Hi My name is Will and I've been working in software development for several decades now. I started in the nineties in Silicon Valley working for companies like Apple and Symantec and then I moved into consulting in the two thousands. I've written four books on software development, and I built and sold an eighty five person software development consulting company, which gave me a chance to work with a lot of companies , everything from startups to a lot of big fortune five hundred. So today I wanted to talk a little bit about a topic that's on the mind of a lot of folks And the question is when will the tech jobs come back I did another video about some of the layoffs and talking with a recruiter you can go check those out. But at some point you start saying okay well we know that the layoffs are happening when will the jobs come back? the most obvious simple answer is when interest rates drop and money is cheap Right The jobs come back. if that's the answer, then you can bookmark this webpage the Fred website and take a guess. looking at that chart I'm gonna guess It could be anywhere from this summer to two years from now. the outside barrier on that I would guess would be if college enrollments in computer science drop off a lot now then it could be closer to three to five years when the pool of CS talent would shrink enough to start putting pressure back on employers for hiring. the bad news is is that if it's gonna take three to five years for jobs to come back and you just got laid off That doesn't do you a lot of good. But it starts to give you an idea about how to kind of think about where things are gonna go. Now that said, do think things are gonna be a little bit more complicated this time around I personally lived through the two thousand and one and the two thousand and eight crashes and there was kind of a…small crash at the early nineties as well which is when I got in CS was not considered a growth thing necessarily it was sort of a thing that nerdy kids did. and so what I wanna do is talk about the some of these struck changes that are happening that I think might affect if and when the software development jobs come back. And so the first thing that on that point that I wanna talk to is just to talk about the term technology. So even in the thumbnail I said when are the tech jobs gonna come back And most people, I think instinctively think of tech jobs as software development jobs, But that's not strictly accurate That's actually a pretty recent just a few decades phenomenon That's been true. For most of history technology really just referred to the process of things getting better And that kind of looks like two things Either means that things get cheaper. Or you have new products and innovations but, you know obviously things like hardware play a role. And so we've kinda been emphasizing the software development side for quite some time and that's partly because the speed and the velocity with which someone could theoretically get into the software development space and then have things go to the moon brings a lot of attention and a lot of money. The challenges is that it's not clear to me that the next few years we're gonna see the same level of investment in traditional software development as a way to improve technology some of that's kinda obvious because everybody's obviously so excited about AI and LLMs and and how that applies. The one that's been catching my eye a lot lately has been a lot of the investments in robotics. let's talk through that a little bit more if technology doesn't mean traditional software development it means things getting cheaper and faster we actually can see how that has affected the software industry itself over the last few decades. For example back in the nineties there were a lot of web developers who were just writing HTML and that was a whole career and job. other roles that have been impacted like that over the last years include things like QA It used to be manual QA was a big thing. server management for IT A lot of people used to just manage individual servers, where the server ratio might be ten servers for a person and now that could be hundreds or thousands of cloud based servers. I've seen that affecting even the Java developers that I know A lot of them have over the last few years moved from I write a Java app to managing Java apps but you're also worrying a lot about things like managing your cloud clusters. Or images and how you do the deploy or how do you tie an existing caching in with auth to try to scale it out. And so you're really doing a lot of data flow management, not necessarily writing Java code all day long the theme that's underlying a lot of that has been out Right You either learn more and add more to your skill sets or at some point you get out of the space So for example QA years ago, probably fifteen years ago most of the manual QA got kind of scrubbed out and replaced with test automation and SDS for example. So that kind of made everybody say either you're in and you're gonna keep adding more and more to your skill set or your out one of the canaries in the coal mine for me around all the stuff has been watching how AWS has evolved over the last few years. Basically…the dynamic is AWS can go to its customers and ask what do you need and then that gets swapped out. Where what used to be manual developer work or dev ops or what have you it just keeps moving more and more into off the shelf stuff that you can get from AWS The sort of last evolution of that even recently was probably some of these low code and no code tools and A lot of those tools as a professional software engineer, you might look at and go well that doesn't really do what I want it to do But if you can build an app with it that meets what you need that's probably good enough. And when I look on entrepreneurial forums a lot of those guys are talking about things like using no code tools to get their MVP launch So they're actually pushing back trying to bring on a CTO type person because they wanna just get as far as they can validating their idea they do a lot of software engineering work part of what's interesting about that is if you look at some of those tools like for example here's Flutterflow which is a low code no code tool that does mobile and web app stuff, they've added in an AI configuration so you can generate UIs and the snippets of code that you need. Using an AI interactively, similarly Supabase which is a postgres managed service that provides a lot of extra add ons. They've added, AI stuff right into their dashboard. So part of the point there is that they're trying to lower the amount of work to get things done , which is great, but it also means that the techs skills levels to be productive with it shrank as well. a lot of the entrepreneurs are using things like bubble or other platforms to just simply build and launch their apps with drag and drop remember it's not about replacing all the jobs But if we go through a few years where every year it's five to ten percent shrink in the overall jobs for software development. What that means is that we'll have a lot of price pressure on salaries and also negotiation for the software engineering what that might look like is instead of six figure developer jobs you get five figure developer slash configuration jobs potentially. Right So think about like if you wanna manage your website, you don't go hire a full blown high end software engineer to update your WordPress site The other one is is that a lot of the investment that I'm seeing right now isn't going to the software developer space part of this is because If the moats are low on software development, that means there's an investor you wanna put your money in other places So obviously that might look like data. Right if you wanna build an LLM or provide other services that might mean you're gonna put money into acquiring or managing large data sources and then crunching that. And then the other one is robotics. There's a term I've heard recently called Dark Factory The idea is is that if you have enough automation in the factory you can just turn the lights off And then…inputs come in, the robots do their thing and products roll out the other side. if you're an investor, what do you put your money in Do you go build a new app? What does that even mean What does that look like And especially if the moats are so low given… you know AI can just build a lot of these things, or do you put your money into a new dark factory. Right? Um and some of this stuff may be actually really good for us in the big scheme of things For example, I've been tracking and finding things like prefab housing very interesting where a factory can produce a house. So what would it mean to deal with some of the housing crisis issues in the United States if robotics and factory work is able to then allow us to dramatically decrease the cost of new construction for folks. Right? Another example of this Amazon just announced this huge investment in robotics. And…that money is paired up with money from Open AI, which is also paired up with all these other huge sums Right? So where this comes back is if you're a traditional software developer, and you're sitting there looking at this going well, Going from building rest services to doing robotics is non trivial. Right Same thing with moving from I do rest services to I wanna do data science. So again that kind of comes back to well, what or how are you going to invest in…building a skill set Right? in the another video I talked a little about some of the ways to get a new job and and how to think about your skill set and expanding it I don't know that I would say that like all the jobs are gonna go away This is a thing that people are talking about now but it's gonna take years or maybe a decade or more to deploy this stuff I don't know that the hype curve's gonna you know really fall out the way they're just gonna wipe everything out. But if you're looking at an environment where you're used to getting six figure work as a software engineer, And that might look like five figure work for the next three to five years That…implicitly means a lot of changes in life and how we approach things Right So anyway I think that part of the point here is not to depress anybody. Even though that might be hard if especially if you just got let go, but to kind of think about it as a we're all in very similar boats right now. Right? even if you have a job that you feel, you know covers what you need today, the risk and concern factors with all the layoffs and everything else should…be cause for concern. And when you're doing your planning you need to think about whether or not those roles doing it the way that you did it before…are going to come back in the same way. So pay a lot of attention to the job boards and and what's going on And just also kind of think about at what point do you have a conversation…about what the future's gonna look like for you in this environment What does it mean to be in a space where the jobs might just contract for five to ten percent for the next three years Right? So with that in mind, I'm hoping to do more videos on this topic I do wanna talk a little bit more about how the macroeconomic components interact in with this. And also some of the other options for folks that are currently doing software development today , but they kinda wanna build some safety nets and some transition plans and things like that So I hope this was helpful for you and interesting. gave you some food for thought all the usual things like and subscribe and all that fun stuff Thank you so much for your time and talk to you later Bye
