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IMO it's far too early for "AI" to have had a meaningful effect on Software company hiring. A more plausible explanation for me is that between roughly 2012 and 2022, there was a tremendous increase in the supply of SWE talent (via undergraduate CS programs massively increasing enrollment, boot camps, immigration, etc), fueled primarily by ZIRP. On the demand side, ZIRPy VC funding primarily went to bullshit Crypto and (to a lesser extent) bullshit Metaverse companies, most of which have not panned out, meaning there is a dearth of late stage and newly public companies to hire said talent.
I agree with all of this, coupled with a decent amount of layoffs from the Mag7s, though I'm not sure how distributed those were in California, necessarily.
And old unicorns like airbnb and uber now having to compete with traditional hotels and taxis again.
I think Elon's takeover of twitter set something of a precedent too: if he could reduce headcount as much as he did and still have a functioning product, then why can't I?
BTW I also don't think it has much to do with that engineering tax deferral code change that people keep talking about. My cynical hunch is that that topic keeps getting seeded by the billionaires who have the most to gain by reversing it, and hey maybe they'll hire an extra engineer or two afterward just to be good sports, but it's not going to reverse any major employment trends.
It doesn't have to be either-or. I think there are a bunch of factors all contributing to the current state of developer job market:
1. Rise of remote work: sure, it was there in some form. But prior to 2020, state of the remote work tools was abysmal. The prevalent culture was also about hiring the whole teams. After covid, remote work tools are far better. And companies learned to onboard one new remote hire at a time which over time is now allowing them to replace US workers with cheap overseas ones at a manageable pace.
2. end of cheap money - if the risk free rate is 4-5%, the demand from risky ventures like software startups is going to go up. So funding has dried up at the margins.
3. rise in the discount rate - related to the previous point, the discount rate one applies to investments have gone up. That means startups valued at 1B are now valued only at a few hundred millions. So to avoid down or flat rounds, startups have to cut costs drastically and show profitability to justify a higher valuation. Cue all the job cuts, belt tightening and death marches with a skeleton crew.
4. rise of AI - AI is helping with productivity of coding and non-coding tasks. It is also acting as an excuse for #3 when laying people off.
In my experience, all these are meaningful factors for the abysmal state of the developer market.
Biotech is facing a huge downturn right now too.
Zero Interest Rate (monetary) Policy targets short-term interest rates at or near 0% to stimulate economic growth via extremely cheap borrowing, to encourage spending / investing / risk-taking
My anecdata - the large tech company I work for has practically stopped hiring. I went from conducting interviews practically every week in the first quarter to none at all on the post 3 months. Even during the layoffs on 2022 they were still hiring for some positions, so I conducted around 1-2 interviews a month.
I'm literally one of the last software engineers my company (in the Bay area) ever hired. I've been here for 2 years and only 1 engineer joined since then, meanwhile dozens left.
Same in mine - started off as 800, had a salary freeze for a year, had a hiring freeze for now 2 years and after layoffs and people leaving we’re now at 480
What if this turns into rust belt but for software? Once high paying jobs gone with AI, politicians trying to please grumpy software developers promising them to open a software shop and create jobs. Mostly college drop-outs, voting for a certain party that promises to take on AI :)
Half kidding of course, but AFAIK many industries went through such a transformation and today most social and political issues stem from those areas that once were affluent lost their industries. Why not the software too?
We are giving India the IT market, just like China got manufacturing.
The rust belt can't really fall back on tourism like California can. Worst case scenario all software jobs evaporate and it becomes Florida with better weather
Everywhere has a boom-bust cycle. The question is just on what timeline. It typically takes decades to happen. When is anyone's guess.
Haha so true. Though I feel for this to happen the cost of building software products has to be high. With manufacturing your average mechanical eng grad cannot build something and sell (factories' costs etc) out the gate.
With software any body can build and put something out there (ignoring quality and tech debt and taste etc). Where software might go the way of manufacturing is when price of ai actually reflects hardware costs (my estimates of the realistic Claude max pricing at cost is between 7-10k and month). Now put together other structures that will come up to "industrialize" ai+software software may not have easy entries sadly.
> What if this turns into rust belt
We're rewriting the belt.
> Why not the software too?
Would it be any worse than the Dot-com bust?
Literally no jobs are going away due to AI.
What’s with the comments here? Forget the official reports, we should ask a couple randos on HN about their inboxes?
After reading the article it looks like the attribution is defensible:
"In contrast, professional and business services were down 7,100 jobs in July, the worst of any sector, and the tech-heavy information sector lost 1,000 jobs."
This could be many things. People could be leaving to do their own startups. The BLS counts that as a job loss thus high-velocity sectors can be reported as job loss.
Provided folks give some context about their location, experience, search, etc the input can be helpful - averages are great but aren't super instructive about one's own odds.
Plus BLS household survey probably has some non-response bias from it re: high income, low time individuals, precisely the folks chiming in.
Well, you survey 4400/13500000, the rando inbox is adding quite a bit to the sample size
We're littreally reading stories upvoted in importance by a bunch of randos. What else do you expect?
Are we sure its just tech? Isn't the entertainment industry going through a rough time right now as well?
I have a Teamster friend here in LA, and according to him practically nothing is being filmed in this area. The major studios are opting to film either out of state (Georgia) or in Canada.
I just noticed tonight that the movie theaters in my city closed up July 27--there's already weeds growing up out front. This was a really depressing epiphany because the mall next door is basically dead, too. I feel like 2020 killed this place but it's been a delayed reaction, same as my tech career. All we have now here in the upper midwest are people wandering around wearing outfits more suited to the desert conditions of Africa and I guess they don't go to the movies, so...
anecdata: after lay off 10 months ago, I suddenly got 3 offers in July and I am employed now.
I think it's the BBB that fixed the tax code issue - just a guess.
This is the time to cut back on h1b permits.
Good on the rust belt states for being able to get their unemployment down under 5.5%.
I’ve started seeing emails from recruiters coming in again after a long drought. These unemployment figures will probably be lagging indicators.
Unemployment in California was higher back in 2015. Feels like this is layoff related
After a long drought I've seen more recruiter emails recently but I do think the days of 500k-1M TC are dwindling. Big Tech seems to be moving a lot of positions to LCOL areas and I don't see that abating.
I'm not sure if this is entirely related, but during COVID (in SF) I was always surprised to see my colleagues so adamant against RTO once the vaccine was widely disseminated. I always felt that if jobs were remote there would be no need to hire us specifically - they'd hire in the cheaper parts of the country remotely or worse yet, other countries. The usual retort was that folks in North Carolina, Canada, Eastern Europe, Bangalore or whatever weren't as good - but I always thought such rebuttals were arrogant at worst, and ignorant at best.
Sad to see that to some extent that's exactly what happened. My current tech take is that developers shouldn't allow AI and/or agents to do the entirety of their job, rather allow them to do more, and it should be framed as such specifically. e.g. don't use AI to write the entire feature, use it to make the feature better and drive more revenue, or more correct and result in less bugs, thus less wasted effort on ops/etc.
It's amusing to see some people excited for AI to do the entirety of the implementation and planning, as if there would be no impact on us. If AI is that good, you just need TPMs (to the extent it's even possible, anyway).
It's no surprise to see that jobs that cannot be done remotely are making a comeback.
The topic deserves a lot better explanation.
It's not helpful to just talk about absolute numbers of jobs gained or lost in a sector without talking about percentages and historical variability.
It also appears the California number cited is based on a survey of ~4K people, some reporting they can't find work, while e.g., Federal unemployment is a function of people getting unemployment benefits. Do states do the same surveys with the same methodology, so the numbers are comparable? Likely not. So the term seems to be used in different senses, and "worst in the US" is unsupported.
Further, for tech in particular, it's not clear which jobs were converted to contracts, for AI services or outsourcing (in or out of US).
This kind of salad article is likely the future: enough for the general public worried about jobs, but not helpful to anyone who actually wants to understand and plan accordingly.
There's a reason most people you run into SF are either here on O1 or h1b visas these days...
Time to cull the waterloo crowd and maybe think twice about cheap outsourcing to latam and india.
California’s economy feels like it’s running on tech companies at this point. Any downturn in their hiring has really big effects on the California state budget.
So the clickbait headline is "as tech falters" but tech actually had the least losses of any sector, except government. More correct in all possible ways would have been "as construction falters", "as manufacturing falters", or "as banking falters".
It is only two weeks ago the commissioner of labor statistics got fired and going forward one needs to be very sceptical about the integrity of numbers or statistics coming from the official US government resources. How can anyone at this point trust any US statistics?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-fires-commissioner-of-lab...
Same newspaper last week: tech guys so over-abundant they are paying $2000 each to sleep in bunk beds in Mission flophouses.
Worst reported.
Serious question: who is producing reliable numbers now? The Trump administration is actively suppressing federal reporting and openly threatening to cease collecting and reporting data,
and this is absolutely signaling to sycophants and supporters that they should falsify or withhold unflattering data.
This is a truly terrible timeline.
H1B visas are not going to help the situation. The reality is our corporate structure lobbies for legislation that lowers wages through various means and is quite effective at doing it.
All of New York City only added 1,000 jobs in the first half of 2025. The economy is crumbling underneath the hood.
These might be the only reliable numbers in the country…
Hmm anecdotally I’m seeing a lot of hiring in all places ranging from faang to startups. So tech hiring is not evenly distributed.
Got to love our kakistocracy.