alt Hacker News> The real risk isn't that some 19 year-old vibe coder is going to replace you, it's that there's simply less need for more experienced engineers. The market is shrinking.
That last sentence is verifiably false if you look at SWE job postings and their recovery since 2022.
It’s also a poor take in general, buying very much into the narrative propagated primarily by OpenAI and, especially, Anthropic, who nonetheless continue to hire large numbers of SWEs while paying double the market rate.
Replies
wiseowise • today at 9:55 AM
> That last sentence is verifiably false if you look at SWE job postings and their recovery since 2022.
Do you take into account recent layoffs of Meta (8k people), Block (4k people) and others?
> That last sentence is verifiably false if you look at SWE job postings and their recovery since 2022.
Source?
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE
And it's probably worse than it looks because phantom job postings are a real thing.
> ...who nonetheless continue to hire large numbers of SWEs while paying double the market rate.
Tech companies have laid off over 200,000 people since the beginning of 2025. Even putting aside the fact that (from what I understand) over half of Anthropic and OpenAI's employees are in non-engineering roles, if you assumed every employee was an engineer, Anthropic and OpenAI could triple their staffing levels and it still wouldn't even fill a quarter of the void.