Historic Lows in the Software Development Job Market
If you’re a coder, you already know: There just aren’t as many jobs as there used to be.
Tim Paradis at Business Insider takes a less-than-penetrating look into the job market for software developers, but he did include a link to a Federal Reserve Bank chart that plots the change in the number of job postings on Indeed.
Beginning in 2020, the chart shows a meteoric rise of software development job postings into the second quarter of 2022. A rise to over 230% from the February 1, 2020 numbers. Job postings have since fallen to approximately 63% of February, 2020.
According to the article, the primary driving factor is the use of artificial intelligence. It’s making individual coders more efficient and more productive thereby rendering larger teams obsolete.
For those of us in the industry, as the above quote observes, the chart is unnecessary. If we haven’t already been laid off, we’re waiting for that Muskian email asking us to justify our employment. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, we all have a front row seat for a modern reimagining of Death of a Salesman, and we don’t need the Fourth Estate talking us through the play.