What’s absolutely mind blowing to me though…the idea AI isn’t causing software engineering jobs to collapse…which you would think would make people here happy…is something that makes software engineers upset??
It’s almost as if everyone here has married their identity to the idea they are victims of AI progress and any suggestion otherwise is ego destruction.
”What??? You mean the job market is expanding and the reason I can’t find a job is…me? That can’t possibly be true I’m a genius, the data is clearly wrong!”
The options do seem a bit idiosyncratic, but I guess they are useful for the kind of data the site users usually look at.
Similar with "criterion" or "phenomenon".
In my unhinged pipedreams, we’d have some sort of standard for conveying the data directly so users could use browser settings to decide how to display the data. There like a dozen people in the world that would use it, but they’d really really enjoy it I bet.
Readers are guilty too - they like to see wiggly lines wiggle. Nobody wants to see a graph that's just a horizontal line or shaded band. We want to peer harder at it to tease out any sort of signal that can tell our emotional brains "good" or "bad".
Then stuck in the 60-80 range since 2023. The sample period chosen by Citadel is wildly deceptive.
This is an important question and these crap stats are not helping.
The link you're responding to has the option to zoom out more to 2020. If you scroll down to view the other related graphs, you'll find that they also index 2020 as a starting point because they're all tracking this hiring bubble.
Graph starts with a black swan event
Do they mean "published" or "latest" or what?
edit: nvm they probably pull in results from these ATS
But I do like folks calling out the OP for being AI spam.
However, if there will be, locally deployable, meaningfully capable AI models that can change the computing cost equation.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonsnyder/2025/08/26/mit-find...
1. Automated code needs quality requirements specifications. Requirements specifications requires requirements analysis.
2. The human sweng's mental model is part of the product. If the "mental model" is in an AI and be beholden to it, and you can't do the same things with it, like take it for coffee and ask it about where the product / company should go next etc.
They're addressing a very important question, and one for which there is surprisingly little hard data. It's too soon to try to see a trend from low-quality data. Three years of this data might be meaningful.
McKinsey reports are the original slop
If you just mean “people who make software in any capacity”, it will probably grow (or has already grown) via product, marketing, etc folks making internal tools with AI (which may not work out, we’ll see).
Presuming we keep seeing LLM improvements, SWE will move up the stack like they did in the past. They used to work directly with hardware and software. Ops folks sprung up to do the hardware, and SWEs do basically all software using abstractions over hardware. This will be another step up where SWEs no longer work directly on software, but rather on the tooling that writes software which they hand over to marketing, HR, etc.
Again, presuming this all works out the way the AI folks plan.
It’s continuously updated, and postings are still on the rise as of last week, so your criticism doesn’t make much sense.
The year is 2026. The unemployment rate just printed 4.28%, AI capex is 2% of GDP (650bn), AI adjacent commodities are up 65% since Jan-23 and approximately 2,800 data centers are planned for construction in the US. In spite of the current displacement narrative – job postings for software engineers are rising rapidly, up 11% YoY. ... We wrote last week that we see the near-term dynamics around the AI capex story as inflationary, but given markets are focused on the forward narrative, we outline a more constructive take on the end state below. Before that, however, it’s worth reflecting that the imminent disintermediation narrative rests on the speed of diffusion.
The chart "Job Postings For Software Engineers Are Rapidly Rising" seems to show a rise from 65 to 71 for "Indeed job postings" from October 2025 to March 2025. That's a 9% increase. Then they inflate that by extrapolating it to a year. The graph exaggerates the change by depressing the zero line to way off the bottom and expanding the scale. This could just be noise.
The chart "Adoption Rate of Generative AI at Work and Home versus the Rate for Other Technologies" has one (1) data point for Generative AI.
This article bashes some iffy numbers into supporting their narrative.
Suggested reading: [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics