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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?

#81

Post by esaym »

astone26 wrote: post #54
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…

Interesting… 50% of US dev cost is like what if you don’t mind saying? 100k? I found the biggest issue with these engagements is the trust with remote developers.

I would think $40k-$50k

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

#83

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

rajman187 wrote: post #37
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 was clearly valuable from day 1 I’m not sure that’s the case even if in retrospect we can clearly argue this In 1998, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel memorial prize in economic sciences, infamously predicted that “the growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of par…

He was correct about Metcalfe's law though. He correctly refuted a bad argument, but making a bad argument for a position doesn't make it false.

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

#84

Post by lazyasciiart »

esaym wrote: post #81
astone26 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting… 50% of US dev cost is like what if you don’t mind saying? 100k? I found the biggest issue with these engagements is the trust with remote developers.

I would think $40k-$50k

Remember that employee cost is usually estimated at twice their salary.

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

#85

Post by xienze »

addicted wrote: post #65
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…

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 working that well. I’m not _that_ old and I was around at IBM for two separate rounds of “outsource-it-to-India-no-wait-bring-it-back” and IBM was and still is very keen to ship everything overseas.

I’m not saying it won’t eventually stick, but I think it’s important to dispel this notion that WFH made everyone have this sudden epiphany that US workers aren’t necessary anymore. It’s been going on for ages.

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

#86

Post by xk3 »

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...

I don't think this is FRED but rather Gergely making the implications but yes

FRED is just a descriptive tool: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/06/business/economy/fred-eco...

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

#87

Post by suraci »

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...

Almost every company that announced layoffs said, "We're 're-organizing' to focus on AI", but not "We're over-productive because of AI."

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

#88

Post by selcuka »

m3h wrote: post #59
selcuka wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the same jobs are advertised multiple times, with completely different wording, by multiple recruitment companies.

Then, assuming that the fake job posters are still there and that they now have AI help as well, the fall in the number of postings is more concerning.

Maybe recruiters are also losing their jobs, so the number of duplicates are now less?

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

#89

Post by RayVR »

"Programming languages are simpler than human languages"

this is a very stupid thing to say. The formal structure of a language doesn't easily determine the complexity of what can be done with a language, nor is it a way of predicting the difficulty of expressing an equivalent idea vs other formal or natural languages.

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