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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?

#231

Post by andro_dev »

dilyevsky wrote: post #78
willmadden wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I follow this topic closely and I disagree that it is a tiny fraction.

BLS says there are 140,000 of new job postings for sw engs annually. DOL stats show ~120,000 PERM applications (for which job postings are required - they're not required for H1Bs), of which probably only 20% are for software engineers. So 30,000 / 140,000 - ~21%. Pretty small fraction.

I am not a Trump supporter and I didn't vote for him, but the fact is that Biden's BLS numbers were always manipulated to portray the former president as successful. These statistics are unreliable, in addition, the underlying premise of relying on job postings was flawed from the start which was my initial argument.

Take a look at this, the previous administration hired hundreds of thousands of gov workers to inflate the employment numbers.

https://x.com/VladTheInflator/status/1891600635167981904

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

#232

Post by noahjk »

apwell23 wrote: post #210
DanielHB wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Brazilian dev living in Europe, one thing people just don't get about offshoring is that good devs have options, even in poorer countries. Companies offshoring usually offshore crappy projects, crappy projects attract bad talent. Also really top devs (at least in Brazil) can make more than 50k USD per year (fluctuates widely based on exchange rates) at Brazilian companies, it is cheaper than US but the tail-end…

i think they over estimate how many 'good devs' are there not that good devs have options.

Feels a bit chicken-and-egg - if I live in, say, Brazil, and I know that there isn't a great market for good devs here, will I put in the effort to become a good dev? If I really have a passion for dev work, will I try to move or work freelance?

Not that you're implying it, but I think it's fair to point out that people in ex. Brazil aren't worse at dev work, just that there is probably lower incentive to be good.

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

#233

Post by senordevnyc »

andro_dev wrote: post #231
dilyevsky wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BLS says there are 140,000 of new job postings for sw engs annually. DOL stats show ~120,000 PERM applications (for which job postings are required - they're not required for H1Bs), of which probably only 20% are for software engineers. So 30,000 / 140,000 - ~21%. Pretty small fraction.

I am not a Trump supporter and I didn't vote for him, but the fact is that Biden's BLS numbers were always manipulated to portray the former president as successful. These statistics are unreliable, in addition, the underlying premise of relying on job postings was flawed from the start which was my initial argument. Take a look at this, the previous administration hired hundreds of thousands of gov workers to inflat…

Doesn't pass the smell test since the chart for government employees clearly includes more than just Federal. The Federal workforce is about 3mm, but that graph shows 23mm [1], so it clearly can't just be Federal employees.

EDIT: here you go, just looking at Federal employees [2]:

Jan 2021: 2.89 million

Jan 2025: 3.02 million

The Federal government added ~130k employees over the four years that Biden was in office, an increase of about 4.4%.

During that exact same period, all private employment went from 121 million to 135 million, an increase of about 11%. So Federal employment grew slower under Biden than private employment did. [3]

Sources:

1. Total government employees: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USGOVT

2. Total Federal government employees: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES9091000001

3. Total private employment: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USPRIV

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

#234

Post by DanielHB »

noahjk wrote: post #232
apwell23 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think they over estimate how many 'good devs' are there not that good devs have options.

Feels a bit chicken-and-egg - if I live in, say, Brazil, and I know that there isn't a great market for good devs here, will I put in the effort to become a good dev? If I really have a passion for dev work, will I try to move or work freelance? Not that you're implying it, but I think it's fair to point out that people in ex. Brazil aren't worse at dev work, just that there is probably lower incentive to be good.

My point was, there ARE opportunities in Brazil that don't involve working in a slave outsourcing factory. Even individual remote dev contracts are not always the top tier of talent. The real good talent working remotely from Brazil is probably working for startups in silicon valley not your average mid US company.

Just as you compete for top talent locally you also compete for top talent globally when hiring remote.

I live in Sweden now and have dealt with a lot of Swedish companies over the years. It is hard to explain this to the locals because they see Sweden as a big tech hub where all the talent is at, but the scale of things in Brazil is _crazy_. I worked in a telecom project where this one single company had more active (paying) SIM cards than the population of Sweden several times over.

Just because it is a poorer country doesn't mean it is easier engineering, if anything the engineering is harder.

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

#235

Post by cutemonster »

rob74 wrote: post #158
dragonwriter wrote: post #142

The charts show software dev gaining more jobs under the COVID demand and stimulus swing, and then losing more as those went away and monetary policy got tighter than even it had been even before the COVID stimulus. The easiest explanation for the whole chart is "Software dev is more reactive to the monetary policy environment than most other industries, because more of it is funded by new capital investment -- wheth…

Or, to put it in another way, the amplitude of the pork cycle ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_cycle ) is higher for software developers than for other jobs.

... partly because it's quicker to get started with software projects?

No expensive machines or lab equipment, sometimes not even office space needed, just people with laptops

But the cycle wave length should ... Be similar to how many years people spend studying? That doesn't seem to be the case here?

Quoting the Wikipedia link:

"high salaries in a particular sector lead to an increased number of students studying the relevant subject; when these students enter the job market at the same time after several years of studying, their job prospects and salaries are much worse due to the new surplus of applicants."

Maybe you could say it's related to investors' pork cycle (of different/unknown wavelength) not students' pork cycle :-)

Or maybe just one-time opportunism: low interest rates etc

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

#236

Post by vouwfietsman »

rightbyte wrote: post #183
vouwfietsman wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no, form validation is a double edged sword: without it whoever receives the data may have to deal with inconsistencies, so removing that will increase efficiency. However, the flexibility and adaptability of human interaction is lost when an intermediate digital system enforces rules without exception, and that loss can absolutely result in inefficiencies because the world is always changing and your digital…

Thanks for the write up. I am having an emotional crisis having to defend bureaucrats against us. (I conveniently blame their systems not being FOSS, not us programmers blindly following orders. No... not our fault).

I love me some FOSS but I don't think that helps here, does it? In the end the person having domain knowledge is no longer in control of the process, because its been transferred to an automated system. Therein lies the issue, even if the software can be modified it cannot be done by the domain expert, or on the fly, or at low effort.

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

#237

Post by kragen »

throw83288 wrote: post #202
kragen wrote: post #147

The graph is very interesting! The number of Indeed openings looks like it's basically leveled off at the initial early covid number over the last year; it's not rising, but at least it's not falling anymore. That seems like pretty optimistic news for developers! Total compensation is still pretty high, I hear. And it seems likely that if humans aren't replaced wholesale by AGI, the opportunities for building valuabl…

This smells like AI.

No, I'm pretty sure Gergely Orosz is a real person. He's been blogging at that domain name since 02015: https://web.archive.org/web/20151112212434/http://blog.pragm...

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

#238

Post by vouwfietsman »

tobr wrote: post #186
vouwfietsman wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and no, form validation is a double edged sword: without it whoever receives the data may have to deal with inconsistencies, so removing that will increase efficiency. However, the flexibility and adaptability of human interaction is lost when an intermediate digital system enforces rules without exception, and that loss can absolutely result in inefficiencies because the world is always changing and your digital…

Great points! To be clear, I was not trying to say that automated and strictly enforced bureaucracy is a good thing. The bureaucracy of the form is very efficiently implemented. That's mostly not a good thing (or at least it often has costly consequences), but it is an example of software creating more efficient bureaucracy - efficient as bureaucracy, but often not efficient in fulfilling its supposed goals.

Aha, ok. I'm not 100% sure I understand but I imagine you mean that bureaucracy, viewed negatively as simply the execution of some process, is expedited by form validation. I have to agree then indeed that this is true. I thought of bureaucracy more as the whole of the functioning, so efficiency would include successful resolution, not just successful process.

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

#240

Post by kragen »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #206
throw83288 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This smells like AI.

I would imagine as high as 1 in 5 here is AI. this one was just lazy prompt engineering or QC afterwards

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