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.
this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2025
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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
- 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.
union IT job
Figure it out now, techies, because it will be too late when a 23yo fascist declares you an enemy of the state
I don't have personal experience, but it's my understanding that most H1B holders get paid well below market rates, and I have no doubt that the DoL under this administration will greatly exacerbate the problem. https://www.epi.org/publication/h-1b-visas-and-prevailing-wage-levels/
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.
I think this is the most accurate take. I'm not at the "don't go into the field" take, but Amazon and Microsoft have been pumping boot camp devs into the market for a decade now promising high paying jobs just so they could do this, flood the market with juniors and pay them peanuts .
So juniors and intermediates are everywhere, the market has been flooded. Also anyone who has written a few lines of python thinks they're a full stack engineer now and label their resume as such, so exactly what you said, the hiring market is flooded with spam.
My company rejects so many people on the first screen who have great resumes but then can't write more than the basic for loops or if statements on the page.
Also AI is becoming a crutch for people. You will not get AI in interviews people. You need to know how to do it yourself. I don't care if you use it for work, but when you're interviewing I'm hiring an engineer, not a prompt writer.
So, the trick is proving you're above the hordes of shit developers, and that's going to mean learning new stacks, pushing yourself harder, and probably doing some real networking. (For those reading who may be looking soon)
The 2010s and covid told people that anyone can code. Well, here it is, the market flooded. Now it's "anyone can code, why should we hire YOU." And you better have an answer for it.
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.
This seems to be a post about USA.
Yes, I'm in Canada and a software programmer for 25 years, and yes it's not the golden age anymore, but we don't have those H1B visa problem here. It also really depends of your field, if it's frontend web/javascript it's harder to find. If you are backend or embedded linux etc, it's better I think.
Some fields like FPGA is highly looked for too.
From what I've seen, US programmer salaries are a lot higher than other countries. What we could be seeing is American programming salaries going more in line with the international market.
Yep. Saw a remote job posting for either USA or Canada and the Canadian rate was half the US one. Same role.
25+ years here too, Sweden. Agree that I've heard frontend and mobile apps isn't what it was a few years ago but backend, embedded and cybersec is constantly hiring.
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.
Honestly if young people can get a good union trade job they'd be set for life.
My nephew is early 20s. Union welder. He makes double my salary. I definitely picked the wrong career. Of course his job is much more dangerous than mine.
Assuming unions are legal in 2026.
Tech should unionize
c/USdefaultism
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.
Maybe. And if that happens then I'll go back to encouraging people to get into writing software.
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
I can only speak to my experience. And in my experience I spend far less time writing software than I do fixing old software. When I recommend replacing outdated systems I'm told the existing stuff is good enough.
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.
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).