrected, or some mysterious combination of economy this, AI that?

I would have agreed with you, but tech companies have done the collusion dance so much they've actually been caught: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Collusion could be a factor, sure. But, is collusion the primary factor?

I would argue that salaries and onboarding were primary factors with all else being secondary considerations.

Instead of SEs demanding pay and benefits, now they’re beggars and beholden to the company for grace in hiring.

Contrast this with two years ago.

Companies were the beggars. SEs were the lords.

The power dynamic has shifted, all at once, over the entire industry.

Coincidence? Hardly.

Beyond interest rate, I think that software developers' wages in some places were getting absolutely insane. A lot of developers think it'll be difficult for them to get another job with the same wage - not just another job.

I was puzzled that people without a degree or relevant experience doing a 6-months bootcamp could earn great salaries as juniors or even interns!

It seems we're getting back to a more realistic scenario.

In Europe software engineers are being paid much less than the US (especially SV) and it seems we're not getting this kind of job market (yet?).

If your barometer for what SWEs are making is Blind or something, let's just say you're way off. Based on salary sites and such that I've seen that are specifically calibrated to Bay Area pay scales, most of the people bragging about their TC on Blind are either lying, overinflating pre-IPO equity, or got lucky with some real equity.

I don't think most of them are lying about TC. On blind especially, I see lots of reasonable pay scales, /especially/ when compared with salary sites.

The numbers I've seen on blind are mostly accurate. The issue is that people only report on blind when their comp is at p95 of market. Making $350k is a bit of a trope on blind. You either make $350k, or peanuts.

I suspect this has a lot more to do with interest rates than anything else, and as painful as everything is right now, I wouldn't make any firm conclusions about the future of our industry until rates have come back down.

I'm struck by seeing headlines like these and the layoffs but then hearing anecdotally of people graduating with CS degrees making 6 figures out of the gate. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts 25% growth 2022-2032 for software engineers, compared to 10% for Mechanical Engineers, and a current $30K higher median pay. I look at Indeed and for software engineer and there are 65K jobs while for mechanical engineering there are 18K.

Is the market really bad? I haven't accounted for relative populations but it just seems like despite the all the headlines it's still a good place to be.

I'm interested in this too! I'm a CS student with peer anecdotes of $140k/year starting their first role this past year. Yet I was laid off in Dec 2022 and haven't had any luck even with some industry experience..

What's going on? Maybe I'm missing a public portfolio..

if you can get a job, the jobs still pay well. but the availability is SIGNIFICANTLY decreased. so the stanford cs grad can probably get a 100K job straight out of college, while people lower down on the totem pole may be unemployed or taking very low paying jobs. similar to how law is structured

I guess I'm venting here but, can I ask a naive question? Let's say the hype is true and AI really relieves N% of the efforts to solve the average software engineers tasks. Let's believe the hype and assume "N" could be as high as 25%. Wouldn't that be a net positive for employers?

Well rested, happier, healthy work-life balance employees should become even better performers than before, be more creative, communicate better and reduce the human error that is known to be triggered by high-stress environments.

Well if there are multiple companies competing to provide the same product then the one extracting more labor from its employees will win out….

"Thinking back to his decision to major in computer science as an undergraduate, he said he now feels "very naive.""

Well, at least he can claim he is computer literate.

Is "much worse" a SV or coastal phenomenon? If you in, or willing to go to other parts of the country I would think the ups and downs aren't as severe, but I could just be naive.

“The way is shut. It was made by those who are dead.”

- A senior engineer’s message to a junior engineer, probably

Ex FAANG Senior engineer here. I don’t think the gap between a senior and juniors is that big, and seniors shouldn’t be so complacent (if they were)

What scares me a lot is that, I believe, many companies will see inexperience as an asset. Good experiences engineers know things, and sometimes/often that's kind of inconvenient for business/product types, whose conceit is that they think their idea is great and that it ought to be simple & dev "resources" should just do it. Sharing power is less fun than being the boss, than the uninformed feeling in charge.

The MBA'ification of various sectors keeps resulting in disaster & decline, but empowering craftspeople & laborers to do good seems to remain deeply unpopular by most businesses.

Whether businesses care enough to share ownership with the dev "resources" is a somewhat scary ongoing balance. It's sick to say, but to me it's unclear what concerted forces will help maintain experience & knowledge as a useful thing, amid a hyper-capitalism running amock. I hope my fears here are deeply unjustified.

Experience can be shackles too. Most "senior" guys I know are just too stuck in their old ways to adapt well going forward.

My favorite part of the day is explaining to the "senior" dev I work with about how useEffect works.

I see this statement as an absolute win for the “senior” dev.

Unless the person has spent their entire career working with React, I see no contradiction here. Or do you think that any experience outside of React doesn’t count?

Was it me? I ask questions like this all the time. I’m a senior engineer that has spent the better part of 2023 migrating failed react-native disasters back to fully native projects and retraining the devs to use a new stack.

Were you the person throwing things into a dependency array expecting some behavior but getting another because you used the functionality without reading the docs?

Real "senior" devs don't cargo cult.

Nope. Must’ve been someone else!

As a European, I really don't care. My US colleagues are all buying houses and going on expensive ski trips while I can't even afford a used car. I am a much better software engineer than they'll ever be and yet I'm stuck in this hellhole and will never be able to afford my own home. Time for the market to cool down a bit.

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