Software Engineering In 2023
Reflections On A Rapidly Changing Landscape
Most of the people who follow this blog do so because of one viral article I wrote, which was called “If software engineering is in demand, why is it so hard to get a software engineering job?”
If you have not read it, I will give you the ten-second version: I wrote that it is hard because of all the behavioral, system design, and LeetCode-style interviews you typically have to pass. This article received more than 200,000 views and gave me my 30 seconds of fame: The most notable response was that they linked to it on the ChangeLog podcast. Gergely Orosz briefly responded to it.
Rather than reiterate anything from my article itself, which was fairly short, kind of random, and written at a time when this blog had 0 followers, I think it is more interesting to ask WHY it got so popular. My theory is that it served as a lightning rod for a lot of interesting discussions, rather than being the lightning itself.
It was written in late 2021: At that time, tech companies were still doing fairly well and so it served as a way to voice my opinion that the process of finding a software engineering job was still difficult, in spite of this. A few months after it came out, the ChangeLog podcast released an episode called The Insane Tech Hiring Market, in which Gergely Orosz (a former software engineer manager at Uber) described how hot the market was.
In late 2022, The ChangeLog podcast invited Gergely Orosz back for an episode called “The !Insane Tech Hiring Market.” As you can probably guess, it was about hiring freezes, tech layoffs, and the general “cooldown” of the tech market.
The Current Climate Of The Tech Market
A little while ago I wrote this, and received the comment below:
Sorry, Oana…it’s going to be more of that again. I want to present some real numbers, then talk to them.
According to this article by NBC News, US tech firms slashed more than 100,000 workers last year. Indeed.com reported that software developer listings are down 39.6% from last year as of January 13.
I think these two numbers alone are a good way to set the tone, but Yahoo! Finance elaborates on the number. You have probably seen the same bullet points in the news:
- Amazon announced it would eliminate 18,000 workers
- Google announced it would lay off 12,000 people
- IBM axed 3900 employees
- Microsoft said it would cut 10,000 employees
- Salesforce announced it would cut 8000 employees
- Paypal cut 2000
- SAP cut 2800
One thing that Orosz touches on is over-hiring. According to him:
And then one last thing — if you look at what is actually happening in the market in terms of numbers, it is a correction, but when we look at — let’s say there’s big news that Meta laid off 13% of staff, or 11,000 people; it’s a huge number, 11,000 people. But when we look back at how quickly they hired those people, just this year they hired 20,000 people. They’re 87,000 people right now. So by just laying off, they’re kind of back where they were in March
— Source
You can find a similar trend for previous years here, and so the explanation changes — big tech companies were hiring too many people, and so when the market cooled down they laid off large portions of people. I have also found more optimistic stories in the news. This article by US News mentions that the median salary for software developers is $120,730, and that the US Bureau of labor statistics expects 26% growth of this profession over the next 10 years, or 371,000 jobs. This is why they argue that “software developer” is the #1 job of 2023.
The distinction between “software developer” and “software engineer” is for another day.
The New Discussion With Orosz
Orosz mentions so many interesting things that the episode could probably be its own separate post.
- Orosz talks about a “silent majority” of companies that we are not hearing about in the news, the “unsexy,” stable companies that are not that impacted by the tech slowdown. As an example, he mentions a major bank in the Netherlands that is actively hiring
- In contrast, Orosz talks about Hopin. This company achieved a ludicrous $7.8 billion valuation, but it did so under a false prediction. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, they foresaw changes that did not really come to fruition. They are a tool for digital conferences, so their flagship product was incredibly useful. Then the world started to open up, people went back to preferring in-person conferences, and their growth stalled
- In this changing economy, people are realizing how risky it can be to accept stock options from pre-IPO companies
- If you are going to jump ship, Orosz encourages us to do so because you can find more meaningful/fun work. If your sole motivation is increasing salary, then understand that some of these high-paying companies were also high-risk. Fast is a famous example of a company that was advertising incredible salaries, then burned through all its money and became a cautionary tale of high-risk companies
- If you are working in tech and have not been laid off, save more money, strive to be in the top 25% of your company in performance, and figure out if you are in the profit center of your company. Sit out the storm
Some of the things Orosz said above are…complicated. Like in the last episode, I do not agree with everything he said. Arguing that we should be top performers is reasonable, but I think it is about as useful as the John Sonmez argument that we should get perfect SAT scores and work twice as hard as everyone else. If you already figured out how to do that, great. If you haven’t, it may be more useful to get a book explaining how than to read a Tweet that says “be a top performer to avoid layoffs.”
Closing Thoughts
I can’t predict the future, and I find it a little strange how hard everyone tries to. Clement describes this as a natural decline, a kind of adjustment period after the crazy rise in the tech industry influenced by inflation and high interest rates.
Me? I don’t know. I am still trying to work my way through LeetCode.
LinkedIn is not a fun place to be right now, which is why you can currently find me more active on ShlinkedIn. I want to write that the unsexy companies won and going forward we should strive to find something stable, but sometimes this just feels random to me — like the people getting laid off are not getting laid off because of skill level, market prediction ability, or experience level, but rather because we all unknowingly received numbers when we signed our contracts and now someone is picking numbers out of a hat to decide who goes where. Some people are really smart and got laid off, or are really kind and got laid off, or were really loyal and got laid off. Maybe a software engineer with precognition would have chosen to work for Boeing, but he/she would also have needed the precognitive ability to know when to avoid Boeing.
We still get to sit at our computers, make things, and learn how the work of others relates to what we build. We get to look at projects, break down how they work, and create new things that feel entirely like our own.
Let that be motivation, rather than the desire to always be safe and secure in a job.
