Hacker News Reader

Comment by general_reveal | Hacker News Reader

Um, some data:

”Nowhere is this clearer than in entry-level software engineering—though the picture depends on whom you ask. Brynjolfsson discovered that employment among developers aged 22 to 25 has fallen nearly 20% from its late-2022 peak. The online job site Indeed also paints a stark picture: software development job postings have fallen 53% from the same starting point.”

https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/the-real-job-destruct...

They aren’t firing the meat proxies to that degree yet, but they absolutely have stopped hiring the meat proxies. It’s going to be a very dirty year on Wallstreet when you’ll see massive sneaky layoffs of the existing meat proxies.

You can turn your brain off with these models. It is what it is.

View on HN

I think there's just too many confounding variables to say. ZIRP policy ended in 2022, with interest rates going up 5% between 2022 and mid-2023[1]. This both means that money was historically cheap when these early-career developers were being hired in the peak, and it was relatively (in terms of the past couple of decades; eg, the modern tech industry) expensive after.

We've seen layoffs as a result of this, and nobody's hiring a cohort of juniors when they're trying to afford the employees they already have.

On top of that, companies are firing the money cannon at AI initiatives and experiments (some of which will be successful and others which won't), leaving less money for humans.

Anyway, it's just a single occurrence of a hiring drop in a single economic cycle. Unfortunately, it just happens to perfectly line up with the rise of GenAI. We may never be able to tease apart cause and effect in this period, and we certainly won't be able to do so until we have at least a handful more years of data to see how junior hiring does or does not rebound.

[1]https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/zirp

Everything you said is true, I agree with you.

”Unfortunately, it just happens to perfectly line up with the rise of GenAI.”

Right. That’s just something I think we should keep our pulse on and keep looking at this data every six months (seriously, this needs to be tracked by devs because this data may start forming into that proverbial “writing on the wall”).

No one should be planning on being a software engineer in about 3-5 years, all need to plan for alternative income sources or early retirement. I think, at least.

>No one should be planning on being a software engineer in about 3-5 years, all need to plan for alternative income sources or early retirement. I think, at least.

Interesting. I recall Geoffrey Hinton saying something similar about Radiologists.

“People should stop training radiologists now” "it is just completely obvious that within 5 years deep learning will do better than radiologists”

https://youtu.be/2HMPRXstSvQ?si=prlQ_uGkCrWAZwgU&t=22

Reply on news.ycombinator.com