Piousbox

Hello everyone and welcome back to this mini-series, where we explore the misinformation and falsehoods presented daily in the news.

I really wanted to talk about politics, but the article I had in mind, upon review, has very carefully presented the misdirection in such a way, that it was difficult to criticize. I'll get back to it, for now though - let's look at this article by Zero Hedge, which warns about "widespread layoffs and hiring freezes as economic headwinds and post-pandemic corrections hit the sector."

So, this is something I can actually analyze, and demonstrate that the statement in the infographic above, and the overall statement in the ZH article, is largely false.

First, the graphic starts at 2020, the pandemic. 5 years is very little time to conclude anything about any trends. I think software development has been growing steadily (although I don't have hard data to illustrate my opinion), but we'd be looking at trends over the last, say, 20 years. Whatever happened since the pandemic is largely a freak event. One global crazy freak event. 

Second. From personal experience, I'd say this ties into the USAID fiasco, where the US guvmt paid for social engineering, including on the job boards. If a company claims to be hiring, is a position actually available? Maybe not, as many people have voiced the idea that a lot of jobs (and applicants!) are shadow jobs - which is to say, fraudulent.

Many recruiters just collect personal data. I think once, there was a recruiting company that advertised heavily, in the Bay Area and maybe everywhere else. Some 15 years ago, I saw their postings regularly like clockwork, but they never interviewed me. 10 years later, after a 10 year intermission and long after I left the Bay Area, they began spamming me with interview offers and other annoying messages. I think what happened is that they collected candidate data for years, and then sold the database to someone else. The new owner of the personal contact info used that, mass-mailing and mass-soliciting everyone on the list. The point is, when the original company was collecting candidate PII info, they didn't actually have any jobs available.

Third. The way recruiters often work is, they approach an employer and say they'll deliver candidates, for free. If you as an employer hire someone, then the recruiter gets paid (something like 30% of one year's worth of the employee's salary). You can see the problem with that: employers will be "interviewing" even when they aren't really interested in hiring. It's free, so why not? And so maybe you see a lot of "positions" being "open", when in actuality there are none.

Also, and again to tie this all to USAID. Maybe it was in someone's interest (in the manner of social engineering) to make it look like there are plenty of remote jobs. Software engineering jobs are often remote, those jobs are prime candidates for being remote. Well, once USAID funding dries out, maybe all the shadow job postings disappeared (they were free, anyway - noone gets paid in the time-consuming and exhausing process of interviewing). 

So actual software engineering jobs may be climbing slightly and steadily - it's just that the illusion of the software engineering jobs has peaked, and burst as bubbles do.

Fourthly, about AI. The AI is stupid. AI development does not replace knowledgable programmers. Maybe programmers use AI to help themselves code, I don't know - but I do not think AI can program like people do. So I don't think real software jobs are at risk from AI. On the opposite - I think AI is interesting, and creates more programming jobs. Someone needs to code all that stuff, it doesn't code itself.

So, from what I can tell from inside the software industry, the above infograpic doesn't make sense, and is strictly speaking false.