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0 pointsElProlactin24d ago0 comments

> If you're worried about non-technical vibe coders taking your job, the correct response is to be much better at building software than those vibe coders. That means you need more skill, more ambition, and more experience. It's hard!

This is a false fear. The real risk isn't that some 19 year-old vibe coder is going to replace you, it's that there's simply less need for more experienced engineers. The market is shrinking.

Also, even if the premise behind the SaaSpocalypse is naive and oversimplified (companies aren't going to replace all their SaaSes with internally vibe-coded replacements), it looks reasonable that net-net AI will have a negative impact on the value of software.

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batshit_beaver24d ago· 3 in thread

> The real risk isn't that some 19 year-old vibe coder is going to replace you, it's that there's simply less need for more experienced engineers. The market is shrinking.

That last sentence is verifiably false if you look at SWE job postings and their recovery since 2022.

It’s also a poor take in general, buying very much into the narrative propagated primarily by OpenAI and, especially, Anthropic, who nonetheless continue to hire large numbers of SWEs while paying double the market rate.

ElProlactinOP24d ago

> That last sentence is verifiably false if you look at SWE job postings and their recovery since 2022.

Source?

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

And it's probably worse than it looks because phantom job postings are a real thing.

> ...who nonetheless continue to hire large numbers of SWEs while paying double the market rate.

Tech companies have laid off over 200,000 people since the beginning of 2025. Even putting aside the fact that (from what I understand) over half of Anthropic and OpenAI's employees are in non-engineering roles, if you assumed every employee was an engineer, Anthropic and OpenAI could triple their staffing levels and it still wouldn't even fill a quarter of the void.

batshit_beaver24d ago

Yes that’s the right source. There would be no recovery in SWE market after the higher interest rates killed it if LLMs had any major impact on SWE employability.

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wiseowise24d ago

> That last sentence is verifiably false if you look at SWE job postings and their recovery since 2022.

Do you take into account recent layoffs of Meta (8k people), Block (4k people) and others?

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