Just Learn to Code

Sometimes, even a seasonally-adjusted picture from FRED is worth a thousand words.

In three years–three good economic years–the number of Software Developer jobs listed on Indeed has fallen just over 70%. If there were ten jobs listed three years ago, there are almost three listed now.

Note that most of the drop was before all of the hype over “Generative AI.” Here’s just the past year:

It was a very bad start to this year, and whether that mid-month jump was a “dead cat bounce” remains to be seen. But it’s difficult not to see that listings are down about 10% year over year. And this is Indeed, which remains either the first (likely, with all due respect to Dice) or second-best place to find a technical job.

There are other really good reasons to not tell people to “learn to code”–languages go out of fashion, hiring managers have absurd expectations for low salaries, losing the rights to your Intellectual Property is not a way to riches–but looking at the past three years of job postings, the core one remains the same one as all the other college majors, from English and History to Political Science and Public Health: there aren’t that many jobs.