Drops in total and remote jobs on HN Who is hiring? (March 2023)

March Highlights

Saturday, March 25, 2023

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.

March 2023 Hacker News Hiring Trends: Remote vs Onsite

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