The local decline in open software engineering positions has _nothing_ to do with AI. The best orgs are using AI to assist developers in building out new systems and write tests. Show me someone who is doing anything bigger than that, please I'd love to be proven wrong.

The big decline is driven by a few big factors. Two of which are 1- the overhiring that happened in 2021. This was followed by the increase of interest rates which dramatically constrained the money supply. Investors stopped preferring growth over profits. This shift in investor preferences is reflected in engineering orgs tightening their budgets as they are no longer rewarded for unbridled growth.

GPT-4 came out in March 2023, after most of this drop was already finished.

And also with a large increase in interest rates.

The tanking is more closely aligned with new tax rules that went to effect that make it much harder to claim dev time as an expense.

I'm skeptical because "we fired half our programmers and our new AI does their jobs as well as they did" is a story that would tear through the Silicon Valley rumor mill. To my knowledge, this has not happened (yet).

this drop is more related to the FED increasing the interest rates