> If you think I'm wrong, can you please help me not be anxious?
You are not wrong, but I think that there are other reasons behind the slump in software development jobs which are
1. How expensive it is to hire a software developer in EU and the US when compared to the other parts of the world. The cost of maintaining a software engineering team now bites into a company's budget more than previous years because of section 174 in the US. Earlier, companies with potential could seek investors in case they need capital to grow, but most investors are picky about where they invest in because of points 2, 3 and 4.
2. High interest rates.
3. 2024 is considered to be a geopolitically volatile year, due to the ongoing global conflicts as well the elections that are going to happen across multiple countries (REF: https://www.statista.com/chart/31604/countries-where-a-natio...). When governments change there are going to be changes in focus of the entire economy, for example, it's quite hard to guess the stance of a Republican led USA on the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
4. The fear of more regional conflicts breaking out around the world. This might spook a lot more countries into investing more into defensive technologies and in fact, one of the startup ideas of 2024 from YC was for defense technologies.
5. Nvidia is a company that started out as a GPU manufacturer and is currently riding a very huge wave of speculation around the future capabilities of "AI". And to investors with money, it seems safer to invest in it.
> What advice would you give to junior or mid-level software engineers, or college grads trying to break into the industry right now, who have been failing completely at getting a foot in the door in the last 12 months, when they would have been considered good hires just two or three years before?
I also only have similar experience as you have right now (~9 years) so I cannot give any specific advice on this. I would recommend applying to all jobs that even remotely fit their profile and in the meantime to attend conferences or meetups so as to network better. 90% of the time the resumes that is sent is being screened by a Recruiter or by an automated system. However if you already have someone inside a company willing to refer you, you will have an easier time getting to skip this filter.
Thanks -- Really appreciate your thoughtful and kind response! Yes, I see there are a lot of other factors to consider. Will keep networking and interviewing until something lands.
Will also focus my unemployment energy on deepening my software infrastructure and MLOps knowledge, building open source side projects using generative AI tools, using LangChain / GPT / Pinecone / Ollama, focused on practical business purposes like parsing customer service data and fintech anomaly detection. Whatever I can do in a short time to provide more value than GPT4 / GPT5, I guess I'll try my best to work on it with the fear of the abyss...
A part of me still thinks it might be time to pivot to healthcare. I'm no greybeard or "10x Engineer", just a regular old React/Node (formerly Ruby On Rails, PHP) developer doing the CRUD thing, and yeah, I'm not sure I quite make the cut.
All the best of luck to you! And thanks for writing an encouraging response.
You are not wrong, but I think that there are other reasons behind the slump in software development jobs which are
1. How expensive it is to hire a software developer in EU and the US when compared to the other parts of the world. The cost of maintaining a software engineering team now bites into a company's budget more than previous years because of section 174 in the US. Earlier, companies with potential could seek investors in case they need capital to grow, but most investors are picky about where they invest in because of points 2, 3 and 4.
2. High interest rates.
3. 2024 is considered to be a geopolitically volatile year, due to the ongoing global conflicts as well the elections that are going to happen across multiple countries (REF: https://www.statista.com/chart/31604/countries-where-a-natio...). When governments change there are going to be changes in focus of the entire economy, for example, it's quite hard to guess the stance of a Republican led USA on the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
4. The fear of more regional conflicts breaking out around the world. This might spook a lot more countries into investing more into defensive technologies and in fact, one of the startup ideas of 2024 from YC was for defense technologies.
5. Nvidia is a company that started out as a GPU manufacturer and is currently riding a very huge wave of speculation around the future capabilities of "AI". And to investors with money, it seems safer to invest in it.
> What advice would you give to junior or mid-level software engineers, or college grads trying to break into the industry right now, who have been failing completely at getting a foot in the door in the last 12 months, when they would have been considered good hires just two or three years before?
I also only have similar experience as you have right now (~9 years) so I cannot give any specific advice on this. I would recommend applying to all jobs that even remotely fit their profile and in the meantime to attend conferences or meetups so as to network better. 90% of the time the resumes that is sent is being screened by a Recruiter or by an automated system. However if you already have someone inside a company willing to refer you, you will have an easier time getting to skip this filter.