u/SignificanceBulky162

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ces6054150001

I see a lot of narratives being pushed on this subreddit ("Tech is doomed!" "Tech is not doomed, AI companies are spreading doomerism for their IPO" "doomers are just trying to reduce competition!" "Claude is going to fuck us all in the ass", "Tech is now armageddon and noone should even try to get in anymore" etc.)

A lot of the data being quoted is also really bad. There's that infamous chart from FRED of Indeed SWE job postings, but who even uses Indeed, and who even thinks a job posting is necessarily real?

So I think an actual data source can finally solve this debate. I found this time series on FRED which is the most comprehensive and seems the best in terms of quality. According to its definition of "computer systems design and related services," (which seems relatively consistent over time), there are currently about 2.368 million people employed as software developers in the US (other definitions online give anywhere from 1-4.4 million, so treat this more as an indexed baseline).

From the data, several distinct periods can be identified:

Following the early 1990s recession and during the Clinton admin. economic and internet boom, tech employment increased exponentially at a 12% annual rate, peaking at 1.358 million in March 2001. It then collapsed in the dot-com bubble, up to an 18% downturn at its worst, and only recovered to the same level 6 years later, on March 2007. However, the market returned to growth in under 3 years.

The 2008 global financial crisis actually had only a limited impact on tech employment, since tech continued to boom during this time. From June 2009 to the pandemic in February 2020, tech employment increased in a remarkably stable and rapid linear growth pattern of around 80k per year.

The disruption caused by the pandemic was incredibly brief. It caused a net change of -70k, but by June 2020, hiring restarted at the fastest pace in history, around 130k per year. Having been a high schooler in this period, I definitely remember how insane the hype was around tech.

Hiring finally began to plateau beginning in May 2022. Total employment peaked at 2.483 million in March 2023. Ever since then, it has changed at a net rate of -42k a year.

The current slump is characterized by being less severe compared to the massive displacement of the dot-com bubble, which was much worse in percentage terms.

However, the current slump is also very protracted. This is the longest contiguous period of declining tech employment in the 36 years of data. That probably explains why this slump feels worse than anything in history. Even if it is not as intense as the dot-com bubble was, it is already longer, and it also followed the most rapid period of hiring in the history of tech.

It seems obvious that 2021-2022 overhiring has contributed to a disproportionately large glut of CS majors who had been expecting that 130k/yr employment growth rate when the market has actually suddenly shifted to -42k/yr, a gap in expectations of 172k.

This can be seen by the recent shifts in CS major enrollment. We can see enrollment as a rough 3-4 year lagging indicator for the sentiment of the *candidate* pool (since the data I have only tracks the employee pool, not how many people are applying for those positions). It started to drop rapidly this year.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/04/13/computer-science-major-ai/.

Tldr: current tech slump is real and is worse than 2008, but that's mostly because 2008 barely affected tech. Dot-com bubble was much worse but shorter. Overhiring increased competition in the last few years.

Handshake? LinkedIn? Company site? Other sites?

As I'm sure you all know, the return offer rates for qt/qr type internships are typically 50% or lower. I think JS typically has 40% or 35% or lower. And then for a lot of companies, maybe 50% of the new employees are gone within 1-2 years.

Where do these people go? Other, less selective quant companies? Big tech? AI labs? Grad school? Is it typically much easier for them, or more difficult?

As I'm sure you all know, the return offer rates for qt/qr type internships are typically 50% or lower. I think JS typically has 40% or 35% or lower. And then for a lot of companies, maybe 50% of the new employees are gone within 1-2 years.

Where do these people go? Other, less selective quant companies? Big tech? AI labs? Grad school? Is it typically much easier for them, or more difficult?

Edit: ofc, don't mean to suggest these people are "failures" overall in any sense, just that they didn't make it in that particular stage of a highly competitive process

I am a current student in CS: I always genuinely enjoyed problem solving, I did competitive programming contests and leetcode. I also like the experiences I had from internships and SWE work, I had a romanticized notion of talented engineers working together on hard problems, building stuff used by millions of people. Obviously, that was never really truly the case, even in the past, but at least it had a hint of truth from the experiences I had.

Now, it seems like everyone is just a glorified code reviewer? The nature of the work is quite different, almost orthogonal to what it was just a few years ago. And it seems like most people are on edge, afraid of layoffs and being replaced. It feels like there was a brief golden age for tech of massive salaries, upwards mobility, abundant jobs, and interesting work, and now we are coming back to the real world.

Sorry if this is yet another doompost (I just sorted by new and wow, this sub is bleak), I just couldn't shake this feeling. The reason I wrote this post is because I started working on a new personal project and suddenly all my old passion came back, and I realized just how lacking the real work done in industry has become lately.