Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

What did they write that article with?

The year is 2026. The unemployment rate just printed 4.28%, AI capex is 2% of GDP (650bn), AI adjacent commodities are up 65% since Jan-23 and approximately 2,800 data centers are planned for construction in the US. In spite of the current displacement narrative – job postings for software engineers are rising rapidly, up 11% YoY. ... We wrote last week that we see the near-term dynamics around the AI capex story as inflationary, but given markets are focused on the forward narrative, we outline a more constructive take on the end state below. Before that, however, it’s worth reflecting that the imminent disintermediation narrative rests on the speed of diffusion.

The chart "Job Postings For Software Engineers Are Rapidly Rising" seems to show a rise from 65 to 71 for "Indeed job postings" from October 2025 to March 2025. That's a 9% increase. Then they inflate that by extrapolating it to a year. The graph exaggerates the change by depressing the zero line to way off the bottom and expanding the scale. This could just be noise.

The chart "Adoption Rate of Generative AI at Work and Home versus the Rate for Other Technologies" has one (1) data point for Generative AI.

This article bashes some iffy numbers into supporting their narrative.

Suggested reading: [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics

Worth seeing the whole chart in perspective:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

Worth also noting that this chart has the bottom of the Y-axis cut off, exaggerating differences and making visual intuition basically useless.

The art of putting wavy lines across an axis to denote a range skip has atrophied, probably because few charting software packages support it ?

Broken axes aren't the solution. Starting from 0 is but nobody making graphs seems to understand or, in the case of journalists, they're trying to mislead their readers. I suppose readers enjoy being awed by dramatically changing graphs too.

It would also be nice to include a shaded area for the first standard deviation over a relevant period of time to get an idea of how far outside normal it is.

In my unhinged pipedreams, we’d have some sort of standard for conveying the data directly so users could use browser settings to decide how to display the data. There like a dozen people in the world that would use it, but they’d really really enjoy it I bet.

It's usually intentional so they're not going to show more information to reveal that their narrative is weak or wrong. It's up to the reader to think critically because journalists are constantly trying to fool them with true facts presented in a misleading way.

Readers are guilty too - they like to see wiggly lines wiggle. Nobody wants to see a graph that's just a horizontal line or shaded band. We want to peer harder at it to tease out any sort of signal that can tell our emotional brains "good" or "bad".

The format is editable. The line chart seems always to be scaled so the minima is at the bottom, but you can get the zero point by changing it to bars.

The options do seem a bit idiosyncratic, but I guess they are useful for the kind of data the site users usually look at.

"Minimum". That's the singular. "Minima" is plural.

Similar with "criterion" or "phenomenon".

Are you assuming a unique minimum?

Yes, cause grammar. Parent wrote "the minima is". Not matter one or multiple minima, that expression has a problem.

do do, de do do

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTXyXuqfBLA)

But it essentially shows the same thing, the covid overhiring boom and then layoff cycle post-covid is over. And jobs are rising again.

What’s absolutely mind blowing to me though…the idea AI isn’t causing software engineering jobs to collapse…which you would think would make people here happy…is something that makes software engineers upset??

It’s almost as if everyone here has married their identity to the idea they are victims of AI progress and any suggestion otherwise is ego destruction.

”What??? You mean the job market is expanding and the reason I can’t find a job is…me? That can’t possibly be true I’m a genius, the data is clearly wrong!”

This graph was scaled to 2020=100 so not as bad as excluding 0 for raw numbers.

Wow, that says a lot with data. Thank you.

Interesting chart that confirms hiring dynamics for SE have not much to do with AI despite all the PR, as in 2023 models and agents capabilities were quite limited, and now that capabilities increase hiring is picking up. I hope more journalists will start to challenge that narrative.

Wow. Huge crash between 2022 and 2023, from 230 to down around 80. Why? That's the real question. What happened? It's post-COVID.

Then stuck in the 60-80 range since 2023. The sample period chosen by Citadel is wildly deceptive.

This is an important question and these crap stats are not helping.

It’s not a crash, but a huuuge peak around ‘22.

Well, yes, but we're still sitting at ~80% of 2020 levels. Perhaps just hangover from 2022, perhaps the end of ZIRP, but it's still depressed relative to 2020.

There was a hiring bubble in 2022 just before the Fed raised interest rates. I'm not understanding what the mystery is.

The link you're responding to has the option to zoom out more to 2020. If you scroll down to view the other related graphs, you'll find that they also index 2020 as a starting point because they're all tracking this hiring bubble.

There was a change in US tax law that revoked the ability of software companies to classify engineer salaries as an R&D expense, which massively increased the tax liability for many software companies.

This is under-recognized by many folks. That full impact of the that aspect of the 2017 TCJA was hard to predict when it was so far in the future, and when it hit, we were dealing with the latter economic impact of covid in addition to these deduction changes.

This was reverted for us employees in OBBB and companies can refile taxes for what they couldn't use as an expense in the intervening time. I think the impact of this is generally overstated

Click "max" to see its the corona peaks that's the outlier.

"Whole chart"

Graph starts with a black swan event

Unfortunately that's when they started recording the data

While I like that you debunked the article . . . I want to hear an argument for where the SWE job market can grow in a post-Claude world. I might expect something like: “CEOs are naturally greedy. So after trimming the team, they then recognized (versus “replacing” people with AI) they could actually accomplish _more_ with more engineers, each empowered with AI.

But I do like folks calling out the OP for being AI spam.

I'm not sure whether it's AI spam, or somebody at an investment company who actually writes like that. It's an exaggerated version of the style in McKinsey reports.

They're addressing a very important question, and one for which there is surprisingly little hard data. It's too soon to try to see a trend from low-quality data. Three years of this data might be meaningful.

> It's an exaggerated version of the style in McKinsey reports.

McKinsey reports are the original slop

Its not AI spam, there are typos

Might still be AI if the prompt specifically requested that the article should not look like AI.

As long as software engineers are needed to leverage AI (they can manage the output, refine the prompts, check the BS), there is plenty of software to write and not having SWEs still means you will have to write less of it.

The world runs on software. AI makes it easier to create more software, but it still requires humans to keep running and decide what to do. Maybe each individual project will need less pure coders, but there might be a lot more projects?

Computing cost and reliability remains the bottleneck. AI agents are nowhere near smart enough to carry out tasks on their own. Combined with the fact, 95% of gen-AI pilots "failed" [1], at least failed to improve the bottom line. Layoffs were never about AI, they were almost always about capex, and correcting the pre-2022 overhiring. All CEOs are hearing in 2026, "I didn't get anything done, but the model hit the limit".

However, if there will be, locally deployable, meaningfully capable AI models that can change the computing cost equation.

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonsnyder/2025/08/26/mit-find...

I don't work in IT but I use and love Claude code. What strikes me is maybe the overall software job market can not grow to surpass the post covid peak but any current professional software engineer has immensely valuable skills that can no longer be gained in the same way, if at all. I would think the counter argument to the greedy CEO argument is that AI breaks the former economy of scale in the opposite direction towards hyper specialization in business with small teams. In that scenario, as the economy grows with more and more business, the current software engineers are the substrate for a new type of off brand bargain CTO as opposed to the current , luxury brand CTO sitting at the top of oversized companies.The bull market becomes at the higher level that current software engineers step into. Most likely though, none of this is true and 15 years from now it all shakes out in a way that none of us could have really predicted from our vantage point because the prediction would sound ridiculous with the information at hand.

It really depends on how you define a software engineer. If you mean software engineers doing what we do today, the market probably won’t.

If you just mean “people who make software in any capacity”, it will probably grow (or has already grown) via product, marketing, etc folks making internal tools with AI (which may not work out, we’ll see).

Presuming we keep seeing LLM improvements, SWE will move up the stack like they did in the past. They used to work directly with hardware and software. Ops folks sprung up to do the hardware, and SWEs do basically all software using abstractions over hardware. This will be another step up where SWEs no longer work directly on software, but rather on the tooling that writes software which they hand over to marketing, HR, etc.

Again, presuming this all works out the way the AI folks plan.

Just go look at the chart: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE

It’s continuously updated, and postings are still on the rise as of last week, so your criticism doesn’t make much sense.

Does any serious SaaS HR use Indeed? Whenever I hear that is the source, I immediately question it because companies I look up use Ashby, Lever, Greenhouse, Jobvite, Dover, etc.

edit: nvm they probably pull in results from these ATS

Indeed scrape a lot of places looking for jobs. While they don't get a lot of the startup scene, it's a better metric across the economy.

I've noticed this "XYZ just printed rate%". WTAF does "printed" mean in this usage?

Do they mean "published" or "latest" or what?

Is it not just the same as when people suddenly started having "an ask"? It is some kind of in-group speak that it is important that you adopt just to show that you are with the times.

I believe this wording originates from references to a Stock Ticker machine and the Ticker Tape which would "print" the "latest" values of stocks, interest rates etc.

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