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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?

#21

Post by AlexCoventry »

PessimalDecimal wrote: post #19
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…

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.

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

#22

Post by nbbaier »

streptomycin wrote: post #10

No mention of Section 174... Edit: I am an idiot, there is a mention. Or possibly the article was edited and I'm not an idiot, it does say there was an edit recently.

There is mention of Section 174, last paragraph before the "Comparison with other industries" heading.

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

#23

Post by throwaway638637 »

streptomycin wrote: post #10

No mention of Section 174... Edit: I am an idiot, there is a mention. Or possibly the article was edited and I'm not an idiot, it does say there was an edit recently.

Wow I just googled this and it's the first time I'm hearing about it!

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

#24

Post by aorloff »

NeverFade wrote: post #16
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…

The internet created vast new opportunities for software engineers to create value. Generative AI is about replacing software engineers in creating that value. These are very different things.

Software engineers also create value by recognizing opportunity.

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

#25

Post by AlexCoventry »

righthand wrote: post #3

I’ve been receiving emails from reps at companies lately. Some are from companies that didn’t hire me after getting laid off in 2022 for petty/unclear reasons. I had written some of them off as fake job postings. Now between that experience, this supposed decline, and ghost job postings I’m not sure if it’s a serious email or not.

What's your field?

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

#26

Post by scarface_74 »

Everyone wants to say it will get better based on what happened in 2000 and 2008. I was around both times.

In 2000, none of the ideas ended up being bad. They were just too early and internet wasn’t ubiquitous.

But even then, if you were working as a standard enterprise dev for a profitable business - banks, insurance, companies, etc, outside of Silicon Valley, jobs were plentiful. I was a Windows dev living in Atlanta with 4 years of experience and had no issue of getting offers.

Things improved when internet became ubiquitous both at home and in their pockets with smart phones and the App Store by 2012.

On the B2B side, there was the rise of SaaS.

There will be no next doubling of jobs to absorb all of the people looking. Every application gets literally 1000 applications within the first day of posting.

It’s going to take at least a decade for the supply/demand to balance out.

No Section 174 is not to blame either.

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

#28

Post by saalweachter »

PessimalDecimal wrote: post #19
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…

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…

Like half of software jobs are Doing Something so that management feels like they are innovative thought leaders of the tech community, while the other half of the software jobs are keeping the unsexy business critical software working.

Even if everything being done with LLMs is useless, if you can do the same amount of useless with half as many developers, it's bad news for us.

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

#29

Post by _heimdall »

xk3 wrote: post #6

> Devs spot and fix hallucinations immediately, dismissing incorrect autocomplete suggestions Some hallucinations stay in codebases longer than others! If there were zero hallucinations there would really be no novel output. Some hallucinations are useful and some are not.

The term "hallucinations" has always frustrated me. The marketing there makes sense, but an LLM that hallucinates is an LLM doing exactly what it was designed for -predicting what a human might say in response.

Facts don't really play a part there, if a response is factual its only a sign that the training set largely agreed on the facts (meaning the correlation of token sequence was high).

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

#30

Post by PessimalDecimal »

saalweachter wrote: post #28
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…

Like half of software jobs are Doing Something so that management feels like they are innovative thought leaders of the tech community, while the other half of the software jobs are keeping the unsexy business critical software working. Even if everything being done with LLMs is useless, if you can do the same amount of useless with half as many developers, it's bad news for us.

But this sounds like the TAM here is roughly "SWE compensation" versus the value of moving all business and social interaction onto the Internet.
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