State of the Software Engineering Job Market in 2024

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Metadata

Author: Gergely Orosz
Full Title: State of the Software Engineering Job Market in 2024
URL: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-eng-market-2024?utm_campaign=post

Highlights

Even so, nothing beats high-quality data for insights. To get some, The Pragmatic Engineer and two companies whose bread-and-butter is tracking employment stats and jobs data, have collaborated, and both businesses were kind enough to create the resulting unique data sets and charts for this article. They are: (View Highlight)
It feels that 2023 was a bad year for software engineering due to unprecedented large layoffs. Zooming further out from 2000, what are the long-term job trends? Here’s the data: (View Highlight)
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2023 was, indeed, historic as the first year since Y2K when the number of software engineering jobs shrunk. Growth has resumed this year, but it’s at least possible that a long-term flattening of the growth curve is emerging. (View Highlight)
In the 4 years after the 2001 Dotcom Bust, the tech industry grew relatively slowly (View Highlight)
A decade of growth happened between 2011 and 2021 for combined reasons like the mobile and cloud revolutions, and massive VC investment during a zero interest rate period. Check out analysis of this in a deep dive on what 0% interest rates and their demise mean for tech (View Highlight)
The future does not mirror the past, of course, and right now there’s a cyclical slowdown in VC investment, coupled with huge AI investment. But elsewhere, there’s currently no similar triggers for growth like those of the smartphone and cloud revolutions from 2007, through the 2010s. (View Highlight)
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The good news is there’s been an uptick since the start of this year. The bad news is that the number of vacancies is still around half of what it was in 2022. This data matches a deep dive into global software engineering vacancies falling back to 2019 levels. (View Highlight)
If you’re looking for openings, here are the top 10 tech companies recruiting the most new software engineers: (View Highlight)
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Amazon is unsurprisingly on top since announcing its full return to the office, which caused massive churn and the need to backfill (View Highlight)
TikTok and ByteDance’s aggressive hiring with 6x as many roles as rival Meta, is a surprise. This company is the only Asian business in the list, and shows how much the China-headquartered firm is investing. This is especially interesting given there are calls for the app to be banned in the US, or for it to be forced into a sale. (View Highlight)
IBM hiring more than Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Meta, is also a major surprise, and suggests the 114-year-old computing giant is doing pretty well. (View Highlight)
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So many openings at Oracle in senior-and-above positions, is quite surprising. What explains this is that in the data set, “principal engineer” is considered a leadership position. However, at Oracle, the scope of a principal engineer resembles a senior engineer elsewhere in Big Tech. (View Highlight)
Oracle seems to be doing very well, business-wise. The company’s market cap is an impressive $483B at time of publishing, making it the #11 biggest publicly traded tech company, just below Tesla ($ 693B), and Tencent ( $508 B), an d ab o v e N e t f l i x ($ 325B) and Samsung ($285B). (View Highlight)
What’s behind this strong performance? Annual revenue climbed from $42 Bt o$ 52B in two years, it remains strongly profitable at $8 - 10 Bp erye a r, an df orec a s t s t o hi t$ 100B revenue by 2029. Remember, OpenAI is projecting that it will also hit $100 B re v e n u e in 2029- so m e t hin g I t hink [i s im p oss ib l e] (h ttp s : // n e w s l e tt er . p r a g ma t i ce n g in eer . co m / i /150360625/ o p e nai s - im p oss ib l e - b u s in ess - p ro j ec t i o n s) in t h e t im e f r am e, g i v e n t h eco m p an y i se x p ec t e d t o g e n er a t e “ o n l y ”$ 4B revenue in 2024. (View Highlight)
Is Oracle hiring so much to backfill for attrition? Based on the data, the answer is “no.” Far more people joined Oracle last year than left. (View Highlight)
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Meta, Amazon, Google and Microsoft all did large cuts between the end of 2022 and mid-2023, meaning that: • Amazon and Google have shrunk in the past two years • Microsoft is around the same size • Google has grown by around 7% • Apple is the only Big Tech company not to do layoffs, and grew in headcount by about 5% in that time • Apart from Meta, no Big Tech company has shown notable growth for 6 months (View Highlight)
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NVIDIA is benefitting hugely from the AI industry’s rocketing growth, and briefly became the world’s most valuable company. Tesla had impressive headcount growth until early 2024, after which the EV maker made job cuts. Workday growing by 25% in two years is a bit puzzling, and seems to suggest the HR SaaS suite is doing very well. Workday is doing fantastic financially: revenue grew last year from $6 Bt o$ 7B, and the profit (net income) went from slightly negative, to $1.3B. Headcount growth and positive financials suggest Workday is doing very well when few similar companies can say the same. Airbnb seems to have been on a hiring spree throughout 2022, and headcount has been flat since. (View Highlight)
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Twilio had several layoffs: 11% in September 2022, 17% in February 2023, and 5% in December 2023. Today, the headcount is 27% lower than two years ago. At the same time, it was one of the first to commit to full-remote work in a powerfully-worded statement two weeks ago. (View Highlight)
Spotify did deep job cuts from the middle of 2022, and more in late 2023, which reduced the workforce by around 25%. (View Highlight)
Shopify had a very deep cut early 2023, and has kept headcount flat since. Salesforce did layoffs in early 2023 and hasn’t been hiring since. DoorDash has done no mass layoffs and seems to be letting natural attrition of about 10% per year do its job by not backfilling. Check out a deep dive into typical attrition for software engineers. (View Highlight)
OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Mistral, are the hottest AI companies. They each raised billions in funding, are growing at what feels like exponential pace, and all could be “rocket ships” in terms of company and career trajectories. From which places do these leaders hire from? The data: (View Highlight)
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Google is the biggest source of all hires by these companies except for xAI, where more Tesla employees join. Elon Musk is CEO of Tesla and founder of xAI. (View Highlight)
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Intel and Qualcomm are popular sources of Big Tech hires. Both companies have high engineering bars. Intel is struggling business-wise, so it’s little surprise people are leaving. Qualcomm seems to be doing better; my sense is that higher compensation packages might be partly why some of its staff move to companies like Google and Apple. (View Highlight)
Where’s Meta? I assumed the social media giant would be a major source of hires for companies like Google, but it did not make the top 5 places from where Big Tech companies hire. This suggests Meta struggles to hire from other very large businesses. (View Highlight)
Amazon and Microsoft hire from each other a lot. The #1 company Amazon hires from is Microsoft, and vice-versa. A likely reason is that both are headquartered in Seattle, pay similar compensation, and their offices are in close proximity. (View Highlight)