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Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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Re: Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

#121

Post by kavalg »

CalRobert wrote: post #69
yolovoe wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good point. I used to work at a SF startup before the FAANG about 4-5 years back. All the engineers there have unfortunately been replaced with those in LATAM too. LATAM engineers were making like $80-$90K in USD, which is apparently really good money there, whereas US engineer asked for base pay twice that. So it seems like a win-win deal for the cofounders and LATAM engineers. Just not so great for those o…

Incidentally 80-90k is pretty normal pay in Europe too. High, even, for southern Europe.

Currently the going annual salary for a senior developer in Bulgaria (Eastern Europe) is somewhere between EUR 50k - 75 EUR net, with 25-30 days of paid time off. The gross will be about 25% more (income tax is 10%, social security around 40%, but there is a cap on the salary base, so effectively it is less). For freelance senior developer, the (B2B) daily rate is in the range EUR 350 to EUR 550, depending on the technology and project complexity. Of course, there are rare examples outside of these ranges (e.g. top talent in ML, BigData etc). Leadership roles are usually at 10-20% premium.

Re: Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

#122

Post by seattleeng »

jjeaff wrote: post #103
tqi wrote: post #60

FRED wants the implication to be AI related, but it seems pretty clear that all/most of this decline is related to their interest rate policies creating a raft of bullshit companies funded by too many dollars chasing ever more far-fetched returns...

Returns are no longer the actual goal. The actual goal is the perception of far reaching future returns. The perception of those returns is much more valuable than the actual returns. Because the wealthy don't want profits and dividends that get taxed. They want ever increasing stock prices so they can continuously grow their asset base to borrow against so they can never sell said assets this triggering capital gain…

I think you're almost right

I suspect its more a structural issue

e.g. because of Big VC (a16z, other firms with dozens or hundreds of investing staff), VCs don't stick around firms long enough for real returns (cash distributed) to matter. If you're at a place and your stuff is marked up 10x after 4 years, you just hop to become a GP and try to ride the next markup wave. Even if these people exit VC after 10 years that is still 10 years of deals that all flopped.

This might not even be the individual VC's fault -- there may just be too many venture dollars chasing too few power law returns, so you get a surge of startups circa 2019-2022 that all disappear

Re: Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

#124

Post by imiric »

> Devs spot and fix hallucinations immediately, dismissing incorrect autocomplete suggestions

Bullshit. Spotting hallucinations requires expertise in the subject matter, and most devs wouldn't be using LLMs if they intimately knew the programming languages and APIs the LLM is generating.

The reality is that spotting hallucinations often takes more effort than reading the source documentation and writing the code from scratch, since the dev also needs to review and check the code for correctness.

Re: Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

#125

Post by ramon156 »

vonzepp wrote: post #116

If AI makes a programmer say 25% more productive. Then a team of 4 can do the workload of a team of 5.

And you will only get this advantage using senior programmers, all the more reason most juniors are fucked.

Juniors need to learn by falling on their face a few times, if companies don't want to train them then they'll never become seniors. Lovely cycle

Re: Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

#126

Post by datpuz »

vonzepp wrote: post #116

If AI makes a programmer say 25% more productive. Then a team of 4 can do the workload of a team of 5.

That's a big, massive if. I think the more experienced you are, the less net productivity you gain. If you're more senior, is probably very low or even negative. I use ChatGPT every day pretty much, but it has wasted quite a bit of my time.

When it does save me time, it's almost just some boilerplate I didn't have to Google or type out. Honestly, I feel like gen AI pleataued a year or more ago.

LLMs are just really convincing bullshit generators. They look impressive on the surface, and the times when they spit out a whole bunch of useful boilerplate feels like magic, but that stuff isn't super useful for a majority of the work you spend your time doing. Throwing more money at these companies is not magically going to yield AGI. I think the AI CEOs are basicallly selling us a lie.

Re: Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

#127

Post by KronisLV »

DeathArrow wrote: post #123

>I’m sure that LLMs are a leading cause of the fall in software developer job postings I can't agree with the conclusion. I can come with tens of examples of when using AI doesn't work. Also, software engineering means much more than writing code.

> Also, software engineering means much more than writing code.

What if it speeds up the part of pumping out widgets in the widget factory, shipping Spring Boot / Laravel / whatever projects more quickly and therefore individual devs becoming more productive on cookie cutter projects (without necessarily getting more money for it either).

Re: Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

#128

Post by menaerus »

DeathArrow wrote: post #123

>I’m sure that LLMs are a leading cause of the fall in software developer job postings I can't agree with the conclusion. I can come with tens of examples of when using AI doesn't work. Also, software engineering means much more than writing code.

I don't disagree with you but a different view that could support the OP hypothesis could be that prior to the AI boom we could see that 90% of the capital went into "normal" software engineering jobs while maybe only 10% of the capital went into the ML market.

Now in the AI boom era, 90% of the capital goes into the AI while 10% goes into SE jobs. That could explain the drop in SE jobs.

Re: Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

#129

Post by DeathArrow »

I am not sure how things work in US but, living in an Eastern European country, I can say that salaries started growing, almost reaching western european levels, after which many foreign companies closed offices and moved to cheaper countries like India and Pakistan.

Re: Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

#130

Post by DeathArrow »

menaerus wrote: post #128
DeathArrow wrote: post #123

>I’m sure that LLMs are a leading cause of the fall in software developer job postings I can't agree with the conclusion. I can come with tens of examples of when using AI doesn't work. Also, software engineering means much more than writing code.

I don't disagree with you but a different view that could support the OP hypothesis could be that prior to the AI boom we could see that 90% of the capital went into "normal" software engineering jobs while maybe only 10% of the capital went into the ML market. Now in the AI boom era, 90% of the capital goes into the AI while 10% goes into SE jobs. That could explain the drop in SE jobs.

That can be a valid point, sure. But the AI bubble will burst just like the dotcom bubble. Maybe some money will return into SE jobs.
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