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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?

#131

Post by _fizz_buzz_ »

xienze wrote: post #85
addicted wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was unsurprising when American employees decided to use the significant power they gained over the pandemic to insist on WFH. Whether working collaboratively in an office was beneficial or not, employers certainly believed it to be so. They believed it so much that employers, pre pandemic, were willing to hire employees a single time zone away from SF, and then pay them a significant one time amount along with a…

> And now since WFH has become the norm in the US, employers are realizing there’s no need to pay to keep employees in the U.S. and outsourcing to significantly cheaper locations instead. “Whoa we can do this cheaper in another country???” is not a new phenomenon. Companies have been trying to do this for literally decades at this point. The reason so many jobs still exist in the US is because it doesn’t end up worki…

The work force abroad has caught up a lot though. Online learning has made it much easier to improve skills and their English has also improved. And since everyone has become more used to remote work, communication is also much better now. One reason a lot of outsourcing efforts in the early 90s failed was also because the Indian teams weren't properly kept in the loop.

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

#132

Post by brutus1213 »

DeathArrow wrote: post #129

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.

That's pretty weird. Usually, less companies mean less demand for labor. If supply is the same, that means price-for-labor (salaries) would go down. Unless, this was accompanied by people leaving (reduction in supply). Do you have an explanation for this?

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

#133

Post by zero_shift »

sisisbdhc wrote: post #51
throwaway638637 wrote: post #20

Kind of strange to see no mention of outsourcing in an otherwise detailed analysis

Our company just let go of all our remote LATAM hires. We paid high end in their LCOL areas. They were somewhere between ok and not good. Felt like we got about what we paid for - their cost was about 50% of a US dev. They were as productive as a low end US dev, so in some cases ok value but since hiring low performers tends to hurt a team overall they weren’t worth it. We’re a mid range company (decent cash comp, no…

Always has been, especially since countries opened up their work visas.

There are great engineers around the world but why would they accept ten beans an hour if they can take a plane to a different country and earn fifty?

The talent from LATAM are not just sitting in the rainforest waiting for your phonecall.

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

#134

Post by menaerus »

DeathArrow wrote: post #130
menaerus wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It might burst but it may take years for that and until then it's going to be a struggle for most people in non-ML engineering jobs. But it might not burst at all? The trends in AI developments for the past few years are a bit concerning IMO.

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

#135

Post by _fizz_buzz_ »

Aurornis wrote: post #43
ipnon wrote: post #11

We are in a period analogous to the end of the Dotcom bubble. The Internet is obviously going to change the world, but right now all it can do is pets.com, etoys.com, kozmo.com. People are out of work, and those with other alternatives or preferences will leave the tech industry. In 10 years entire new platforms and modes will exist that generate even more opportunities than before. Some variation of this wave has be…

> We are in a period analogous to the end of the Dotcom bubble. The Internet is obviously going to change the world, but right now all it can do is pets.com, etoys.com, kozmo.com It certainly feels this way if your only perspective on the tech industry comes from headlines and social media. Step outside of the doomerism whirlwind that is internet headlines and it's a very different story. There are a lot of companies…

At the end of the dotcom boom there were also a lot of companies doing good work.

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

#136

Post by suraci »

samplatt wrote: post #35
PessimalDecimal wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the analogy is LLMs are today's equivalent of the web, I'm skeptical. Internet-based communication replaced technology like telephones and fax machines for synchronous and asynchronous telecommunication. People like and need to talk to other people. It was clearly valuable from day 1. What is the equivalent value proposition for LLMs? They make for really cool and splashy demos. But practical usage doesn't seem to…

I have personally written VBA macros (or hell - just a decent Excel spreadsheet...) that have put people out of their jobs. I didn't know this at the time, I was just a young gun able to see how to make some slow repetitive jobs, faster. Later moved to Oracle / SQL Server / C# / microservices / CICD etc etc) but hell, that was my whole career 2002-2012 across various companies. Making cool tools for smart people, thi…

"Hence there is immanent in capital an inclination and constant tendency, to heighten the productiveness of labour, in order to cheapen commodities, and by such cheapening to cheapen the labourer himself. "

"No doubt, in turning them out of this “temporal” world, the machinery caused them no more than “a temporary inconvenience.” For the rest, since machinery is continually seizing upon new fields of production, its temporary effect is really permanent. Hence, the character of independence and estrangement which the capitalist mode of production as a whole gives to the instruments of labour and to the product, as against the workman, is developed by means of machinery into a thorough antagonism. Therefore, it is with the advent of machinery, that the workman for the first time brutally revolts against the instruments of labour."

soon we'll see if the old man was wrong and short-sighted, or if what has happened since the internet revolution is just an abnormal period in centuries

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

#137

Post by kavalg »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #21
PessimalDecimal wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the analogy is LLMs are today's equivalent of the web, I'm skeptical. Internet-based communication replaced technology like telephones and fax machines for synchronous and asynchronous telecommunication. People like and need to talk to other people. It was clearly valuable from day 1. What is the equivalent value proposition for LLMs? They make for really cool and splashy demos. But practical usage doesn't seem to…

It seems to me that I can research and study much faster as a result of using ChatGPT's Deep Research, FWIW.

It depends. If fed with high quality content (e.g. publications) results are decent and mostly on the positive side of time savings/value. Try to ask it a simple question, such as "pros and cons of these two smartphones" and it will suck up marketing bullshit from the internet and give you a convincing, but useless answer. I was really surprised to find this out, because I've been mostly living in the "scientific research" bubble, where it performs good to excellent and really saves time.

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

#138

Post by Magmalgebra »

datpuz wrote: post #126
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 c…

I think experiences are highly variable based on the person and stack. I'd say I've gotten a ~50% productivity boost. I'm quite senior, make FAANG money.

I work in typescript, rust, and go - mostly typescript. LLM coding is an order of magnitude better at typescript than these other languages. To contrast, LLMs seem mostly useless for rust.

I also use cursor, which is a big jump over other code assistants.

And finally I understand how to prompt LLMs accurately. This is a new tool and from interacting with coworkers in the same codebase I can say many smart people have not yet learned how to use the tools effectively.

But if you just assume that everyone catches up to where I am today with cursor + typescript the change is massive.

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

#139

Post by dragonwriter »

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...

> FRED wants the implication to be AI related,

Where is there any indication that FRED wants this?

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