Are software jobs on the rise again?
Numbers go up
Recent online discourse (and probably quite a bit of financially invested marketing) has built up a substantial uncertainty and angst about the job market for software developers in the future.
However, looking at U.S. job posting data for software developers, we can actually see a recent spike in the job market data, looking at the past 12 months:
Of course, one can debate whether job postings say anything at all about the health of a job market, but lets assume that it is at least a useful proxy.
Zooming out in time
Zooming out beyond just the recent months, the recent uptick pales in comparison to a much larger market mover, the pandemic:
Zooming out in scope
However, what about the job market in its entirety? Maybe all jobs are just ebbing and flowing together? Well, yes, somewhat overall… but software jobs have been uniquely sensitive to the pandemic:
Of course, a lot of what happened afterwards was likely just a counter-reaction to overhiring.
Normalizing it all
We can focus further on what movements were unique to the software job market, relative to the rest of the job market, by normalizing the data:
Going back again
And similarly, we can do the same for the past 12 months:
Now… 5-6 months isn’t much in the grand scheme of things. But I’ll propose a couple of possible hypotheses:
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AI is making software development cheaper and more accessible, which is counter-intuitively causing an increase in the total demand for software development. (See Jevon’s Paradox)
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AI is erroding other job submarkets faster than that it is erroding that of software developers, and the rise we are observing is actually due to some other factor entirely.
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What we are actually seeing is an increase in AI-generated software job postings… somehow directed at hiring software developers?
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This is just a short-term noise in the data that means nothing.