(2024-03-22) Bjarnason The One About The Web Developer Job Market

Baldur Bjarnason: The one about the web developer job market. The software developer job market today looks at least as bad as it did in the aftermath of the dot-com collapse. This is not a one-off event but has turned into a stock market driven movement towards reducing the overall headcount of the tech industry.

This is despite the arrival of a boom in funding due to the generative model (GenAI) bubble. “AI” is ostensibly here to turn the tech industry around.

when the bubble ends, as all bubbles must, the job market is likely to collapse even further.

The reasons for the disconnect between the tech industry’s overall prospects and the job market seem twofold:

• 1. The stock market loves job cuts
• 2. Activist investors see it as an opportunity to lower developer compensation
• 3. Management believes they can replace most of these employees with LLM-based automation

The fact that pretty much everybody quoted to say that programmers will be replaced with LLMs is either a CEO or CTO is important. These are the people deciding to do lay-offs.

Whether it’s actually true or not doesn’t change that this is part of what’s driving the decision to cut jobs en masse.

Not every CEO is predicting the end of programming as a profession. GitHub’s CEO instead thinks that programmers will be the primary beneficiaries of the introduction and improvement of LLM tools for coding

The positive case for LLMs is to claim that they will remove the drudge work of coding.

if you believe in the best-case prediction, a 20-40% improvement in long term productivity sounds reasonable, if a bit conservative.

This world-view assumes that the purpose of software development is the productive creation of successful, defect-free, software projects. LLMs would increase productivity.

**The alternate world-view, one that I think is much more common among modern management, is that the purpose of software development is churn. Faster feature development to drive sales to customers who then are locked into your software

Presenting an image of an organisation that is working with the latest technology.
Responding quickly to the whims of investors and the stock market.
Bolstering a manager’s resume or status within the organisation.

The range of improvement people propose for LLM coding tools is vast.

Some of that difference is down to bias. My entire shtick is that the software industry as a whole is self-evidently dysfunctional because most software is either broken in some way or doesn’t even end up shipping to users (because it was too broken). It shouldn’t be surprising that somebody who thinks the industry is incapable of shipping a well-made software product is of the opinion that the industry is incapable of actually shipping a safe and functional LLM-based software product.

GitHub’s CEO, conversely, is in the business of selling said LLM-based software product. He’s clearly not likely to focus on the flaws of his product.

But much of it also comes down to perspective. The most dangerous flaws in LLM coding tools are sporadic.

Security issues in code contributions in general are hard to detect,

The same tool that enhances their productivity by 20-30% might also be outright harmful to a junior developer’s productivity, once you take the inevitable and eventual corrections and fixes into account.

It’s hard to gauge the harmful effects of LLMs on the field as a whole from the perspective of a single developer testing the tools directly.

But that’s not relevant to the argument in this piece. From the job market perspective, all that improved and safe LLM-based coding tools would mean is more job losses.

Because the effect LLMs have on the job market is down to manager world-view not the level or quality of the innovation.

If the technology is what’s promised, the churn world-view managers will just get more production, more churn, with even fewer developers. The job market for developers will decline

If I’m right, they will still use the tech to increase production, with fewer developers, because software quality and software project success isn’t what they’re looking for in software development. The job market for developers will decline.

technical innovations in programming generally don’t improve project or business outcomes.

The odds of a project’s success are dictated by user research, design, process, and strategy, not the individual technological innovations in programming.

Rapid-Application-Development tools, for example, didn’t shift outcomes in meaningful ways.

When management of a project is disconnected from business value all that technological innovation in software development will do is change the flavour of dysfunction.

web software quality, more than any other sector in software development, is disconnected from business outcomes. Most web projects shipped by businesses today are broken, but businesses rarely seem to care.

Most websites are buggy, inaccessible, and broken

It’s clear from even just a cursory look at the data presented by the authors of the posts I listed above that web project quality and functionality isn’t what matters to many organisations. Instead, what matters is being seen making projects that have a plausible semblance of functionality and technological progress because that’s what drives investment and stock prices

The disconnect between project quality and business success happens for a variety of reasons.

• High software margins (you still have a profit despite the dysfunction)
• Organisational tolerance for partial success
• Fresh codebase momentum leading to customer lock-in
• Managerial career chess
• Pure vanity theatrics

Web media: the eradication of an entire sector of employment

the core reason for the lay-offs is that much of web media is already in free-fall.

Subscriptions and native advertising aren’t coming close to making up for a 95% shortfall.

This would be bad on its own, if it weren’t for the fact that search engine traffic is declining as well. LLM-enabled spam sites are flooding the search engine results which drives down traffic to web media sites in general.

The scale of LLM-enabled spam production outstrips the ability of Bing or Google to counter it. Results filled with spam pages lower the traffic directed by search engines to web media. Lower traffic means less native advertising and subscription revenue, which were supposed to offset the 95% drop in programmed advertising.

But it gets even worse as every major search engine provider on the market is all-in on replacing regular keyword search with chatbots and LLM-generated summaries that don’t drive any traffic at all to their sources

Due to the existing dysfunctions in the web development scene, there are very few signals you can rely upon to easily filter job applicants. Experience in Node or React is not a reliable signifier of an ability to work on successful Node or React projects because most Node or React projects aren’t even close to being successful from a business perspective. This means that one of the risks we’re facing in the industry is information asymmetry in the web developer job market could turn it into a market for lemons.

We don’t know how much of this will be offset, if at all, by under-served demand for developers from other sectors that have previously found it hard to compete with the tech industry for talent.

I keep asking myself: what should I do?

the only recourse labour has is to unionise. Collective action limits the abuses of management

This does not help people like me, though. I’m a freelancer

Diversify your skills
Popular frameworks and languages are likely to be harder hit than others.

But the market for developer training in general has collapsed.

Why invest in job training if tech cos aren’t hiring you anyway? Why invest in training your staff if you’re planning on replacing them with LLM tools anyway?

Some of us could take the opportunity to make products

Bootstrapped entrepreneurship might begin to look like a promising alternative to many in the field.

The tech industry has “innovated” itself into a crisis, but because the executives aren’t the ones out looking for jobs, they see the innovations as a success.