Thousands of Software Engineers Say the Job Market Is Getting Much Worse
Thousands of Software Engineers Say the Job Market Is Getting Much Worse
9,388 engineers polled by Motherboard and Blind said AI will lead to less hiring. Only 6% were confident they'd get another job with the same pay.
Thousands of Software Engineers Say the Job Market Is Getting Much Worse::9,388 engineers polled by Motherboard and Blind said AI will lead to less hiring. Only 6% were confident they'd get another job with the same pay.
The job market is worse now than it was a couple years ago. It's not AI's fault, blame the Federal Reserve Bank and the interest rates. Blame VC, who've been relying on 0 interest loans for so long they don't know how to actually take a risk any more, and will no longer fund startups. Blame cowardly executives of established companies, who are no longer seeing sales numbers increase exponentially forever.
This is what non-zero interest rates do to a motherfucker.
We need universal basic income.
77Universal Basic Income to mean sounds like trickle up economics with extra steps. All of does is reward automation and inordinately support the wealthy.
What we need is a society that takes little stock in currency.
Edit: read my comment under here for better understanding. UBI is a capitalist solution to a capitalist problem.
-29In the long term yes. But we need a complete systems revamp before that's possible without creating a situation where a lot of people starve to death. UBI works great as a patch over, and while automation is still getting off the ground. As a solution to an automated economy it sucks. It's asking to have questions like, "how many loafers can we remove from the system without people revolting this year?" Or the creation of premium dollars that seem to only go to the owner class and goes with scarcity of supply as the wealthy become more and more detached from everyone else and shut down facilities to save on costs.
Basically it risks A Brave New World. Instead we need to make it clear that an automated economy is there for everyone and thus is owned by everyone.
3
I was laid off last year. Got a job after a while and just survived another layoff today. I agree with this assessment.
It’s all post-pandemic stuff. Executives thought growth would continue, and it didn’t. Then they had to take account for their decisions and make others suffer for them.
57That's the funny thing. Common sense says things go back to a sense of normal. Executives lack common sense or foresight.
10Normality. That would be nice. Where the rich and powerful… (checks history books)… use their riches and power to get more riches and power.
In all honesty, yes, things will go back to normal. Layoffs shouldn’t be as common in the future, it’s just still post-pandemic stuff we have to get through. Executives will always be cold, but hopefully they won’t expect massive growth in the future and then not get it.
5
Its not even about the growth, publicly traded companies do layoffs because it makes the stock price go up.
You should be worried when small and midsized comapanies do layoffs that are not publicly traded
7
I’ve met a lot of people who were boot camp developers. Did a month long class and came out during a period where everyone was hiring anyone with a pulse. Got in the job, barely produced anything, and didn’t really learn much past that. Obviously they were the first to get cut when things got sour. Now, they’re wondering why they can’t get past the tech part of the interview. I feel this might account for a lot of those numbers.
42Although this surely does not completely explain the situation, I also have a feeling these sorts of hires surely account for a substantial number of layoffs.
12
This article isn't really saying anything. It's just saying that a lot of people feel like the job market has gotten tougher, but we don't have any solid evidence to prove that.
Personally, I recently got a new software development job, and it was offered to me from the very first company I interviewed for. (This is out of the ordinary for me, as during past job searches it took me several interviews before I got an offer.) Did I get a job quickly this time because the job market is better, because I've become a better candidate, or because I got lucky? It's impossible to say. Anecdotal evidence doesn't really mean anything when it comes to market competitiveness IMO.
30Exactly. I see an insane amount of job postings for my particular field in IT and people are changing jobs left and right in my circle. Which is also anecdotal, so there is that.
7Also having gone through this process from the other side of filling two IT positions at my company, the options are slim. Our company is adjusting all pay brackets to be more competitive, because of the smaller talent pool.
2
I also just got a new job jan 1st. Submitted applications for a few positions, got an interview with 1 and an offer. 40% salary increase. Meanwhile my company was talking about how they couldn't offer any raises because the job market was so bad right now lmao.
5Negotiated myself a 15% raise last year by getting a competitive job offer from a neighboring firm.
Admittedly, I'm not a Stanford brat getting fuck-you high six figures from Palantir for doing fancy powerpoints at the DoD. Maybe that's the jobs that are going away.
1
AI has very little effect on my job. When the common task I've given is 'write an ASN.1 parser that will fit into 100Kb flash', AI can only copy code from existing ASN.1 libraries, and both of them are GPL-licensed, so it's no-go for a proprietary firmware.
28AI has very little effect on any software engineer's job
6So what the article says is not supported by my personal experience. Hmmmmm.
Oh well, it's probably a Silicon Valley specific thing.
1
I've spent the last 18 months learning how to program so I could get a job that doesn't make me want to kill myself, not being ironic, and now this bullshit. Am I just forever doomed to be miserable and just not enjoy anything or have a single break in life?
27Downturns happen. They don’t last forever. There is a lot of pressure from businesses to depress wages and get more work out of software engineers and IT and etc., since we’re one of the few classes of workers who actually get paid. But thinking that developers will be replaced by AI anytime soon is wishful thinking on the part of the bosses. 20 years ago it was how we’d all get replaced by dirt cheap engineers overseas. Well, I’m still waiting on that to happen. If the MBAs could clearly and unambiguously articulate exactly what needs to be implemented, then maybe it would work. But if they can’t do that when we’re all in a conference room together then they’re sure as shit not doing it over email with a 12 hour time difference.
Keep your head up and keep trying to get an entry level gig somewhere. It doesn’t have to be Google or some hotshot startup or even a tech company. Doing IT or websites for an insurance company is still good experience.
54If the MBAs could clearly and unambiguously articulate exactly what needs to be implemented
LOL if only.... If this happened, we'd need half as many engineers, even without AI. It feels like a third of my work hours are dedicated to figuring out what the fuck they actually want, and half of them are dedicated to building the wrong thing because they change their mind or didn't say something.
Shit makes me feel like I should go into management but you could not pay me enough to sit around and talk to these people for 8 hours a day.
Sure, AI would solve some problems if people could actually ask the right questions. But engineers are already being paid to be those translators on their own since companies cannot find any other way to solve this problem.
16Hell, even project managers who used to be engineers have trouble figuring out what they need. The reason engineers/general technical folk are valuable is because their job is to pick through the guesswork laid by management and formulate an actual working thing, regardless of whether it's a physical object or a button on a website.
Current language learning model AI has no chance if you can't actually formulate what you really need.
I can make AI write code for me, but actually knowing what I need it to write is more than half the battle
6
Coding skills are almost always valuable even if you're not coding directly. Depending on what you're good at/interested in, I'd recommend data analysis (everyone has data! Gotta look at it somehow), database management, engineering roles other than just software engineering, IT, etc. Might not pay exactly as well as a big coding job out the gate, but it'll certainly be interesting if you like coding.
14Not if you unionize
12Don't dispair. Deep and wide skillsets are always valuable. Continue to build your skills and specialize in areas that your peers don't.
Target your region too if you aren't fully remote. Different parts of the country have different trends for tech that is in demand. For instance, I work in IT, and the state that I am in for some reason is by and large Microsoft tech stacks, (no I'm not in Washington.) So .NET and C# devs are in high demand here, as are IT people who have experience scripting with Powershell and developing/administrating in Azure environments. But other areas will be more AWS or Google-centric, or even other stuff.
Identify the trends, figure out what people are looking for and what isn't being met as a need, then train in that.
6I work as an “API Consultant” but I do a lot of coding and there’s room to move into an engineer role in the future. So there’s still stuff out there.
5Same for me
2
I would say the general job market is getting worse 🤔
16Unemployment has been under 4% for a record time. The boomers are all leaving faster than zoomers can get hired. Tech outsourcing is increasingly seen as a path to managerial failure, as these cheapo firms fail to produce real value and talented professionals run circles around their shitty products. And we're experiencing something of an industrial renaissance in the US, thanks to the battery boom.
The job market is as good as its been since at least the Bush Era and the Jobless Recovery. It just sucks because working conditions generally speaking have deteriorated so heavily from the 70s-era nadar.
2
The 2017 tax bill that the Republicans rammed through had a time bomb in it for software developers. Starting in 2022, companies could no longer expense R&D costs, and instead had to amortize them over 5 years. This has led to massive tax bills in 2023 for companies. I have no doubt that this is another major factor in the recent tech layoffs.
Take an imaginary bootstrapped software business called “Acme Corp.” This company generates $1,000,000 of revenue per year running a SaaS service. It employs five engineers, and pays each $200,000. That is $1,000,000 paid in labor costs. For simplicity, we omit other costs like servers and hosting, even though those costs can also fall under the new R&D rules, and have to be amortized. So, how much taxable profit does this company make?
In 2021, the answer would be zero profit. In 2022, the answer was $900,000 in profits(!!)
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-will-us-companies-hire
15That doesn't make sense because salaries are a current expense, not a capital expense to be amortized. And why 5 years? The work a software engineer does may be outdated in a year or two. Only certain legacy applications are around for 5 years.
The amortization time period is supposed to match the usefulness of the item purchased. Basically, software engineers are an ongoing expense, not R&D.
6
I don't think they are engineers. AI isn't anywhere near replacing engineers yet.
15The thing about software is that once it does replace a technical job, it replaces basically the whole industry. Physical machines at least generated new jobs building and configuring the individual new machines. Software doesn't need to be built each time, and the better AI gets the less necessary configuration is.
AI engineers, in general, are in the future, sure. But don't be fooled into thinking that all engineers are that far in the future. All AI has to do is replace the majority, with a few senior engineers to give their work a once-over. It's not about total replacement, it's about decimation.
1I believe it will take at least 15-20 years before the majority of engineers can be replaced. I do agree it will happen eventually. But my point wasn't about what will happen in the future. It was about whether engineers are losing their jobs due to AI at the present moment, as the article claims.
3
This is old news though. The article is a poll of engineers, which means that the "news" is what we already know.
12I doubt it has to do with AI, feels more in line with rising global inflation
11Fuck
7I mean, I keep seeing news articles about tech companies laying off tons of employees. I don't think many of those companies are going to be hiring very much.
6What about the regular engineers? I hardly ever hear about those guys and AI.
6Regular engineering is still ok. Most of us didn't get to WFH because we're building physical things, and that hasn't really changed.
6As both a regular engineer (electric/computer) and software engineer... The amount of interest I got as a regular engineer never even came remotely close to the deluge of recruitment attempts I regularly got during the pandemic, but it remains consistent. Even now that it has diminished a bit, it's still far more.
This is part of the reason I'm primarily a software developer now because I got recruited and got a huge pay bump, a way better lifestyle, and far better perks.
4Traditional engineering areas can't be as easily automated. Certain aspects certainly can, but prototyping usually involves physical presence, as well as installation or testing.
1
Yet tech companies keep posting record profits. Hmm, it's low people on the totem pole get used as pawns so executives can make millions.
4It’s not AI - most companies are still in the process of experimenting with it and exploring the limitations of it, and there’s a tonne of shoe leather it doesn’t seem able to help with. If anything, companies need warm bodies to try to generate innovative uses for it.
Feels what we’re seeing is the repercussions of lots of huge tech corps making mass layoffs last year to placate their shareholders in the face of growth stagnation. Of course a lot of those devs got hired back as contractors, and consequently the global contractor market is a shambles atm, but that’s an awful lot of Silicon Vallet devs in the pool who’ll really struggle to replicate that kind of package in the wider world. I certainly felt this when I rocked up in a new city earlier last year with nothing but a CV and a plucky “can-do” attitude. I initially planned to contract but ended up taking perm, because I like food and a roof over my head.
2GenAI is a bubble; it will crash sooner of later when companies realize how much money they'll have to spend on the infrastructure.
The hard part is making sure you don't lose your job while clueless execs are still enchanted by the bullshit.
1Please, please let this result in these programmers realizing that working for for profit corporations is bad for societal reasons as well as for themselves.
I await further progress in the ongoing cyberpunkening of reality.
We already have insane wealth disparity, massive geopolitical instability basically everywhere, greed and ignorance driven climate catastrophy and real world megacorps dictating more and more fundamental aspects of our lives.
We need a few /interesting/ people and projects to uh, balance that out.
-24Any of this isn't a "programmers" problem - this is just a "people" problem. Programmers are just forced slaves to the system because, like everybody else, they need to eat as well.
You're not going to fix shit like that by convincing some portion of the work force that they "need to stick to morals" - if there's money involved, someone will take the pay check.
The only way this changes is if society as a whole decides this isn't okay and forces regulations or other legal enforcement to prevent shit like this. You need all of society to shift and force a change - pulling workers out of their offices will just result in new workers filling their seats.
15Cool, hows that working out so far with the vast majority of people not actually doing anything that might actually result in your desired outcome?
Just keep thinking inside the box, I hear the view from the Overton Window shifts very slowly, so we can all just watch the planet die and with it human civilization as we know it, waiting for society to solve the problem from inside all their little boxes, with their same view from their same Overton Windows.
-9
I'll get right on that because I hate having money. /s
14