This assumes that the companies' business growth is a function of the amount of code written, but that would not make much sense for a software company.
Many companies (including mine) are building our product with an engineering team 1/4 the size of what would have been required a few years ago. The whole idea is that we can build the machine to scale our business with far fewer workers.
Even in companies that are no longer growing I've always seen the roadmap only ever get larger (at that point you get desperate to try to catch back up, or expand into new markets, while also laying people off to cut costs).
Will we finally out-write the backlog of ideas to try and of feature requests? Or will the market get more fragmented as more smaller competitors can carve out different niches in different markets, each with more-complex offerings than they could've offered 5 years ago?
This is already happening. Fewer people are getting hired. Companies are quietly (sometimes not, like Block) letting people go. At a personal level all the leaders in my company are sounding the “catch up or you’ll be left behind” alarm. People are going to be let go at an accelerated pace in the future (1-3 years).
> We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022
It is absolutely likely. The hiring market for juniors is fucked atm.
(And if it is, what is the cause?)
Lots going on right now in the market, but IMO that retreat is the biggest one still.
Many companies were basically on a path of infinite hiring between ~2011 and ~2022 until the rapid COVID-era whiplash really drove home "maybe we've been overhiring" and caused the reaction and slowdown that many had been predicting annually since, oh, 2015.
There's a lot of perverse interests and incentives at play.
> We find no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022
Also dont forget theres only so many viable revenue-generating and cost-saving projects to take. And said above - overhiring in COVID.
