- cross-posted to:
- programming@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programming@lemmy.ml
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.
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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 don’t think they are engineers. AI isn’t anywhere near replacing engineers yet.
The thing about software is that once it does replace a technical job, it replaces basically the whole industry. Physical machines at least generated new jobs building and configuring the individual new machines. Software doesn’t need to be built each time, and the better AI gets the less necessary configuration is.
AI engineers, in general, are in the future, sure. But don’t be fooled into thinking that all engineers are that far in the future. All AI has to do is replace the majority, with a few senior engineers to give their work a once-over. It’s not about total replacement, it’s about decimation.
I believe it will take at least 15-20 years before the majority of engineers can be replaced. I do agree it will happen eventually. But my point wasn’t about what will happen in the future. It was about whether engineers are losing their jobs due to AI at the present moment, as the article claims.
Yeah 15-20 feels right. But I’m talking about the bottom up. When AI replaces people, it’ll start with the junior roles doing grunt work. I would not be surprised if entry level engineering positions are currently beginning to be displaced, or at minimum new openings evaporating.
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.
That’s the funny thing. Common sense says things go back to a sense of normal. Executives lack common sense or foresight.
Normality. That would be nice. Where the rich and powerful… (checks history books)… use their riches and power to get more riches and power.
In all honesty, yes, things will go back to normal. Layoffs shouldn’t be as common in the future, it’s just still post-pandemic stuff we have to get through. Executives will always be cold, but hopefully they won’t expect massive growth in the future and then not get it.
I’ve spent the last 18 months learning how to program so I could get a job that doesn’t make me want to kill myself, not being ironic, and now this bullshit. Am I just forever doomed to be miserable and just not enjoy anything or have a single break in life?
Same for me
Coding skills are almost always valuable even if you’re not coding directly. Depending on what you’re good at/interested in, I’d recommend data analysis (everyone has data! Gotta look at it somehow), database management, engineering roles other than just software engineering, IT, etc. Might not pay exactly as well as a big coding job out the gate, but it’ll certainly be interesting if you like coding.
Downturns happen. They don’t last forever. There is a lot of pressure from businesses to depress wages and get more work out of software engineers and IT and etc., since we’re one of the few classes of workers who actually get paid. But thinking that developers will be replaced by AI anytime soon is wishful thinking on the part of the bosses. 20 years ago it was how we’d all get replaced by dirt cheap engineers overseas. Well, I’m still waiting on that to happen. If the MBAs could clearly and unambiguously articulate exactly what needs to be implemented, then maybe it would work. But if they can’t do that when we’re all in a conference room together then they’re sure as shit not doing it over email with a 12 hour time difference.
Keep your head up and keep trying to get an entry level gig somewhere. It doesn’t have to be Google or some hotshot startup or even a tech company. Doing IT or websites for an insurance company is still good experience.
Don’t dispair. Deep and wide skillsets are always valuable. Continue to build your skills and specialize in areas that your peers don’t.
Target your region too if you aren’t fully remote. Different parts of the country have different trends for tech that is in demand. For instance, I work in IT, and the state that I am in for some reason is by and large Microsoft tech stacks, (no I’m not in Washington.) So .NET and C# devs are in high demand here, as are IT people who have experience scripting with Powershell and developing/administrating in Azure environments. But other areas will be more AWS or Google-centric, or even other stuff.
Identify the trends, figure out what people are looking for and what isn’t being met as a need, then train in that.
Not if you unionize
I work as an “API Consultant” but I do a lot of coding and there’s room to move into an engineer role in the future. So there’s still stuff out there.
Please, please let this result in these programmers realizing that working for for profit corporations is bad for societal reasons as well as for themselves.
I await further progress in the ongoing cyberpunkening of reality.
We already have insane wealth disparity, massive geopolitical instability basically everywhere, greed and ignorance driven climate catastrophy and real world megacorps dictating more and more fundamental aspects of our lives.
We need a few /interesting/ people and projects to uh, balance that out.
I’ll get right on that because I hate having money. /s
I’ve met a lot of people who were boot camp developers. Did a month long class and came out during a period where everyone was hiring anyone with a pulse. Got in the job, barely produced anything, and didn’t really learn much past that. Obviously they were the first to get cut when things got sour. Now, they’re wondering why they can’t get past the tech part of the interview. I feel this might account for a lot of those numbers.
Although this surely does not completely explain the situation, I also have a feeling these sorts of hires surely account for a substantial number of layoffs.
Yeah for sure. Especially with wfh. It’s easy to fire a remote worker. It’s harder to fire them in person. A good attitude in the office does go a long way. (I’m not arguing against wfh)
As if the people making the firing decisions knew the people they fired and their “good attitude” before COVID.
This is plainly just the financial class pushing back against recent advances in wages by inducing a recession.
In the case of a mass layoff where an entire department is cut, then yes. But often times the manager from each department is asked to provide a list of “expendable” people.
Fuck
I would say the general job market is getting worse 🤔
This article isn’t really saying anything. It’s just saying that a lot of people feel like the job market has gotten tougher, but we don’t have any solid evidence to prove that.
Personally, I recently got a new software development job, and it was offered to me from the very first company I interviewed for. (This is out of the ordinary for me, as during past job searches it took me several interviews before I got an offer.) Did I get a job quickly this time because the job market is better, because I’ve become a better candidate, or because I got lucky? It’s impossible to say. Anecdotal evidence doesn’t really mean anything when it comes to market competitiveness IMO.
I also just got a new job jan 1st. Submitted applications for a few positions, got an interview with 1 and an offer. 40% salary increase. Meanwhile my company was talking about how they couldn’t offer any raises because the job market was so bad right now lmao.
Exactly. I see an insane amount of job postings for my particular field in IT and people are changing jobs left and right in my circle. Which is also anecdotal, so there is that.
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
That doesn’t make sense because salaries are a current expense, not a capital expense to be amortized. And why 5 years? The work a software engineer does may be outdated in a year or two. Only certain legacy applications are around for 5 years.
The amortization time period is supposed to match the usefulness of the item purchased. Basically, software engineers are an ongoing expense, not R&D.
Only certain legacy applications are around for 5 years.
Oh if that were true.
Those are the legacy applications. This is the survivor bias 100%. You don’t see all the projects that were created and then dumped after a year or two (see Google).
It’s not AI - most companies are still in the process of experimenting with it and exploring the limitations of it, and there’s a tonne of shoe leather it doesn’t seem able to help with. If anything, companies need warm bodies to try to generate innovative uses for it.
Feels what we’re seeing is the repercussions of lots of huge tech corps making mass layoffs last year to placate their shareholders in the face of growth stagnation. Of course a lot of those devs got hired back as contractors, and consequently the global contractor market is a shambles atm, but that’s an awful lot of Silicon Vallet devs in the pool who’ll really struggle to replicate that kind of package in the wider world. I certainly felt this when I rocked up in a new city earlier last year with nothing but a CV and a plucky “can-do” attitude. I initially planned to contract but ended up taking perm, because I like food and a roof over my head.
I doubt it has to do with AI, feels more in line with rising global inflation
