Because I've been following the field since the early 1990s and have been in it since the mid 1990s, and have seen it act as a sine wave, although the amplitude can change.
The US was in a recession until March 1991, and this affected the IT job market. Even out to 1993 it was slow. It began picking up in 1994, more in 1995, more in 1996, until 1999 when it was hotter than I've ever seen it. Then the dot com crash happened in 2000, and things were worse for the next three years, especially in IT companies. Then things began picking up until the 2008 subprime crash which affected the whole economy.
As others have alluded to in the thread, for people just coming out of college in spring of 2011 - interest rates were 0.10%. This is historically unusual. IT companies and IT were in a go-go time for a number of years up until the end of 2022, not seen since the dot-com days.
IT companies were hiring and paying like crazy in 1999. It was much more difficult to get a good-paying, or even any, job at an IT company in the Bay Area in 2001. By 2007 things had picked up a little. Then at the end of 2009 things were dire all over the economy. Then by 2021 IT was booming again.
So will it be booming again in the future like it was in 1999 or 2021? History says it will. Will it again be in the dumps like it was in 2001, 2009 and to some extent now? History says it will.
I don't see any historic change from what happened in the past, although of course some computer languages are falling out of favor while others are coming into favor, and job roles are shifting around - yesterday was monolithic, today is microservers, yesterday was waterfall, today is agile and scrum etc. People have been programming since the 1950s, and the job market has seen its ups and downs since then. Nothing happened in the past year and a half that is off of that.
It's possible neural networks will change things in the coming years, but someone is going to have to program all those Python pytorch scripts and the like. I'm sure in the next year or two we will see amazing new things like Sora come out. We'll even see programmers using LLMs or whatever to generate little functions more. The notion that neural networks are going to wipe out programmers in the next year or two (or three, or four) is inane. I can barely get ChatGPT 4 to write some simple (WORKING) functions I want, never mind gather specifications, ask for clarifications on those specifications, design a proper architecture for the project with unit testing and so on. This will surely improve in the next few years, but not by much in the next few years at least.
