There's a much more reasonable explanation here.. tech jobs had the most wage growth during COVID and this was a pullback. The time frame they used (2022-2024) was also pre-coding agents, where GPT-3.5/GPT-4 were frontier models.
More concretely, companies do layoffs, visa workers have to find another job in 60 days. Companies like amazon try to scavenge and lowball the shit out of them. This is happening across the industry.
There's consolidation, acquisitions, and layoffs happening across industry. It's just a big game of musical chairs
We've seen this play out in history multiple times, already, so it's pretty ignorant to ignore the evidence.
Carpenters aren't being paid less because we have framing nailguns and pre-fabricated trusses. Instead their skillset had to evolve. In fact, smaller crews can do larger projects... which doesn't mean fire your crewmembers, it means a builder company can take on more projects in parallel, leading to bigger profits through volume.
"AI"s are useful tools. The skills in a post-AI world are different. Lower wages will be experienced by people that can't evolve, that's all.
I so wish that would happen so we can all find a more sustainable middle ground, but the trillion or so dumped into it says otherwise.
Eventually AI will be able to just bootstrap solid security, payment, accounts, DB management, backups, customer support services that automatically link to the correct department or sub-system
I think the environment and landscape will change and different skills will be more valuable for developers
But I think the existing skill-sets developers use can mostly be automated away
If you were really good at your job as a contract software engineer in the past, you would basically just automate yourself out of a job and have to find a new one anyway. This just accelerates it.
You are describing a templating system. It's useful to create projects from scratch, but that's not what software engineers do 99% of the time.
What software engineers do 99% of the time is modifying existing services to adapt to changing requirements that more often than not are grossly unspecified.
Also, a key part of a software engineer's work is serve as a point of contact with non software engineers to discuss what services do and plan work.
> If you were really good at your job as a contract software engineer in the past, you would basically just automate yourself out of a job and have to find a new one anyway. This just accelerates it.
I don't think this assumption holds water. At most your efficiency improved as short contracts to patch random customer projects now can meet the definition of done (maintenance be damned) in shorter iterations.
However, ironically we are also seeing the occurrence of consultancy firms specialized in providing software engineering services as contract engineers that are explicitly marketed as solutions to problems introduced by vibe-coding.