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Time of India
5 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Software developer jobs shrink by over 70% in the US: Can new grads still break into tech?
The software development career path, long considered one of the most reliable gateways into the American workforce, is now facing a severe downturn. According to new data from Revelio Labs, a workforce intelligence company, job postings for software developers in the U.S. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now fell by over 70% between Quarter 1 in 2023 and Quarter 1 in 2025 — a decline more than twice as steep as the 35.8% drop in white-collar postings overall. For thousands of new graduates with degrees in computer science, coding bootcamp credentials, or tech-focused MBAs, this sharp contraction has made an already competitive market even more difficult to navigate. A tighter job market for tech talent The overall decline in white-collar job postings between Q1 2024 and Q1 2025 stands at 12.7%, according to Revelio Labs — slightly sharper than the 11.9% decline in blue-collar roles during the same period. However, for software developers, the pullback has been far more drastic, suggesting a sector-specific hiring freeze that goes beyond the broader market slowdown. Other white-collar roles in tech and business functions have experienced similar declines. Job postings for Business Analysts, Market Researchers, and Delivery Managers have also fallen at nearly double the overall white-collar average, indicating a broader retraction in mid-level corporate hiring for analytical and project-based roles. Wage growth stalls for new hires Compounding the issue for job seekers, the salaries offered in white-collar tech job postings have remained flat since mid-2024, according to Revelio Labs' analysis. This stagnation contrasts sharply with the continued rise in blue-collar wages, which have steadily increased over the same period. The wage freeze has been most acute at the entry level, where employers appear less willing to compete aggressively for new graduates or early-career professionals. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now While mid-to-senior roles have seen modest salary stability, job postings for executive positions continue to show upward salary trends — highlighting a growing pay divide within the white-collar workforce. What this means for new grads Tech graduates entering the job market this year are facing a much different reality than their counterparts just two years ago. The decline in developer roles — combined with the stagnation of pay and a redistribution of jobs away from traditional tech hubs — suggests that new entrants must now work harder and smarter to break into the industry. Success may depend on the ability to: Diversify skillsets beyond traditional software development Gain certifications in high-demand areas like cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, and AI Be flexible with location, salary expectations, and contract-based or freelance work While the overall volume of white-collar tech job postings is down, some specialized tech areas continue to see resilience, including DevOps, machine learning, and enterprise security. Graduates who target these niches, and demonstrate a willingness to learn and adapt quickly, may still find opportunity in an otherwise cooling market. A tech reset, not a collapse The numbers from Revelio Labs report point to a significant reshaping of the white-collar and tech job landscape, but not an outright collapse. Rather than a death knell for software careers, the data likely marks a correction from years of aggressive hiring, followed by post-pandemic recalibration and economic caution. For new grads, the message is clear: the road into tech is now more competitive and less predictable, but it remains open — especially for those who are willing to shift with the market, sharpen their focus, and pursue the evolving roles where demand still exists.
Business Insider
5 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
See the white-collar jobs where open positions are dwindling — and where they're growing
Jobs are scarce and wages are stagnant for white-collar workers compared to the boom of a few years ago. White-collar job postings nationwide are shrinking faster than their blue-collar equivalents, Revelio Labs, a workforce intelligence company, found. Those postings fell 12.7% compared to blue-collar's 11.6% between Q1 2024 and Q1 2025. Office workers are seeing fewer open roles for titles like information specialists, sales representatives, and business analysts. These business and IT roles are seeing the largest decline as the labor market grapples with slowing job growth. Several white-collar roles were on Revelio's list of occupations that had the biggest declines in openings between Q2 2023 and Q2 2025. Additionally, some other white-collar roles with plummeting job postings included software developers, IT project managers, and market researchers. Wages grew until mid-2024 for office workers before plateauing for the past year for office workers, Revelio found. Blue-collar wage growth continued to steadily increase. These workers, however, still make less than white-collar workers on average, Revelio found. But, it's not all doom and gloom for office workers, as some jobs are growing in comparison to the past two years. Account managers and recruiters are seeing the highest job posting growth in the past two years. Tech jobs have been especially tough for people just entering the workforce. Gen Zers hoping to break into the industry are watching the biggest tech companies lay off workers and hear constant chatter about AI replacing many of their hard-earned coding skills. "The adoption of Generative AI also appears to be a factor. This is a bit nuanced," said Zanele Munyikwa, an economist at Revelio Labs and author of the research. "Our own research shows that on a task-by-task basis, sales roles are actually less exposed to AI than professions like finance or engineering. However, it's possible the impact on hiring is so pronounced because AI is targeting the high-volume, top-of-the-funnel activities performed by junior reps, allowing companies to hit their targets with smaller teams." AI doesn't just loom over tech, as many entry-level white-collar jobs could be in the crosshairs of AI. AI leaders say jobs will change, and many will become obsolete. Companies are slimming down their workforces, especially middle managers. Top executives are the biggest winners in the data. The salary gap between mid-senior management positions and C-suite leadership is growing as execs saw a 26.8% salary raise since 2023's first quarter. With the older workforce eyeing retirement, blue-collar workers have been in demand for years. The blue-collar labor force often retires earlier than their peers in less physically demanding roles. This creates an employment gap as retirees are outpacing the Gen Zers and millennials securing these jobs. Some people are switching careers entirely, seeking more stability in the blue-collar labor market. More high-school graduates are shifting from obtaining a degree to entering a trade as they weigh the cost of college against its return on investment. Whether it be fears of AI, decreased job stability, or less bargaining power for workers in office roles, the blue-collar job boom is working for some.
Forbes
12-06-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Entry Level Jobs Still Exist But The Skills To Get Them Have Changed
A recent graduate holds a "Hire Me" sign, highlighting the challenges many face entering the ... More workforce as entry-level jobs shift in the age of AI. What if entry level jobs aren't disappearing? What if we're just not preparing students for what those jobs now require? We told an entire generation the future was theirs if they just learned to code. We redesigned high schools around robotics labs. Gutted liberal arts departments. Laughed at philosophy majors. We promised that mastering logic, math, and engineering would lead to safe, well-paying jobs. Now AI is writing the code. And the jobs we built the system around? They're the first to go. The uncomfortable truth is this: we spent decades preparing young people to act like machines—just in time for the machines to take their place. But maybe the problem isn't that the first rung of the career ladder has disappeared. Maybe it's that it moved—and we're still looking in the wrong place. Entry-level roles once designed to train analysts, marketers, developers, and support staff are no longer the default path in. Employers are using AI to do that work faster, cheaper, and without the ramp-up time. And the people left standing aren't the ones with the freshest degrees or the most technical certifications. They're the ones with judgment. Experience. Context. Humanity. According to the latest JOLTS data, the U.S. hiring rate has fallen to its lowest point in over seven years. Zoom in on early-career roles and the drop is sharper: new postings for white-collar entry-level jobs fell 12.7% over the past year, according to Revelio Labs. Business analyst and software development roles dropped closer to 25%. And the trend is accelerating. Dario Amodei, CEO of AI company Anthropic, recently warned we're 'sleepwalking into mass unemployment,' predicting that AI could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level knowledge work within five years. These aren't factory jobs. These are the junior roles in finance, tech, media, law—the very ones we've told young people to chase. But this isn't the beginning of a collapse. It's the beginning of a correction. One that reveals not just what's changing, but what's missing. AI doesn't replace much of what makes up experience. It doesn't navigate ambiguity, weigh ethical trade-offs, or read the room in a tense client meeting. It doesn't know when to speak up, when to hold back, or how to build trust across a team that doesn't report to you. These are the skills that used to be learned on the job—through years of context, exposure, and failure. But if AI is absorbing the roles that once taught them, then we're left with a clear mandate: we need to teach earlier the things we used to expect time and tenure to deliver. While AI automates technical skills faster than we can redesign the next curriculum, it still can't connect, interpret, imagine, or lead with moral clarity. In an AI-powered world, it's no longer the person with the best answer who wins—it's the one who can ask the best question, see the bigger picture, and lead others through uncertainty. But we haven't been training for that. In the U.S., the share of humanities degrees has dropped from over 17% in the late 1960s to just 8.8% by 2022. Since 2000, the share of bachelor's degrees in English, history, and foreign languages has been cut nearly in half. Philosophy majors, once at 0.6%, now make up only 0.4% of all degrees awarded. This was framed as progress. As pragmatic. Now we're discovering it was shortsighted. The skills most needed today aren't 'soft.' They're foundational. Empathy. Storytelling. Negotiation. Ethics. Cultural fluency. Pattern recognition across complex systems. Creative thinking in undefined contexts. These aren't cultivated in code academies or spreadsheets. They're shaped in the very disciplines we've systematically deprioritized: literature, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, history, political science. Not as nostalgia—but as strategy. Because in a world where AI can answer almost anything, the real value lies in knowing what to ask, how to frame it, and why it matters. If we want to prepare young people for a world where machines can do the tasks but not the thinking, we need to rebuild the foundation. That means bringing the humanities back—not as electives, but as core career infrastructure. It means rethinking how we measure talent, valuing perspective, presence, and adaptability alongside performance. And it means rebalancing—not replacing—STEM with ethics, systems thinking, and human insight. This isn't about going backward. It's about finally catching up to the world we're already living in. We optimized a generation for technical efficiency—just as AI made technical skills abundant. Now we need to optimize for something else: being deeply, unmistakably human. Because when the machines take the data, the value will live in the mind that sees meaning—and the heart that knows why it matters.
Business Insider
03-06-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Sam Altman said AI agents are acting like junior colleagues — and he's betting that AI could soon 'discover new knowledge'
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is betting that AI could soon help "discover new knowledge" and said it is already beginning to act like your junior-level coworkers. "You hear people that talk about their job now is to assign work to a bunch of agents, look at the quality, figure out how it fits together, give feedback, and it sounds a lot like how they work with a team of still relatively junior employees," Altman said of AI agents on Monday during the Snowflake Summit 2025, in a conversation with Snowflake Computing CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy. "I would bet next year that in some limited cases, at least in some small ways, we start to see agents that can help us discover new knowledge, or can figure out solutions to business problems that are kind of very non-trivial," Altman added. The keynote conversation at Snowflake Summit — which explored how organizations can drive immediate impact with the power of AI — comes as new data show that AI is already replacing human workers. Zanele Munyikwa, an economist at Revelio Labs, spoke to Business Insider's Aki Ito about her analysis of online job postings and the impact of AI since ChatGPT's release at the end of 2022. As Ito wrote, "She found that over the past three years, the share of AI-doable tasks in online job postings has declined by 19%." In roles Munyikwa pinpointed as more vulnerable to AI, such as database administrators and IT specialists, the hiring downturn has been as steep as 31%. Over the past quarter, Shopify said that its managers need to explain why a job couldn't be handled by AI before asking for new hires, and Duolingo, the language learning app, said it would replace contract workers with AI. In February, OpenAI launched GPT-4.5, which Altman called "the first model that feels like talking to a thoughtful person." He also described the model as "giant" and "expensive." The rollout is limited to Pro subscribers until the shortage of GPUs is solved. OpenAI also recently launched Codex, a new AI agent aimed at streamlining coding tasks for developers by writing code, fixing bugs, and running tests. Altman said it was already in use by OpenAI's own engineers. Unlike traditional chatbots, the multitasking AI agent can also interact with external software to complete tasks like making a dinner reservation.
Yahoo
02-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
New data confirms it: AI is taking human jobs
In March, Shopify's CEO told his managers he was implementing a new rule: Before asking for more head count, they had to prove that AI couldn't do the job as well as a human would. A few weeks later, Duolingo's CEO announced a similar decree and went even further — saying the company would gradually phase out contractors and replace them with AI. The announcements matched what I've been hearing in my own conversations with employers: Because of AI, they are hiring less than before. When I first started reporting on ChatGPT's impact on the labor market, I thought it would take many years for AI to meaningfully reshape the job landscape. But in recent months, I've found myself wondering if the AI revolution has already arrived. To answer that question, I asked Revelio Labs, an analytics provider that aggregates huge reams of workforce data from across the internet, to see if it could tell which jobs are already being replaced by AI. Not in some hypothetical future, but right now — today. Zanele Munyikwa, an economist at Revelio Labs, started by looking at the job descriptions in online postings and identifying the listed responsibilities that AI can already perform or augment. She found that over the past three years, the share of AI-doable tasks in online job postings has declined by 19%. After further analysis, she reached a startling conclusion: The vast majority of the drop took place because companies are hiring fewer people in roles that AI can do. Next, Munyikwa segmented all the occupations into three buckets: those with a lot of AI-doable tasks (high-exposure roles), those with relatively few AI-doable tasks (low-exposure roles), and those in between. Since OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, she found, there has been a decline in job openings across the board. But the hiring downturn has been steeper for high-exposure roles (31%) than for low-exposure roles (25%). In short, jobs that AI can perform are disappearing from job boards faster than those that AI can't handle. Which jobs have the most exposure to AI? Those that handle a lot of tech functions: database administrators, IT specialists, information security, and data engineers. The jobs with the lowest exposure to AI, by contrast, are in-person roles like restaurant managers, foremen, and mechanics. This isn't the first analysis to show the early impact of AI on the labor market. In 2023, a group of researchers at Washington University and New York University homed in on a set of professionals who are particularly vulnerable: freelancers in writing-related occupations. After the introduction of ChatGPT, the number of jobs in those fields dropped by 2% on the freelancing platform Upwork — and monthly earnings declined by 5.2%. "In the short term," the researchers wrote, "generative AI reduces overall demand for knowledge workers of all types." At Revelio Labs, Munyikwa is careful about expanding on the implications of her own findings. It's unclear, she says, if AI in its current iteration is actually capable of doing all the white-collar work that employers think it can. It could be that CEOs at companies like Shopify and Duolingo will wake up one day and discover that hiring less for AI-exposed roles was a bad move. Will it affect the quality of the work or the creativity of employees — and, ultimately, the bottom line? The answer will determine how enduring the AI hiring standstill will prove to be in the years ahead. Some companies already appear to be doing an about-face on their AI optimism. Last year, the fintech company Klarna boasted that its investment in artificial intelligence had enabled it to put a freeze on human hiring. An AI assistant, it reported, was doing "the equivalent work of 700 full-time agents." But in recent months, Klarna has changed its tune. It has started hiring human agents again, acknowledging that its AI-driven cost-cutting push led to "lower quality." "It's so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will always be a human," CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg. "Really investing in the quality of the human support is the way of the future for us." Will there be more chastened Siemiatkowskis in the months and years ahead? I'm not betting on it. All across tech, chief executives share an almost religious fervor to have fewer employees around — employees who complain and get demotivated and need breaks in all the ways AI doesn't. At the same time, the AI tools at our disposal are getting better and better every month, enabling companies to shed employees. As long as that's the case, I'm not sure white-collar occupations face an optimistic future. Even Siemiatkowski still says he expects to reduce his workforce by another 500 through attrition in the coming year. And when Klarna's technology improves enough, he predicts, he'll be able to downsize at an even faster pace. Asked when that point will come, he replied: "I think it's very likely within 12 months." Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider. Read the original article on Business Insider
