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If someone wants to make the doom-and-gloom case for CS, they need to be very clear about what job labels they're using.
Source:
I think this is a tax thing. it's definitely an immigration/h1b thing though. if you say you're a computer programmer at the border, you don't get let in
“Software engineer” always made the most sense to me. Like “mechanical engineer”, “petroleum engineer”, “chemical engineer” etc
I also don’t know of any “computer programming” degrees, just comp sci, comp eng, soft dev, etc. I don’t even know if I’ve ever seen a job listing for a “computer programmer”.
I started in the 80s working in the EDV (Elektronische Datenverarbeitung, electronic data processing) and ended 2020 working in IT. All the time I was programming computers.
This very closely parallels the growth of personal computer adaptation and the internet. Before 1990 most people not working with computers as business tools were programming them to perform intricate, complex tasks and automations (whooo y2k).
But that dip at the end for
If a programmer comes asking for a raise you tell them you can’t afford it but you’ll call them a developer and they are happy. If a developer comes asking, you’ll call them an engineer and they are happy. If an engineer comes, you tell them to apply to FAANG and come back when
“Developers, developers, developers. DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS, DEVELOPERS.
WHO SAID SIDDOWWWN!?”
GIF
The moment the government gets involved things become more sophisticated.
Software is boom/bust
Anyone who starts studying comp sci in college won't graduate for four years, after which the market should be better
History says that choosing to become a software engineer after the dot com bubble burst was probably one of the best career decisions
fascinating. so the real question is: am i a software developer, a computer programmer, or something… else entirely?
would your short or long the blue line over the next 5 years?
hard to say but I think I’d have to take the short
realistically my best guess is it’ll be basically flat to slightly down for the next five years
I had no idea. 
Anecdotally, I've been getting tons of recruiting emails while "the market has been down", the opposite of what I've been reading in the news.
Anecdotally, I've been getting tons of recruiting emails while "the market has been down", the opposite of what I've been reading in the news.
I graduated in '04, it was completely over for software developers and programmers. The ecommerce bubble had popped and all the jobs were being moved to India.
Definately should have listened to the advice to change careers.
It took them 20 years plus to catch up on titles. I was a scientific software developer (job title) at the beginning of the 1980s.
Yea, but the market is absolutely dead, pushing jobs overseas and into H1Bs that will take half the salary. It’s a bloodbath right now.
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Graph includes the H1B1s doesn't it?
Companies have been getting rid of native talent for foreigners since the 2000s.
I remember Disney setting the standard back in the 2000s. They fired their entire programmer department, for H1B1s.
Microsoft is trying to do this too.
That dip at the end is pretty formidable tho.
Especially since it’s near certainty the education & coding bootcamp pipeline did not tail off at the same time. Presumably the total number of people who chose SW as their field is substantially higher.
The graph also shows that at any given time most developers only have a few years of experience
For the job seeker absolute number doesn’t matter, only first derivative
(in approximately balanced market like this one)
doesn’t this also show an awful last 1.5 years of declining employment thus proving the point of whoever says “current market is awful”
I’m currently a “software engineer” I’ve had the title of programmer and developer at different times too. Same work.
My favorite title is the old school “data processor”.
Honest question because I am not an IT guy: what's the difference?
Graphs can be deceiving. It's like saying the buffet is great just because the line is long!
Software engineers are the ghosts in the machine.
18 years of experience, can’t get a callback. But sure, tell me how easy it is to get a job out there right now.
A terrible job market is a supply/demand issue, and it’s completely independent of the absolute employment numbers for that occupatiob
What are these people even doing? Computers haven't really changed much in decades. Except maybe getting worse like Google.
Guess the graph shows we're all just bugs in the system waiting to be debugged.
Am I too late or have the AI shills already started talking about how in 2 years we'll have the employment graph of AI Agent SWEs at 200 million and everyone else is unemployed
what's happened to wages in the tech sector over the past few years? How many people has tech laid off?
Graphs can be deceiving. Just like my bank account after a night out!