Unpopular Opinion

I... somewhat agree. Job postings are currently at a local minimum, and if you're intermediate/junior it is pretty rough out there.

But postings are still around 2021 levels overall, which while not amazing, still have jobs available. I got a couple of decent-but-not-amazing offers last year.

Really the biggest trend I've noticed is that real seniors are genuinely impossible to find/hire. Hiring has become a spamfest. Companies use LLMs to poorly filter resumes. Candidates use LLMs to shoddily write resumes and cover letters. Filtering through this to find the actual senior vs. the guy who worked at FAANG for 3 years and got a staff title for it is virtually impossible. Getting your resume seen through the cruft is also impossible, so many great candidates never make it into the process in any meaningful way. As soon as we get into an interview, it's been incredibly obvious who the good candidates are, and we've hired most of them. But getting good candidates to the interview stage is nigh impossible for candidate and employer.

I guess from my perspective the job market is there, but the process is absolutely horrendous.

• there is no upper limit to H1b pay, but it must match or exceed the prevailing wage for that skill or the peers at the worksite. That's the law, and that's my experience when I was an H1b. Where do you get this shite?
• people are absolutely building new software.
• I can't address the false consensus but I do know my union IT job has people with 30 years of experience AVERAGE, and a culture of skills maintenance. Obviously, your mileage varies.
• Ai FUD is just FUD. We survived crypto-bros and AgileEverything, and our odds are good.

This seems to be a post about USA.

I work in IT. Network Admin. And the guys I know that code say basically the same thing. I thought about getting into it but the future looks bleak. Maybe I should become a plumber.

I agree, but for a different reason. Demand for senior/principal engineers is still present, especially for those "third party vendors" you mentioned. But companies are not interested in hiring and training junior devs. They'd rather outsource when long term quality and tight control is not important. Or, for the bigger companies, they'll hire H1-B instead. There are enough senior engineers to be shuffled around for many years now that engineers have reached saturation in many markets.

And it's not that all the software that needs to be created is now present and "good enough". For some industries, that might be valid, but it is definitely not universal. The thing that IS universal is that experienced engineers have become far more productive than they were a decade or two ago because of the large software ecosystem available now. That productivity might outpace what some companies actually can make use of to directly improve revenue or margins compared to their current headcount. (Engineers might still be busy today, but not on things the company considers very valuable.)

I wonder if we will see growth in software consulting or dev agencies as smaller companies find they can do more with less, and only occasionally need more firepower without fully outsourcing.

Software is a maintenance role. Once the higher ups find out there is nobody to fix their shit when it breaks the jobs will come back.

c/USdefaultism

Every field goes through cycles of boom+bust. Major corporations around the world gambled on the importance of having a strong IT office. Some won and some lost. It sucks to see people losing their jobs but at the same time, "the software we have now is good enough" is a pretty bad take IMO

The stuff that already exists is good enough at what it does that it isn’t worth the investment to make something new. That means fewer devs are needed for writing that software.

Where I work, software gets replaced basially every 7 years. It's almost infuriating. But it pays well.

If you're in the US, you're probably right. After the cancerous growth VC companies dumped the unused software people they hired for no reason other than paper growth, the market showed it's not as desaturated as statistics would make it seem.

On the other hand:

• H1-B is a political tool, and I doubt that visa still exists by the end of the year. Plus, the people coming in on H1-B visas are still software developers. They're just from another country.

• The software already built is good enough

  I have worked at several companies whose terrible, buggy software sold like hot cakes because the competitors were even worse. General consumer software and apps may be pretty saturated, but B2B is an unending race to the bottom, racing for "better than before without being much more expensive".

• Destruction of the public sector

  Helps not to be American. Or if you are, look for software jobs in defence.

• AI is going to change the industry for sure. Lots of dumb framework copy/pasting jobs are going to disappear, but among the mess people with actual knowledge are going to be incredibly valuable.

I do expect programmer careers to start paying out significantly less over the coming times, but mostly if you're used to the ridiculously high wages software development pays in the US.

I've found a new software dev job within biking distance in less than three weeks, after submitting my CV a total of three times. The B2B sector is still growing.

Quite the opposite in my experience. Job openings get flooded, but the people that apply just don't have the skills. People from government and big companies seem to have a narrow sliver of experience that doesn't translate well to solving real businesses problems with software, and I include big tech in that as well.

This changes a lot if you have area expertise beyond software. I am seeing a bit of the opposite now - if you have an actual EE or CPE (or even physics or math) degree you are golden. Software as a particular skill is heavily tradeified, like basic IT work was a decade ago.

I've thought on and off about being a software developer since I had ideas I wanted to execute for the benefit of myself and others. But, I'm more of a labor type that wants to move around. I can't stand the idea of sitting for hours on end every day, coupled with all of the negatives involved with office culture and what you've listed.

The exciting shift in Europe is there is now a big push to move off of US tech solutions and to develop EU sovereign software. If it goes the route of open source and interoperability, this could be really exciting compared to US solutions which are locked down and full of spyware. This would create new job opportunities in Europe with a focus on open source.

Well, there should be less people entering the career path at least; especially if they're just doing it for money and not passion. I'm pretty sure most of this stuff is deliberate because the elite were getting afraid of the growing power of their workers (talks of unionizing, demanding their companies be more ethical, etc). Most large corps seem to have given up on innovating, so yeah, less new software is being made, except for whatever is overhyped by investors (AI atm).

Why don't people just get into game development?

It's not like we're going to run out of video games to make.

The market is cyclic with each boom and bust.

We're experiencing the beginnings of a bust.

Here's a good video on these topics

https://youtu.be/LXUw0xSib-g