One single factor is never the source of a problem. It can be both things causing this.

Technology changes too fast today to plan for a 30 year career doing the same thing in a constantly changing world. Anyone with the skillet should take this as a beacon and pivot, whether keeping the skills fresh and branching out into new ventures with them (i.e. spend some time thinking, get a few peers, make a new product or service to sell to others instead of being cheap labour for someone else's idea), or dropping the skills for another one that isn't likely to get pulled out from under your feet suddenly.

I think we'll need plumbers for a while still, and you can make over $100k/year never touching a shitty pipe.

Absolutely the case. I’m a motion designer and thank god I work on the partnship side of my business because that’s actually bringing in money, while the owned and operated businesses are failing. All of tech has just been under the knife the last 18 months and it’s exhausting. We’ve lost two people and no new hires because it’s not in the budget.

Very kind of you to offer! This could really help some people out

That's the funny thing. Common sense says things go back to a sense of normal. Executives lack common sense or foresight.

Its not even about the growth, publicly traded companies do layoffs because it makes the stock price go up.

You should be worried when small and midsized comapanies do layoffs that are not publicly traded

Although this surely does not completely explain the situation, I also have a feeling these sorts of hires surely account for a substantial number of layoffs.

Downturns happen. They don’t last forever. There is a lot of pressure from businesses to depress wages and get more work out of software engineers and IT and etc., since we’re one of the few classes of workers who actually get paid. But thinking that developers will be replaced by AI anytime soon is wishful thinking on the part of the bosses. 20 years ago it was how we’d all get replaced by dirt cheap engineers overseas. Well, I’m still waiting on that to happen. If the MBAs could clearly and unambiguously articulate exactly what needs to be implemented, then maybe it would work. But if they can’t do that when we’re all in a conference room together then they’re sure as shit not doing it over email with a 12 hour time difference.

Keep your head up and keep trying to get an entry level gig somewhere. It doesn’t have to be Google or some hotshot startup or even a tech company. Doing IT or websites for an insurance company is still good experience.

Coding skills are almost always valuable even if you're not coding directly. Depending on what you're good at/interested in, I'd recommend data analysis (everyone has data! Gotta look at it somehow), database management, engineering roles other than just software engineering, IT, etc. Might not pay exactly as well as a big coding job out the gate, but it'll certainly be interesting if you like coding.

Not if you unionize

Don't dispair. Deep and wide skillsets are always valuable. Continue to build your skills and specialize in areas that your peers don't.

Target your region too if you aren't fully remote. Different parts of the country have different trends for tech that is in demand. For instance, I work in IT, and the state that I am in for some reason is by and large Microsoft tech stacks, (no I'm not in Washington.) So .NET and C# devs are in high demand here, as are IT people who have experience scripting with Powershell and developing/administrating in Azure environments. But other areas will be more AWS or Google-centric, or even other stuff.

Identify the trends, figure out what people are looking for and what isn't being met as a need, then train in that.

I work as an “API Consultant” but I do a lot of coding and there’s room to move into an engineer role in the future. So there’s still stuff out there.

Exactly. I see an insane amount of job postings for my particular field in IT and people are changing jobs left and right in my circle. Which is also anecdotal, so there is that.

I also just got a new job jan 1st. Submitted applications for a few positions, got an interview with 1 and an offer. 40% salary increase. Meanwhile my company was talking about how they couldn't offer any raises because the job market was so bad right now lmao.

AI has very little effect on any software engineer's job

That doesn't make sense because salaries are a current expense, not a capital expense to be amortized. And why 5 years? The work a software engineer does may be outdated in a year or two. Only certain legacy applications are around for 5 years.

The amortization time period is supposed to match the usefulness of the item purchased. Basically, software engineers are an ongoing expense, not R&D.

Regular engineering is still ok. Most of us didn't get to WFH because we're building physical things, and that hasn't really changed.

As both a regular engineer (electric/computer) and software engineer... The amount of interest I got as a regular engineer never even came remotely close to the deluge of recruitment attempts I regularly got during the pandemic, but it remains consistent. Even now that it has diminished a bit, it's still far more.

This is part of the reason I'm primarily a software developer now because I got recruited and got a huge pay bump, a way better lifestyle, and far better perks.