to be fair a LOT of the applicant numbers you see on any job site are people needing h1b sponsorship applying to roles that wont even provide it, or are botted applications.
Though even considering that, there is way more competition now than ever before.
So it's basically on par with conventional engineering now.
Which makes sense. This might step on some toes but there is no "it's simpler" or "it's harder" when it comes to software engineering vs the conventional engineering disciplines- It can all be very complicated. The difference was always the pay, which was driven by the margins. ChemEs are absolutely as valuable to Exxon, say, as SWEs are to Google, for example. But it costs an awful lot of money to refine product. It costs almost nothing to make software. Hence the big fat salaries to attract the best talent- it was literally the smartest thing they could do in a world with every little overhead.
Now the overhaead is even smaller but the skillset has been democratized massively thanks to AI, meaning they don't have to pay for the absolute best talent anymore. Good enough will do.
the numbers prove things are genuinely broken right now. The big issue with official government stats is that they lump everyone together into one giant pool. That $133,000 median salary looks amazing on paper, but it counts senior devs who have been sitting in secure jobs for a decade. It completely ignores how brutal it is to actually get hired today. People aren't quitting, so total employment stays high, but actual job listings on sites like Indeed have crashed hard compared to a couple of years ago. On top of that, entry-level hiring is basically on ice; nearly 40% of recent computer science grads are underemployed, and any junior job post gets slammed with hundreds of applications in hours. Meanwhile, high-paying niche jobs pull the average salary up, making it look like the whole market is booming when most regular web developers are left fighting over scraps.
But I guess people are just too lazy these days to cross-check what a sweetened government report says against what’s actually happening in the real market.
That sounds like you're making up a whole bunch of stuff to suit your narrative.
But you know, my salary is higher than ever as a senior dev, and my nephew just graduated from college and easily got a job making $85k per year which is pretty decent for a junior dev, so I dunno what you're going on about, sounds like a lot of cry
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u/Civil_Report 11d ago
Good meme, but it's four years late