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I've been seeing "we are cooked" posts lately about software engineering jobs. But at the same time, here's another take: the number of jobs has been steadily increasing since the release of ChatGPT

Kinda aligns with my observations – even well-funded companies still struggle to find good engineers, but there are just fewer junior positions

Building an AI x SocialFi app @reachbot /getreach | Open-source human-readable EVM data https://github.com/3loop/loop-decoder

Long-term salary of current senior/staff ends will increase as there will be no replacement as they exit the market. In fact, it’s already happening!

On top of that, we will probably see higher educational requirements for the jobs. Employers will want actual engineers and not code monkeys.

Amusement, wonder, and uncertainty ✴︎ libred.org

But that’s only a hope. I have a stronger conviction that edu credentials will come back and even though building software was never easier, most future developers will fallback to third-party attestation rather than first-party work simply because building things from scratch is really hard.

I think that companies that care about high quality software rarely react to global trends and capital change; think Basecamp, WhatsApp, Midjourney, Cursor, or myriad of >$1M ARR businesses we never head about.

As for higher edu reqs: since gaining real world experience for juniors will be harder, there will be more focus on other professional metrics, like education.

However, my *hope* for this scenerio will not happen and instead we’ll see a great influx of builders and open source developers that will completely change the game of credentials. Instead of relying on silly titles in BigFive or degrees, I think it would be better for everyone to just build things and show it to the world.

Why do you think that about the second point?

I think I’ve seen this cycle myself – companies changing from hiring qualified devs to 1-3 months bootcamp folks, and now back. For me, these shifts in hiring standards looked like it were more correlated with the amount of capital and number of new companies in the market, rather than a genuine pursue of a higher-quality software.