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Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?

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

#241

Post by andro_dev »

senordevnyc wrote: post #233
andro_dev wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, a…

Thanks for the additional information. The thing is the Trump administration is about to fire 200k probationary federal employees meaning they were hired within in the last year or so. These numbers don't add up either.

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

#242

Post by thijson »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #219
betaby wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never heard of him. But I'm more surprised that someone who saw the Internet in 1998 would say that!

there was a lot of skepticism, and from some heavy hitters. Sears famously laughing at online orders is a great example. They already had the mail over market owned, and already had the distribution, sourcing, and utterly dominant brand recognition in that space. People used to order homes from Sears! They just needed the online catalog. But the CEO was a psychopath Randian who thought the internet was a fad and now…

Sears HQ walkthrough near Chicago before its demolition:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yX9D3h2F_0

Ironic that Sears back in the day got started with mail order.

Seems like bad management is a cancer on a lot of organizations. Their size protects them for a while, but eventually they get outcompeted.

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

#243

Post by thaumasiotes »

Lockal wrote: post #113
thaumasiotes wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is a very stupid thing to say Well, it does have the virtue of being straightforwardly true. For example, programming languages can't be ambiguous.

> programming languages can't be ambiguous Yes, in C++ we call it "unspecified behavior" and "undefined behavior"

Those occur when you've made an unambiguous statement that has no valid semantics. ("God should get a promotion."†) They don't occur when you've made an ambiguous statement ("We saw her duck.") As I noted above, it isn't possible to make an ambiguous statement.

† I'm aware that that isn't an unambiguous statement. This is for the simple reason that it's next to impossible to make an unambiguous statement in a natural language; that's why legal documents use so many clauses. I'm relying on the reader here to realize which meaning I had in mind, which is the way all natural language works.

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

#244

Post by lubujackson »

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…

I don't think it's doomerism. I started my career during the dotcom boom. I think we are right now in a transition period that is little bit of the start of the boom (just add AI! is the new "just add Internet!") and also a bit of the scorched earth after the initial boom, when all the tourists (CS is easy money!) are rerouted to other careers if at all possible.

This also means it is a great time to start a small, profitable business because labor is undervalued.

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

#245

Post by commandlinefan »

roncesvalles wrote: post #93
sisisbdhc wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Felt like we got about what we paid for This is the usual ebb and flow of offshoring in the tech industry that's been going on since the 90s. There has never been a scalable arbitrage for tech talent by going over to another geo, and there won't be one in the foreseeable future. What US HCoL talent gets paid is unfortunately the fair and natural market rate for that caliber of talent, at least if you need to hire mo…

> US HCoL talent gets paid

In no small part because if you look at that talent you’ll notice that… they’re mostly not natives to those areas. i.e. the highly paid in San Francisco are mostly immigrants from LCOL countries. Generous immigration policies ensure it. If immigration policies do change, you might start to find tech top talent in other geos but for the most part the people they really wanted to outsource to in the first place have already moved next door.

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

#246

Post by aprilthird2021 »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #217
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.

no one is moving to Pakistan

It's a pretty common place to get outsourced devs from. But it doesn't have the conglomerate offices like India, so you have to do more to get a team from there. The people are basically the same so same level education, same-ish salaries, same English understanding, etc.

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

#247

Post by FrustratedMonky »

So mostly, because a lot of companies are 'wait and see'?

Also, is this the downside of the 'wait and see'

But, there could be a rebound from this.

" Software by non-developers creates more opportunities for devs. Imagine a situation where the number of non-developers creating software increases by 10x or 100x, due to AI, thanks to non-technical people creating software with AI tools and agents. "

Just like with arts/video editing.

There could be a rebound when so many people start creating things with AI,

THEN realize it is actually a bit harder than they thought, and boom, need to hire video or software engineers to finish what they started.

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

#248

Post by [deleted] »

vonzepp wrote: post #168
rcpt wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes the competition 25% more productive too.

If there is a finite amount of software to be written in the world, and an increase in productivity of developers than that amount of software is done with less people. Also, if AI allows an non-software person say an marketing person, write a python script to query a few databases. Than the 10 person business data science team might not need a body as they no longer have to deal with the 10% lower level stuff.

[deleted]

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

#250

Post by tqi »

dragonwriter wrote: post #139
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?

Wants is maybe too strong, but I've seen this chart in a couple of different substacks / editorials, which I assumed is the fed's press office shopping this story around because "AI taking jobs" is zeitgeist-y right now.
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