alt Hacker NewsTech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions
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The chart in the tweet represents year-on-year growth. Based on these figures alone the actual number of people employed in tech is still really high, and the numbers can't just go up forever.
Also this only captures 6 industries, which is a narrow view of what would define "tech" these days.
Not to say that the job market isn't tough but this graph is a very narrow view
How’s it compare to 2000 though? Tech was ascendant in 2008 so not surprised to hear it didn’t do too badly then and in 2020 while people panicked tech again had a much easier time keeping people on remotely.
EDIT: posted below as well https://xcancel.com/JosephPolitano/status/202991636466461124...
There’s a longer term graph in the thread. We’ve got a long way to go before we hit 2000 numbers which is what I’d expected.
For the last 2 years I can't even get an interview despited having 14 years of experience and being up to date with development trends, libraries, languages, AI tooling, etc.
I don't think the market is flooded with new devs as many state, I think we are in a deep silent crisis
There are hidden jobs out there that are not listed. Try https://www.jobs.now/
In my very humble view, the mythical 10x developer can now be a 100x developer, and the 2x developer usually stays a 2x developer. We live in two parallel worlds right now. Some run an army of agents and ship somehow working and testable code, and some try to prove AI is not as good as them.
Not dismissing that it’s a tough market for some but folks also need to learn how to read a chart. It shows a slight decline following a massive expansion.
The primary thing going on in the market right now is a lot of companies simply over-hired during the post Covid boom and they’re correcting for that.
People constantly tell me "oh you're a dev it's easy to find work"
I'm a c++ dev, with excellent senior tests, but low experience, and no degree in France. 3 years without a job.
I yearn for a new pandemic.
Fortunately, I learned how to live without a job, found other things to do and how to live a life. Welfare is generous, and I have good savings.
Honestly I don't really want to work in software anymore. If there is a job offer and recruiters are calling me, I answer and I accept.
But I'm not applying to all positions I can see and I won't run after them.
I just can't get over how short and intense the period between 2021 and 2023 was. There was SO much hype, such stupendous hiring, in such a compressed timeframe. Within the span of like 9 weeks it went from full steam ahead to completely seized.
At the same time, the economy at large didn't seem to change very much.
Why did this happen?
Yeah but like... area under the curve. All of those jobs and more were added very recently, 2020-2022. It's a major retreat from that growth, but the trend since, say, 2008 or 2010 or 2018 is still positive growth. 2020-2022 was just a huge shift due to a very weird Covid/ZIRP market.
Hm what about the Citadel rebuttal that showed growth?
https://www.citadelsecurities.com/news-and-insights/2026-glo...
I have PayPal, Amazon, LinkedIn, <<mid size company>>, <<mid size company2>>, <<startup>> as a manager on my resume. I didn't get a call back after applying for two weeks.
I got 4 or 5 standard rejections.
I have non-English name so that definitely hurts. I have AP EAD which is a stage between H1B and Green Card and I still require sponsorship. It's complicated but I can't just switch to EAD right away.
It's not just engineers. It's managers and experienced people as well. Don't believe top comment that it is bimodal. Unless you are supertar (99.99%) it becoming hard to get noticed. I thought of going back to IC role but it is hard to pick up and do leetcode all over again. It is extremely hard with a special needs kids at home.
Any suggestions or recommendations for me?
This is a culling and the fake it until you make it crowd that focused on surface level only knowledge are finding out why they should have went deeper. The ones that honed their craft and really focused on the foundational and core stuff are in demand.
If anyone saw that LinkedIn post about someone at Block resigning guilt of being offered a raise and retention after the layoffs, I'd say that is a signal that tech is heading down.
Most people would be thankful to have a secure well paying job in the post AI blow off; increasingly it's going to harder to differentiate yourself against anyone else using AI. That we have people still in the thick of AI that don't understand that is a strong signal that AI boom is still going to come take some jobs.
If you're in a software related role and AI isn't making you more productive, it's on YOU as a dev to figure things out quickly.
AI is coming for your job so you can either be an AI manager, or you can get managed out for AI.
caveat: This is my take as someone who used to do a lot of hand coding, and now regularly has a small team of AI doing anything that would have normally required mostly brute coding strength but not too much thought; that's facet'ed plots, refactoring libraries, improving pipeline efficiency, adding parallelization where possible, building presentations, adding test coverage.
Those are raw numbers. I would look instead at the job changes over total employment numbers. I don't have the numbers but I would wager we have many more people working in tech today (overall) than we did in 2008.
Also, that spike in 21/22 really did a number on people's expectations. The one constant in this industry is its cyclical nature.
Remember it's the first derivative. The title and chart suggested at first that there are fewer tech jobs vs the start, but really it must be way more.
I still kinda want to see this going back to 2000. That must be the biggest tech crash by far. 2008 and 2020 were overall market crashes, but tech was booming.
Interesting, this shows growth in open positions: https://www.trueup.io/job-trend
I am in my 20s. At the moment I've got a part time job, but I am preparing myself for the worse. In the next few years I am planning to volunteer at farms through workaway. Maybe one day I can become self sustainable,tech and nutrition wise
also getting into plumbing, curious to see what others are doing in this regard.
A look at the number of replies to "Who's Hiring?" each month over the past year or so compared to prior years made it loud and clear. Traditional tech has been in a recession for a couple of years, at least!
I've been lucky enough to stay employed, but eating a massive pay cut hurts. I have no realistic hope of getting back to my peak salary anytime soon .
Jobs are now significantly more demanding too, do more and make less.
Anecdotally seeing this play out in SF right now. We're hiring for our fintech startup and getting 500+ applications per role, many from people at companies I would've assumed were stable. A year ago we struggled to get anyone to even look at us. The talent pool is incredible but man it feels weird benefiting from other people's misfortune.
I wonder how the figures look for countries outside of the United States.
For what its worth, I ended up getting a tech job in Japan instead. Ironically, the requirements at U.S. startups are much higher, and U.S. startups fit the stereotype of Japanese work culture more than Japanese companies nowadays.
Tech jobs are up, just not in the US. I know personally 2 people who got hired without an interview to fill two open roles.
https://muneebdev.com/software-development-job-market-india-...
It sure looks like during the ZIRP era, tech substantially overhired. Post-ZIRP companies are correcting that (but under the guise of AI).
A key thing in this graph is that it doesn't seem to correlate to the rise of code assistants. That is a (relatively) recent last year thing from my point of view. Yes, they were there before, but they hadn't really hit in a way that I think hiring decisions had shifted because of them. This is just tech laying off, not AI taking jobs.
Looking at the employment report that came out today, tech seems to be doing better then most sectors...
"Other professional, scientific, and technical services" grew month over month and year over year
"Information" took a hit, but the bulk of that was "Motion picture and sound recording industries"
"Computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting, and related services" modestly shrunk, but "Web search portals, libraries, archives, and other information service" is the only area to grow under information.
This seems different then what the post says. They also said worse then 2008, but didn't post any information. I would imagine the total market was much smaller, so the while total jobs lost was probably smaller, percentage was probably larger. When I started in 2012, tech would take any with a science degree.
I don't understand the job titles being propose in the post, are the using different BLS data then me?
The ideal software engineer will code himself out of a job and be happy about it.
Be that ideal. The shareholders are counting on you!
I have been getting automated emails from a slew of different recruiters now. Usually one or two per day. I believe they are LLM generated. However, I usually don’t respond.
The next step is for me to respond with an LLM. Maybe if my LLM is good enough it’ll convince their LLM to skip the interview and just offer me a job.
This has a misleading title.
This chart shows that the rate of year-over-year, month-by-month change is worse than 2020.
But the number of tech jobs has grown by 12% since April of 2020 (2.34M vs. 2.63M). Heck, there are more tech jobs today than at the beginning of 2022 (2.61M), even.
Job market sucks, trend is bad, but post title is a misnomer for what this chart shows.
(Numbers based on a quick grab BLS.gov data of CES6054151101 (Custom Computer Programming Services) + CES5051800001 (Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing & Web Hosting) + CES6054151201 (Computer Systems Design Services)---couldn't find other ones quickly and gave up :))
Funny how the dip started years before we had meaningful AI codegen.
Could speculate this is likely to be a shift in what gets funded and invested in.
Misleading title. The change in tech employment is worse, but actual tech employment remains high thanks to the massive 2021-2023 hiring spree.
Good to know it’s not just me. Sheesh. Are there signs that it’ll bounce back again?
I’ve been looking for work for nearly seven months. I can write low level systems code in C and C++ to web applications in Python and compilers in Haskell. I have tons of industry experience.
Yet most places I apply to ghost me or follow up a month later that the position has been filled.
Companies that have been lying off people claim they are seeing record profits.
It seems like we went from a relatively stable growth to just chaos.
If things continue to get worse I really worry how many people might give up on life entirely. A lot of people in this industry don’t have a whole lot else going on for them, myself included.
I grinded my 20s away trying to have a successful career and if that just gets pulled out from under me I’ve got absolutely nothing.
There's still the hangover from free Covid money. I think the number one reason that it feels worse is that there's a LOT more people in the industry now than back in 2020. Much more competition than before.
the 2020 ‘recession’ wasn’t really bad for tech employment at all
I know people will say AI, but I don't think it's that. The whole "everyone should learn to code" bullshit of the last 15 years or so has created a lot of developers that frankly aren't very good, and then you mix in the massive overhiring of the pandemic, and what you're seeing is a hard correction. CEOs love to use "productivity improvements from AI" as a smokescreen and investor catnip but the research shows it's not having the effects claimed.
I don't recall any recession with respect to tech in 2020. It was a hiring frenzy.
Any commentary about tech jobs that does not include the interest rate environment and the massive over hiring that occurred between 2019 and 2022 is borderline dishonest.
Look at federal data of SWE job postings and look at the federal funds rate for the same period. Jobs is giant mountain peaking in ‘22. Interest rate is zero for the pandemic and then spikes right when SWE jobs start to collapse.
Tech hiring is all downstream of interest rates. AI has had almost no impact, at least not yet. (Block layoffs were not AI, look at their stock, they basically can only succeed as a financial company when money is free, very misleading and a convenient excuse for terrible management to now say they need to be “AI native”)
Tech hiring is bad, for sure, but the the graph does not make a clear picture.
What is software publishers category? As it seems it’s picking up while Computer system design is the largest negative impact.
I would appreciate if there was a better chart explaining sort of roles and locations that had the largest impact
My friend who has worked for some big name companies is absolutely struggling to find work. So many interviews, 3rd, 4th round, and then they go with another candidate, or I can only assume someone internally and the listing never existed. It's killing me watching him struggle to find work.
Headline is misleading.
Should be something like tech employment rate of growth is lower than it was in 2008 or 2020.
There are many many more tech workers than at either of those points.
What happens when AI gets so good that even "Juniors" can compete with "Seniors"? It's going to happen at SOME point. I think what will separate devs will be their creativity and ideas. Those that can think outside the box will be the ones getting hired. With that said, I sometimes feel like eventually the OFFICE MANAGER will be coding everything for their company lol.
As an employer it’s very very hard to actually discern who did CS as a prestige degree vs people who are actually into it.
Signal v noise ratio so much higher in hardware, nobody performatively studies mechanical engineering to make $60k in ohio.
The graph does a really poor job supporting the conclusion, most obviously because it only goes back to 2016, the peak of boom times, it doesn't go anywhere near 2008 so why does the caption talk about that? Just this same graph alone going back to 1990 would be super eye-opening.
The other thing is it's showing first derivative, not absolute numbers, which is a very questionable way to derive "worst employment situation" in a field that has been on world-changing boom over the last 50 years.
I've had my suspicions - this seems way worse than anything I remember before. I think right now is worse than the 2000 dot-com bust, too.
They want everyone to chine/indian wages!
Nota bene: these aren't "tech" jobs, these are "laptop job" over-hired email people. Not real people.
Although the graph lists BLS data as the source, it's hard for me to find the specific datasets that back it up. It's March 2026 and the graph indicates it would encapsulate 2025. In fact, the "Software Development Job Postings on Indeed in the United States" indicate something different, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1T60O
I was able to find the following:
- Software Publishers https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU06000005051320001
- Regional data available only, numerous national statistics are discontinued
- California region matches up, but places like Boston don't https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU25000005051320001
- Matches up perfectly, no notes here.
- However, the graph in the tweet doesn't include the February data (even though it claims "recent") which shows an increase
- Matches up, but February data isn't in the graph which shows an increase from January
- Doesn't include January or February 2026 data, doesn't match up with graph in tweet
There are numerous open questions in this analysis which I would need to be addressed before drawing any conclusions. My gut feeling would love to accept it at face value but I never trust my gut.
In my experience, tech employment is incredibly bimodal right now. Top candidates are commanding higher salaries than ever, but an "average" developer is going to have an extremely hard time finding a position.
Contrary to what many say, I don't think it's simple as seniors are getting hired and juniors aren't. Juniors are still getting hired because they're still way cheaper and they're just as capable as using AI as anyone. The people getting pushed out are the intermediates and seniors who aren't high performers.