Thousands of Software Engineers Say the Job Market Is Getting Much Worse::9,388 engineers polled by Motherboard and Blind said AI will lead to less hiring. Only 6% were confident they’d get another job with the same pay.
It’s not just software engineering. It’s anyone in tech. Product, UX, Data science / analytics, research, etc. Been this way for about 18 months.
That said, as someone on the UX side of the technology fence, if anyone needs a second set of eyes on a resume or portfolio, DM me and I can take a gander. I’m not hiring now, but I am a hiring manager, and I know what my peers are looking for.
Absolutely the case. I’m a motion designer and thank god I work on the partnship side of my business because that’s actually bringing in money, while the owned and operated businesses are failing. All of tech has just been under the knife the last 18 months and it’s exhausting. We’ve lost two people and no new hires because it’s not in the budget.
Very kind of you to offer! This could really help some people out
Network Engineer here and it has gotten much harder to get even a call back from a recruiter.
How are you reaching out to opportunities?
I’ve found that I get the most bites by hanging out in industry related slack groups.
Indeed or LinkedIn, mostly
It might be worth checking in with old peers to see if anyone is in some interesting career communities on slack or discord. It can be a lot easier to network and connect with hiring managers in those environments.
Appreciate the tip! I have found that at my level (IC4 close to IC5) it’s not so much what you know but whether you are a good culture fit.
Tldr pandemic and not AI
One single factor is never the source of a problem. It can be both things causing this.
Technology changes too fast today to plan for a 30 year career doing the same thing in a constantly changing world. Anyone with the skillet should take this as a beacon and pivot, whether keeping the skills fresh and branching out into new ventures with them (i.e. spend some time thinking, get a few peers, make a new product or service to sell to others instead of being cheap labour for someone else’s idea), or dropping the skills for another one that isn’t likely to get pulled out from under your feet suddenly.
I think we’ll need plumbers for a while still, and you can make over $100k/year never touching a shitty pipe.
Anyone who knows anything about software development is not scared by some article with journalists who kniw nothing writing about “AI”
Anyone who knows anything about labour relations knows that AI is a front line worker replacement. You aren’t killing all jobs, but how about you tell me the % of workers in the field that won’t be needed to create blocks of code which people get to review moving forward.
Theyll change the whole workflow on you if it saves them money.
the % of workers in the field that won’t be needed to create blocks of code which people get to review moving forward.
that’s a very low percentage, I have been using Github’s copilot for a year, it’s a decent productivity tool, it can do stuff like save me the time of googling how to sort an array, because I rarely do it and always forget the exact syntax, and just offer me the solution, so saves a few minutes, stuff like that, but Software Engineers are literally always developing tools to increase productivity a developer now can do more in a day than a developer 15 years ago, for example for Frontend I reckon REact/Angular/Vue did more for productivity than Copilot ever will.
and that’s how the world moves forward, we have been increasing productivity of workers, and it’s not a bad thing, this “AI” is just another tool to use for that.
the issue is to call this thing AI, chatGPT and the like are Large Language Models, basically calculators for words, so instead of inputting numbers you input words and it spits out something at you, is it correct ? who the fuck knows, the “AI” for sure does not, it has no intelligence, no concept of things, no creativity, it’s not a replacement for humans it’s a tool, like a calculator.
Fully agree that this is a tool to use. But new tools eliminate jobs throughout human history. ICE eliminated a ton of blacksmithing jobs when you didn’t need so many horseshoes. Excavators eliminated groups of workers physically digging ditches.
Progress is good, it helps society, but it has a danger to leave behind the people which helped to create the system that eliminated their need. There needs to be a safety net or a transitional plan for these people to ensure we all continue to succeed. That doesn’t really exist in our current capitalist environment.
I was laid off last year. Got a job after a while and just survived another layoff today. I agree with this assessment.
It’s all post-pandemic stuff. Executives thought growth would continue, and it didn’t. Then they had to take account for their decisions and make others suffer for them.
Its not even about the growth, publicly traded companies do layoffs because it makes the stock price go up.
You should be worried when small and midsized comapanies do layoffs that are not publicly traded
The job market is worse now than it was a couple years ago. It’s not AI’s fault, blame the Federal Reserve Bank and the interest rates. Blame VC, who’ve been relying on 0 interest loans for so long they don’t know how to actually take a risk any more, and will no longer fund startups. Blame cowardly executives of established companies, who are no longer seeing sales numbers increase exponentially forever.
This is what non-zero interest rates do to a motherfucker.
We need universal basic income.
Universal Basic Income to mean sounds like trickle up economics with extra steps. All of does is reward automation and inordinately support the wealthy.
What we need is a society that takes little stock in currency.
Edit: read my comment under here for better understanding. UBI is a capitalist solution to a capitalist problem.
In the long term yes. But we need a complete systems revamp before that’s possible without creating a situation where a lot of people starve to death. UBI works great as a patch over, and while automation is still getting off the ground. As a solution to an automated economy it sucks. It’s asking to have questions like, “how many loafers can we remove from the system without people revolting this year?” Or the creation of premium dollars that seem to only go to the owner class and goes with scarcity of supply as the wealthy become more and more detached from everyone else and shut down facilities to save on costs.
Basically it risks A Brave New World. Instead we need to make it clear that an automated economy is there for everyone and thus is owned by everyone.
AI has very little effect on my job. When the common task I’ve given is ‘write an ASN.1 parser that will fit into 100Kb flash’, AI can only copy code from existing ASN.1 libraries, and both of them are GPL-licensed, so it’s no-go for a proprietary firmware.
AI has very little effect on any software engineer’s job
So what the article says is not supported by my personal experience. Hmmmmm.
Oh well, it’s probably a Silicon Valley specific thing.
I would say the general job market is getting worse 🤔
Unemployment has been under 4% for a record time. The boomers are all leaving faster than zoomers can get hired. Tech outsourcing is increasingly seen as a path to managerial failure, as these cheapo firms fail to produce real value and talented professionals run circles around their shitty products. And we’re experiencing something of an industrial renaissance in the US, thanks to the battery boom.
The job market is as good as its been since at least the Bush Era and the Jobless Recovery. It just sucks because working conditions generally speaking have deteriorated so heavily from the 70s-era nadar.
The 2017 tax bill that the Republicans rammed through had a time bomb in it for software developers. Starting in 2022, companies could no longer expense R&D costs, and instead had to amortize them over 5 years. This has led to massive tax bills in 2023 for companies. I have no doubt that this is another major factor in the recent tech layoffs.
Take an imaginary bootstrapped software business called “Acme Corp.” This company generates $1,000,000 of revenue per year running a SaaS service. It employs five engineers, and pays each $200,000. That is $1,000,000 paid in labor costs. For simplicity, we omit other costs like servers and hosting, even though those costs can also fall under the new R&D rules, and have to be amortized. So, how much taxable profit does this company make?
In 2021, the answer would be zero profit. In 2022, the answer was $900,000 in profits(!!)
https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-will-us-companies-hire
AI may lead to less hiring but it’ll also lead to more software developers creating new competing software, services and technologies.
The likes of Microsoft, Google and Meta may have greatly underestimated the change this may bring to the industry.
This is old news though. The article is a poll of engineers, which means that the “news” is what we already know.
What about the regular engineers? I hardly ever hear about those guys and AI.
Traditional engineering areas can’t be as easily automated. Certain aspects certainly can, but prototyping usually involves physical presence, as well as installation or testing.
I mean, I keep seeing news articles about tech companies laying off tons of employees. I don’t think many of those companies are going to be hiring very much.
Yet tech companies keep posting record profits. Hmm, it’s low people on the totem pole get used as pawns so executives can make millions.
GenAI is a bubble; it will crash sooner of later when companies realize how much money they’ll have to spend on the infrastructure.
The hard part is making sure you don’t lose your job while clueless execs are still enchanted by the bullshit.
We just solved the housing problem again! We just need to count mortgage defaults from software engineers! My outdoor pet mouse can write printer drivers using AI now. So yeah.
Solution: shift left and become an AI engineer?
Source: I’m an AI engineer 😅.
