Supply and Demand in IT is History Repeating Itself

(Est. Reading Time: 12 min)

Look around. How many tech devices do you see? If you are nerdy like me, it might be a slightly higher than average number of devices. Smart TVs, the phone or pc you are reading this on, smart assistant speakers, gaming consoles, all of those are obvious ones. What about your car? Your lightbulbs? Oven? Smoke detectors? Check and check. Tech is everywhere, and more and more things are getting "smartified" each year.

Who builds all that? Hardware people, software people, and a whole slew of supporting cast members. So tell me, when more and more of these tech things are going up, and more and more apps are getting created, and all these billion dollar investment deals keep happening to build the next breakout startup around AI, who is going to do all this?

Well, if you said AI and a bunch of "vibe coding" non-developer types, you are very wrong. Those people smell success, but can't see the future problems. They don't understand the intricacies of software and hardware architecture, the complexity of system to system compatibility and how to maintain that over time as systems evolve and update around them. No, all of that new tech will be built by humans who know how to build it, and maybe with a little more help than usual.

Then where are the jobs? Why is it so hard to get hired right now? With thoughts like these, it's easy to understand how the current sentiment carries bias into all the data and reporting. But we are all getting lied to, if we choose to accept everything at face value. The problem is a bit deeper than "LinkedIn doesn't show that". If you take all the market analysis as a surface level view, the reality is that the truth is getting buried and there actually is a high demand for skilled software engineers.

Another note about all this, well, none of it is new. This is history repeating itself. We have Tech "Moguls" riding the coattails of the US president, influencing policy and action that benefits themselves immensely at the cost of Americans and the industries of the world. That sounds a whole lot like when the Moguls and Tycoons were using their money and influence to buy the Presidency and drive policy and federal backing that benefited them in the late 1800s after the civil war. It's almost like Elon is using history as a playbook.

Just look at all the lawsuits that Alphabet, Tesla, Meta, Microsoft, etc. have been in. Look at how many times their CEOs have had to be the center of congressional hearings. Just look at what happened with Twitter, I mean X. Amazon delivery drivers peeing in Gatorade bottles because the work was designed for robots and the union stomping that ensued. These companies thrive on you being surrounded by their tech ecosystems, and they try to milk every last penny from you. Money is the focus, and they want to protect and grow how much they have, at the cost of all of us.

So it's no wonder these tech giants laid off over 400,000 people in 2023 through 2024. They had been called out in a civil lawsuit and a Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation in 2011 for illegal no-poaching agreements. Then COVID comes along, and there is a massive need to new tech to get built, so each tech company starts hiring people straight out of universities with little experience at $300k/yr, just so their competition wouldn't hire these people. They laid off all those people a few years later, citing a need to refocus on AI, just to start rehiring, but with much lower pay. Hiring hundreds of thousands of people creates a "demand" issue. Firing hundreds of thousands of people creates a "supply" issue. But who is at the edge of the curve? The tech giants.

All this is a lot of noise. It's almost overwhelming. The panic that happens when you see large numbers like 400,000 people getting laid off over two years. What we don't hear about is how many got hired? And you won't. No one tracks that concisely. Something else difficult to track, and may not be that accurate, is the software engineer global population, at roughly 28.7 million in September 2024. In contrast, 400,000 is only 1.39% of the global software engineering community.

We've had AI "stealing" the jobs of software engineers for over a year now, too. Where are the success stories? Where are the news stories about the first billionaire from code written completely by AI? There are none. Ask an LLM about that and they will say its not likely or possible because of the scale and complexity involved. These are models trained for years, running in massive server farms, and they still can't write an enterprise grade application from the ground up to profit.

There is work to be done, though. There are things to do. Tasks to automate, front ends to get built, backends to build them on, and so much more. And now we need people to shift into AI/ML training. Why are these not job postings?

Well, we haven't even talked about the economy, or scammers, yet. HR departments and recruiters are literally swamped right now. When a company hasn't been pummeled by inflation and economic woes, they have to deal with the influx of fake resumes and applicants applying for their open positions. Well, that is, if the job applications are real. The answer seems to be hoops and more hoops for all of us that are looking for work.

I wonder what it feels like as an interviewer to put someone through an interview process where you talk with them and see how fantastic they are, and then watch them struggle on an unnecessary code challenge. Is it paranoia and you have to prove they are not AI, or not using AI? And then the position stays open? How unproductive is that? Imagine being on a team of software engineers that is drowning in work, and their management goes to hire more people, but all the candidates cannot be trusted. They eventually find someone, sometimes, but was it really the best candidate?

So what does this all mean? It means that the tech job market isn’t dead. It’s just shifting. Companies still need skilled engineers, but they’re filtering harder, paying less, and using AI as a smokescreen for layoffs and rehiring at lower costs. The demand is there, but the hiring process is broken. So, if you’re a software engineer struggling to get hired, don’t buy into the lie that the industry is shrinking. Instead, ask the hard questions: Why is talent being undervalued? Why are companies hesitant to hire the people they clearly need? And most importantly, what can we, as engineers or hiring managers, do about it?



Additional Reading

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Professional Overview

(Est. Reading Time: 4 min)     I've been out of a job for over a year, and I have been applying to over 1000 jobs during that time. I lost count, seriously, but I noticed a trend. When I see less job postings, I get more job ghosting when I apply. Alternatively, when I see more job postings, I get more rejections. During this time, I had over 16 different companies I've interviewed with, and almost all have been setup by recruiters. The thing is, recruiters are not doing well in this job market, either, and there are a lot of scammers out there messing everything up. So, to even the score a bit, I wanted to inject more humanity into my hunt. Job applications today are a form with 5 to 10 blanks, half of it being demographics questions at the end that I've answered so many times, that I can almost recite them word-for-word from memory. How do you add more humanity to that? Add a "Are you a robot?" captcha to them? No, I needed a "cover letter" to add to m...
Read more

Technical Interviews Are Getting Insulting

(Est. Reading Time: 5 min)   ( Don't have time to read? Listen to the Podcast version ) The higher the level of the role, the more that technical interviews start to become insulting. And now I cannot wait to read all of the comments explaining how wrong I am. I have over 9 years of Python programming experience, almost 10. Asking me to do a "coding challenge" is an insult to my experience and skill level. But I have to put up with it, because that is the unfortunate norm in Software Engineering today. To dig into this deeper, though, we need to talk about Software Engineers. An engineer is a problem-solver who applies scientific and mathematical principles to design, build, and optimize systems, machines, and processes that improve daily life. Whether inventing new technologies, refining existing ones, or ensuring safety and efficiency, engineers combine creativity, technical expertise, and strategic thinking to turn ideas into reality. What separates engineering discipl...
Read more

Ghosts!

(Est. Reading Time: 18 min)      ( Don't have time to read? Listen to the Podcast version ) It is a quiet Monday evening, and you are up late, worried about finding your next job. Everyone else is asleep, the house is a little dark, and you are curled up under a blanket and cozy on your sofa doing one of your least favorite pastimes: job searching. When all of a sudden, you hear absolutely nothing. Crickets. Wait, what kind of ghost story is this? Hold on, it gets scarier. You don't hear anything for days, weeks, even months. You come to realize you are never going to hear anything at all! You've been ghosted! AHHHHHH! Unfortunately, if you have experienced this, you are not alone. A ghost job is a job that a company posts with the intention of never hiring for the role. Ghost jobs quite often lead to ghosting, which refers to never hearing back from a company after applying or interviewing. To be fair, there are ghost jobs that you actually hear back from, too. " Alth...
Read more