The US government Occupational Outlook Handbook indicates that the Job Outlook is "much faster than average" between 2024-34 at 15%, compared to the growth for all jobs at 3%. Software development jobs are growing at 5x the rate of typical jobs. This coincides with the anecdotal evidence of job growth that I hear Silicon Valley. The reality, backed up by statistics, is that there is strong demand for software developers. It is one of the fastest growing job areas in the US.
Unfortunately, the news seems to report on bleak outcomes. I understand that there are some layoffs, but the statistics show that there are more hires than layoffs by a wide margin. The numbers from the BLS indicate this. According to the BLS, software development is one of the strongest career paths a person can take.
I think the problem with perception is three-fold:
- Hiring for software developers is slower than the boom times during the COVID shutdown, but the growth is still faster than most professions. The COVID bubble was a job hiring anomaly. We can't use that as baseline reference.
- News media is competitive and the editors might be forced to portray bleak apocalyptic scenarios which get people worried and gets their attention. The data on layoffs is also easy to obtain from publicly traded companies and makes the story easy and quick to write compared to figuring out how many developers were hired, which is not as clearly disclosed.
- The BLS is showing average salary of $133K and the average is much higher in my neighborhood (Silicon Valley). maybe there is a certain thrill in believe that this category of somewhat well-off people are being hit by bad times
The BLS stats paint a more "realistic" view of the job market than the media.
Check out the link below and let me know what you think in comments.
Source:
Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Software Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts, and Testers,
at https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm (visited December 09, 2025).
While the US Bureau of Labor Statistics is the gold standard for accurate labor data, LinkedIn does have a cache of data based on analyzing millions of jobs started by LinkedIn members from January 1, 2023 to July 31, 2025 and published in their article, Jobs on the Rise 2026: Fastest Growing Roles in the US
As you would expect, 80% of the top 5 roles are software development jobs.
- Artificial intelligence engineers
- AI consultants & strategists
- New home sales specialists
- Data annotators
- AI/machine learning researchers
The only non-developer job is a new home sales specialists. I speculate that they are selling many homes to the people in the other 4 categories.
While I am sympathetic to the large numbers of people adversely impacted by changes to the economy, this focus on the loss of jobs hurts the young people in our nation who will build our future. The BLS projects 129,200 new openings for software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers each year over the next decade. This is a very robust pipeline new jobs. Additionally, computer science majors can also retrain fairly easily to data science, data analysis, and UX if they take free bootcamp courses on places like Coursera.
There are more jobs that a CS major is qualified for than there are CS graduates.
However, competition for the best jobs is tough. Candidates need to show what they can do and be able to explain it.
After working with a number of interns, my company created a free course to help students prepare for their internship search. The course currently has 100 lessons and is focused on Python.
In addition to people's perspective on the US job market for developers, I am also looking for feedback on the free course to prepare students to find internships.
Top comments (2)
Thanks for referencing the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers. That seems like a real source, with data coming in over time. Not just one company announcement.
I'm just seeing this today in Bloomberg: Meta confirms it is laying off Reality Labs staff and will “reinvest the savings” in wearables; CTO Andrew Bosworth says 1,000+ staff will be notified Tuesday.
Meta’s last reported headcount was 78,450 as of September 30, 2025. I can't tell if the 1,000 reported here is a net reduction or not.
It seems like I hear about Silicon Valley layoffs a lot. Is hiring being under-reported?
well, the NY Times article is indicating that "The company expects to invest tens of billions of dollars on data centers, the computing facilities that power A.I. development, and it has handed out lavish pay packages to hire top A.I. researchers."
I know that one of our interns got a job prepping servers for deploy. Someone has to build and setup the datacenters. It's likely a mix of construction and devops jobs, which computer scientists can be retrained for fairly easily if they're right out of college. For the AI researchers, that's likely to be computer scientists.
IMO, the Reality Labs products are not in that high demand due to positioning. So, maybe it's just a story of a product that is not succeeding and unrelated to any hiring trends?
Do you think the Reality Labs products will continue to grow rapidly?