Drops in total and remote jobs on HN "Who is hiring?"

March Highlights

The Software Developer job industry is facing many changing dynamics, and the data from the "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" thread on Hacker News is a great way to track the changes. From the overall drop in job postings, the return of work to the office, to the rise in AI technogies poised to cause disruption to the way we work.

Total Job Postings Trends

First, there is the total number of job postings, at the lowest levels in years. For March, there are 440 (as of this writing) top level comments on the thread, which represent individual job postings. This is up a bit from last month's count of 394, but prior to Feburary, there wasn't a month with less than 480 postings since December, 2015. This analysis was also confirmed/cited earlier this week over at The Pragmatic Engineer.

For March, total postings are down 49% year-over-year from March 2022. This trend has been going on for a few months now with consistent big YOY drops. The last time a month's postings approached their previous year's was in May, 2022.

Remote vs Onsite Job Postings

Now, in Spring of 2023, not only is the total software developer job market down, but remote job postings are also down to the lowest level seend since COVID-19 sent so many developers home 3 years ago. There was a peak of 76% of postings, now down to 64%. Fully Onsite jobs aren't quite back to pre-covid levels, which shows that many compaonies are trying out hybrid approaches.

Technologies are changing

Along with the number of jobs and where those jobs are performed, the technologies we see and use everyday are experiencing big waves. In 2021, we couldn't escape Web3 hype. Now, AI and ChatGPT have taken over our feeds. But, job data doesn't necessarily always reflect the hype.

AI

Here it begins, the first month of really focusing on where AI is in the job market. In March, Machine Learning is over 13% of postings and AI is mentioned in over 10%. Neither surpass their recent record highs, but this will be a trend to watch in the coming months.

Compare Machine Learning, AI, ChatGPT, and GPT-3

Web3

Web3, Blockchain, Bitcoin, and Ethereum are all still mentioned, but well off their highest levels.

Compare Web3, Blockchain, Bitcoin and Ethereum

Server-side Frameworks

Django and Rails are neck-and-neck in the number of job postings! Though Node.js is still the most popular server-side framework.

Compare node.js, Rails, PHP and Django

JavaScript Frameworks

Compare React, Angular, Vue, and Ember

SQL Databases

Compare Postgresql, MySQL and SQL Server

NoSQL Databases

Compare Mongodb, Elasticsearch, Cassandra and DynamoDB

APIs

Compare API, REST, GraphQL, and gRPC

Cloud Providers

Compare AWS, GCP and Azure

Specialization

Specialization trends are still steady.

Compare Full Stack, Frontend, and Backend

Engineering Levels

Engineering levels are pretty stable, with Senior being the most common, by far.

Compare Principal, Staff, Senior, and, Junior

Top 10 Programming Languages

Finally, some stability! Programming language rankings are more stable than much of the rest of the industry.

1. Python
2. TypeScript
3. Go
4. C++
5. Java
6. Rust
7. JavaScript
8. Ruby
9. C
10. C#

Compare Top 10 Programming Languages

Rankings and movers

• Top 20
• Rising
• Falling