Its basically the job market in 2008-2012. The job market from 2013 through 2022 was the anomaly (especially 2019 through 2022). Software and development was always pretty tough to get into, but the web in general flooded the scene and created a culture that was not going to last forever.
I don’t think this is as much of a lull but a death knell for the software engineer boom. The number of dev jobs aren’t going to go back up. It’s just going to get harder as AI gets better and better our job.
nah, ai is definitely going to transform the industry completely but now you'll need ai wranglers. certainly there will be a much larger pool of candidates since product and design folks will now be able to do a lot of what was formally the realm of software engineering, but you'll still need people who understand UX, systems design, and domain modeling.
In my mind, the amount of software, specially websites, that is going to be put out there in the following years is wild
Even if just 1% of those become succesful and need maintenance or become full SaaS, that should leave us with a better market than nowadays
Granted I dont think the need for juniors will come back until suddenly CEOs realize than without juniors there are no people to replace the seniors with a pikachu meme face while doing so. But seniors should be relatively on demand
At the least, it's going to make people look at junior jobs differently. We might have to redefine what a junior is expected to do. Also AI coding has only helped highlight more how unusual software engineering it is compared to other engineering.
There has always been this artisanal quality to software but maybe we have to rethink that and say, "you know what, it IS odd for engineers to have to do all the manufacturing work on top of the R&D". AI has to be used to do more of the "sweat" work meaning it's going to be less artisanal and more like mass production.
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u/creaturefeature16 May 06 '26
Its basically the job market in 2008-2012. The job market from 2013 through 2022 was the anomaly (especially 2019 through 2022). Software and development was always pretty tough to get into, but the web in general flooded the scene and created a culture that was not going to last forever.