| During the pandemic money printing things got very weird. It created a lot of leverage and bullshit companies and bullshit dev work which led to artificial demand for software developers. We are still in the post-pandemic hangover. If you look up M2 money supply on St Louis fed - that chart has more influence on the job market in the US than anything. The macro whiplash compounds this problem for people like OP in a few ways: - cheap money leads to hiring frenzy (cheap capital costs lead to investments in human capital in software) - developers get conditioned to artificially high demand and assume it will be like that forever - artificially high demand attract people into software dev for the money instead of love of the art (increasing supply) - when capital gets expensive again companies have to correct for over-hiring with layoffs and hiring freezes - developers are stuck in a market with crashing demand (because of higher cost of capital) and over-supply (people attracted to work when cost of capital was cheap) Everyone says it's about AI, but AI is more like the flavor & scapegoat, the substance is all a consequence of macro policy. The next time the fed does quant easing labor market will kick up again. |