Tech jobs are mired in a recession
businessinsider.com
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There's also the absolute flood of CS graduates in recent years contributing to the number of applicants. I know governments have been screaming for more STEM graduates, but I suspect the numbers are far higher than what is actually required.
IMHO, the outcome of all this is that those devs who can't actually code are going to be pushed out of the SE market, and things will normalise in 12-36 months.
(I say this all this sitting on the couch waiting for the results of second of three interviews after submitting my 30th application - I've literally never had to submit more than five - and that was where I didn't get poached directly.)
[0] I'm not going to say it's a _massive_ gain, but even a 10-20% increase in productivity from something off the shelf like Github Co-pilot would show up in employment numbers
To the point where in many places it's optimizing communication and management that might be the low lying fruit - as far as programming efficiency.
It's possible that AI may have some kind of impact on the industry too with respect to productivity, but I'd bet that it's nowhere near a 10-20% gain and it's not a factor at all in the difficulty of finding a job.
When the macro changed, those bets no longer made rational sense.
The silver lining for guys like Jon Bach (as described in the intro) is that with the abundance of free agents and SF/SV office space, it's probably the a great time to form/find an ambitious team and help try to bootstrap the next Google.
I'm not going to make any claim on the actual gain in productivity. My sample size of one for what was sometimes quite repetitive work is a very bad sample.
However, regardless of all other factors (let alone combined with them), I would say that AI has made getting a job far more difficult as AI gives people far more ability to shotgun every single job ad out there. I recently spoke to a recruiter who indicated that for a Senior Golang Dev role in Australia, he had received 400 applications. There is no-where near 400 spare senior Golang devs in this city.
https://www.bdo.com/insights/tax/current-state-of-r-d-tax-po...
It is not giving enough gains. It is only giving ammunition to board members and execs to cut headcount.
What is really happening is that the current cohort of tech companies has been living in the era of free money for so long that they have forgotten competent practices. They only thing they learned was more headcount==more revenue. This was partially possible by delivering large number of features and charging for each one of them e.g. AWS has a ton of useless crap services.
Of course that is horseshit logic that only worked in the era of free money. And of course market caps going up, up, and away was fantasy. At some point, markets shift and cannot be tapped any further. And that is what is causing headcount reduction - there are no saleable features to produce.
There is still a large amount of maintenance to do. But companies loathe paying for maintenance. They'd rather have customers suffer and quit than pay up front for headcount to maintain what has been built in the last decade. They would much rather scam customers with poor billing practices than provide quality and support.
Thus, we end up with lower headcount, lower quality, and a generally third world quality existence - all because execs want to protect margins over anything else aka shareholder primacy.
My wife works in healthcare. There are whole facebook groups dedicated to healthcare workers trying to transition into tech. A lot of these people are clinicians (Occupational Therapists, Physical Therapists, Speech Pathologists, etc).
There are a lot of people looking for WFH jobs and tech seems to be where they turn first. Honestly, I blame the glut of low effort "Day in the life of a Software Engineer" youtube videos where the "worker" spends most of the video walking their dog and going for a casual afternoon jog while fast forwarding through the actual work. There has been a lot of glamorizing of tech jobs on social media that doesn't typically really match reality.
Obviously, we all know about the trend of bootcamps promising six figure jobs after 2 months (though that seems to have tapered off a bit).
I've read a lot of resumes over the last 4 years and I feel like I've seen it all. I've had multiple senior developer openings and I've seen resumes with just about every background you can think of. Waiters, fast food workers, mechanics, pest control, construction workers. No actual real word programming experience, only a list of a few bootcamp group projects with a link to a github profile where they pushed their bootcamp homework. It was especially bad if you included React in the job description at all (I noticed a dramatic reduction in these types of resumes when the job description focused on backend work).
It reminds of that anecdote about stock bubbles: when your taxi driver is giving you stock tips then you know its time to sell. Well, when your waiter is talking to you about JavaScript because you wore an AWS shirt to dinner, you know that we're in a tech hiring bubble that is going to pop.
There are/were a lot of people looking for tech jobs that frankly have no business doing so. Some of them may have spent 5 figures on a bootcamp of dubious value.
If they can’t pass through pre-screen, what use is the cool projects? Besides, bootcamps must make life easy and fun, teaching anything outside packaged topics will scare away the students and the revenue.
Or even audio ads works, pretend it to be radio fully generated with generative AI and inject subtle ads.
Providing stock tips have zero revenue possibilities, but could be useful to have a channel talking about stock market movement today and what the experts are thinking.
I was recently laid off with "Efficiencies gained by AI" explicitly stated as one of the reasons.
Either it's complete PR BS (most likely), or C-level execs are putting the cart before the horse - preparing for "productivity gains" that haven't actually materialized.
As I said above, I'm not claiming it's a massive increase, only that it is there. If AI moved the productivity needle 2%, and a given market has 100,000 software engineers, then that's possibly 2000 devs that are spamming the heck out of every job out there.
> Either it's complete PR BS (most likely), or C-level execs are putting the cart before the horse - preparing for "productivity gains" that haven't actually materialized.
All of the above is also a real possibility.
I don't think anyone in our group who was asked to trial it had much positive to say about it in that situation.
Alot of these grads want fancy silicon valley free lunch ping pong jobs. Those are super competitive. Cities across the US have plenty of "boring" software jobs - in medical billing software, at insurance companies, at credit unions, for hospitals, in defense, etc. But those aren't in SF bay area or Seattle or NYC or wherever these young people want to live.
For example, do you mean tariffs will cause a general economic slowdown in the US, and firms employing software engineers will be incidentally affected along with everyone else?
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/14/companies-global-trade-chin...
When "success" is once again measured by receiving profits instead of simply by receiving investment.
Young people who entered the job market 2012-2022 have never felt the anxiety from a truly bad job market.
Literally every field except healthcare is losing jobs according to your own data. What are you talking about?
After moving to India, I established an outsourcing firm catering to U.S. companies.
I quickly discovered that FAANG where I worked, there was too much focus on delivering quality to the point it sucked all the joy out of working.
I ran back to India and developed a coding approach I called "code slinging monkeys". Basically you iterate and try random things till it works, you pit 3 developers together - whoever meets the test case first wins, gets reward banana (which is just some cash bonus). So their salary can shoot 2-3x if they get enough bananas. AI was absolute game changer. People are driven not by collaboration (why help someone else get ahead or even have your output lost in the team? When u can dominant and compete and win and show teammates you are clearly above them in intellect)
You can be verbally aggressive if that's how you get the results :)
We also have a female tester who is supposed to be nice to the developer who got the most bananas. And she's passive aggressive and bitchy to ones who are bottom . The number of bananas you've define your hierarchy
This way we are stimulating how things work in real world. Where people are driven by their own fear, ego, greed and how only winners are treated good.
Many of the developers who worked for me still show up from time to time and and tell me what I taught them was life changing. And they avoided all the mistakes and delusions when they started with us and it helped them become very successful later on.
In one of our earlier projects, we had a team consisting of three senior developers and five intermediate-level developers. However, with the advent of AI tools like Zeditor, we've significantly streamlined our processes. Now, the same work requires only one senior developer, while we've replaced the five intermediate-level developers with three AI-assisted junior developers.
The senior developer focuses on writing test cases, setting up harnesses, and conducting code reviews. Meanwhile, the junior developers handle coding tasks using a trial-and-error approach, guided by feedback from the senior developer.
We've observed that while junior developers often lack knowledge of best practices, they tend to be highly motivated. This is where AI proves invaluable, bridging their knowledge gaps and enabling them to deliver acceptable results. The senior developer's experience ensures major issues are avoided and provides the necessary foresight to guide the team effectively.
Our work primarily involves building banking apps, pizza ordering systems, and healthcare applications for U.S. clients. This shift in team composition has not only reduced costs but also demonstrated how AI can empower less experienced developers to achieve professional outcomes.
Hiring junior developers with no prior experience is not only cost-effective but also offers flexibility. Once they experience burnout, they can be replaced with fresh hires, continuing the cycle.
While this approach is highly efficient and profitable for businesses, it raises concerns about its long-term impact on employee well-being and sustainability within the industry.
In market, average developer is most motivated at the start of the career, it can last 3 years, 5 years or 7 years after which we fire them if their banana reward count drops.
Yes there are 10x developers but they don't come cheap and come with their own ego and not like we are writing cutting edge code so why we need these SOTA developers at all?
They see it as a challenge to outdoor everyone else and not many companies give new junior developers without any experience beyond hobby projects a chance.
Why, indeed? Even a billion monkeys can't build a well.
Aside, India’s IT situation is fairly decent(if I were to believe my colleagues from there) and no sane people will be working in this crappy place unless they are literally hiring the lowest tier people who are desperate to get into Tech but have no experience or other methods of getting their feet in the door or being driven by some MLM scheme hidden somewhere.
Recently, I read that Nvidia, a company with a market value exceeding $3 trillion, has fewer than 30,000 employees. It's hard to believe. I think we are beginning to see the problems that high efficiency can bring.
Why would they decline any further? The consensus right now is inflation will go up due to incoming administration's stated policies, and rates will go up too.