{"course":{"slug":"how-software-changed","title":"How Software Development Changed","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/how-software-changed","level":"intermediate","track":"work"},"lesson":{"slug":"roles-that-grew-and-shrank","title":"Where the work moved, and what is genuinely unknown","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/how-software-changed/roles-that-grew-and-shrank","position":68,"of":87,"minutes":9,"answer":"Work sold as transcription lost its price while work that decides what should exist and confirms it is right did not.","keyIdea":"Work sold as transcription lost its price while work that decides what should exist and confirms it is right did not, and the employment data from 2023 onward is too confounded by interest rates and post-2021 over-hiring to attribute the junior-hiring fall to any single cause."},"body":{"format":"markdown","text":"## Sort by what the work was actually selling\n\nThe useful question is not \"which job titles are safe\". It is: what was the customer paying for?\n\nIf the answer was largely **transcription** (converting a known, well-specified requirement into code of a common shape) the price fell hard. If the answer was **deciding what should exist, and confirming that what exists is right**, it did not.\n\nThat cut does not follow seniority or language. It runs through the middle of most job descriptions, which is why the effect feels uneven and why people in the same title report opposite experiences.\n\n## Where the price fell\n\nWork sold mostly as transcription: brochure sites from a template, small CRUD applications to a written spec, straightforward ports between languages, first-pass boilerplate, simple scripts for non-technical clients, routine glue between two documented APIs.\n\nFreelance marketplaces are where this shows first and fastest, because prices there move weekly rather than annually. Independent developers doing small well-specified jobs have reported rate pressure since 2023. Note what is happening mechanically: the client can now produce a mediocre version themselves for nothing, so your price competes with free rather than with the next freelancer.\n\nThe response that works is not being faster at transcription. It is selling the part that is still scarce: I will find out what you actually need, and I will make sure it is right, and I will still be here when it breaks.\n\n## Where the work expanded\n\nEverything downstream of writing: review capacity, testing and test infrastructure, release engineering, observability, incident response, security review, data engineering and the endless work of making data trustworthy, and anyone who can hold a domain model in their head and say what the system must never do.\n\nThe pattern is the one from module one, restated at the level of a career: value pooled at the constraint, and the constraint moved downstream. If you want to know where to go, find your organisation's longest queue and go there.\n\nA second, quieter expansion: **integration and operations for AI features themselves**: evaluation harnesses, cost control, fallback behaviour, prompt and context management, safety review. This is ordinary engineering with an unusual failure distribution, and there is more of it than there are people who have done it.\n\n## What is unknown, and why\n\nThe honest answer about total employment is that nobody knows, and the data cannot currently settle it.\n\nEntry-level technical hiring in the United States and Europe fell substantially from 2023 through 2025. That fall has at least three candidate causes running simultaneously: interest rates rose sharply, ending a decade of cheap money that funded speculative hiring; the industry had over-hired dramatically in 2021 and 2022 and was correcting; and assistants arrived. These are not separable with the data available. Any confident attribution to one cause is a position, not a finding, including the confident ones in either direction.\n\nThe two stories people tell are both under-evidenced:\n\n- **\"Demand rises because software gets cheaper.\"** This has happened before with other cost collapses. It is plausible. It is not a law, and it took years each time.\n- **\"The junior role disappears.\"** Also plausible. Also an extrapolation from two years of a confounded series, and it requires assuming the rung is never rebuilt.\n\nHold both loosely. The behaviour that pays under either is the same, which is convenient.\n\n## What to actually do about it\n\n**Move toward verification and decision.** Not as a title change, as where you spend your attention. Be the person who can say whether it is right.\n\n**Get a domain.** Payments, clinical records, logistics, tax, energy trading. The scarce combination is not two languages, it is one language plus knowing what a reconciliation break means. Domain knowledge lives in conversations and regulations, much of it unwritten, and that is exactly the material no corpus contains.\n\n**Stay close to the consequence.** Roles insulated from whether the software worked are the exposed ones. Roles where you are woken when it breaks are not.\n\n**Do not specialise in the thing that is currently easy.** If your work has been getting noticeably easier without you getting better, that is a signal, not a reward.\n\n## The access question\n\nOne good change: the capital requirement for learning this work fell close to zero. A usable assistant, a free editor, free hosting, free CI minutes and a free database are all available to somebody on a second-hand laptop with an intermittent connection, and open-weight models can be run locally on modest hardware when the connection fails.\n\nBe honest about what still gates, though. Reliable electricity and bandwidth are not universal. Most documentation and most hiring is in English. Time zones and payment rails decide who can take which contract. The barrier moved; it did not vanish, and claiming it did is a story told by people who never faced it."},"check":{"question":"Someone argues that the drop in junior technical hiring from 2023 proves assistants are replacing entry-level engineers. What is the strongest objection?","options":[{"text":"Hiring data lags by years, so the 2023 figures reflect decisions made before the tools were widely available.","correct":false,"tempting":"Overstates the lag; the deeper problem is that several causes are simultaneous, not that the timing is wrong."},{"text":"Rates rose and a 2021 over-hire was correcting at the same time; the causes are not separable.","correct":true},{"text":"Junior hiring has fallen in every previous downturn, so the pattern is normal and carries no information at all.","correct":false,"tempting":"Dismisses the observation entirely, which is as unfounded as the claim it answers."},{"text":"Assistants are used mostly by senior engineers, so any effect would appear in senior hiring first.","correct":false,"tempting":"An assumption about usage that does not address the attribution problem in the data."}]},"prev":{"slug":"what-a-portfolio-proves-now","title":"What a repository proves, and what it stopped proving","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/how-software-changed/what-a-portfolio-proves-now"},"next":{"slug":"packages-that-do-not-exist","title":"The package that did not exist until an attacker made it","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/how-software-changed/packages-that-do-not-exist"},"authorship":"Founder and series editor: Dr Mustafa Mun. Written by AI models to a written standard. Exam keys checked blind by a second model: 3,665 of 3,666 agreed. Academic review invited.","review":{"status":"Draft, open for academic review"},"cite":"Addaly (2026) 'Where the work moved, and what is genuinely unknown', in How Software Development Changed. Edited by M. Mun. Addaly. Available at: https://addaly.com/learn/how-software-changed/roles-that-grew-and-shrank (Accessed: 13 October 2026).","licence":{"name":"CC BY-NC-SA 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"},"reader":{"schema":1,"title":"Where the work moved, and what is genuinely unknown","courseTitle":"How Software Development Changed","module":{"index":7,"slug":"skill-and-the-missing-rung","title":"Skill, hiring and the missing rung"},"answer":null,"keyIdea":"Work sold as transcription lost its price while work that decides what should exist and confirms it is right did not, and the employment data from 2023 onward is too confounded by interest rates and post-2021 over-hiring to attribute the junior-hiring fall to any single cause.","hero":{"kind":"plate","image":null,"alt":null,"caption":null},"blocks":[{"t":"h2","id":"sort-by-what-the-work-was-actually-selling","runs":[{"text":"Sort by what the work was actually selling"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The useful question is not “which job titles are safe”. It is: what was the customer paying for?"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"If the answer was largely "},{"text":"transcription","b":true},{"text":" (converting a known, well-specified requirement into code of a common shape) the price fell hard. If the answer was "},{"text":"deciding what should exist, and confirming that what exists is right","b":true},{"text":", it did not."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"That cut does not follow seniority or language. It runs through the middle of most job descriptions, which is why the effect feels uneven and why people in the same title report opposite experiences."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"where-the-price-fell","runs":[{"text":"Where the price fell"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Work sold mostly as transcription: brochure sites from a template, small CRUD applications to a written spec, straightforward ports between languages, first-pass boilerplate, simple scripts for non-technical clients, routine glue between two documented APIs."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Freelance marketplaces are where this shows first and fastest, because prices there move weekly rather than annually. Independent developers doing small well-specified jobs have reported rate pressure since 2023. Note what is happening mechanically: the client can now produce a mediocre version themselves for nothing, so your price competes with free rather than with the next freelancer."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The response that works is not being faster at transcription. It is selling the part that is still scarce: I will find out what you actually need, and I will make sure it is right, and I will still be here when it breaks."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"where-the-work-expanded","runs":[{"text":"Where the work expanded"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Everything downstream of writing: review capacity, testing and test infrastructure, release engineering, observability, incident response, security review, data engineering and the endless work of making data trustworthy, and anyone who can hold a domain model in their head and say what the system must never do."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The pattern is the one from module one, restated at the level of a career: value pooled at the constraint, and the constraint moved downstream. If you want to know where to go, find your organisation’s longest queue and go there."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A second, quieter expansion: "},{"text":"integration and operations for AI features themselves","b":true},{"text":": evaluation harnesses, cost control, fallback behaviour, prompt and context management, safety review. This is ordinary engineering with an unusual failure distribution, and there is more of it than there are people who have done it."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"what-is-unknown-and-why","runs":[{"text":"What is unknown, and why"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The honest answer about total employment is that nobody knows, and the data cannot currently settle it."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Entry-level technical hiring in the United States and Europe fell substantially from 2023 through 2025. That fall has at least three candidate causes running simultaneously: interest rates rose sharply, ending a decade of cheap money that funded speculative hiring; the industry had over-hired dramatically in 2021 and 2022 and was correcting; and assistants arrived. These are not separable with the data available. Any confident attribution to one cause is a position, not a finding, including the confident ones in either direction."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The two stories people tell are both under-evidenced:"}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"”Demand rises because software gets cheaper.”","b":true},{"text":" This has happened before with other cost collapses. It is plausible. It is not a law, and it took years each time."}],[{"text":"”The junior role disappears.”","b":true},{"text":" Also plausible. Also an extrapolation from two years of a confounded series, and it requires assuming the rung is never rebuilt."}]]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Hold both loosely. The behaviour that pays under either is the same, which is convenient."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"what-to-actually-do-about-it","runs":[{"text":"What to actually do about it"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Move toward verification and decision.","b":true},{"text":" Not as a title change, as where you spend your attention. Be the person who can say whether it is right."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Get a domain.","b":true},{"text":" Payments, clinical records, logistics, tax, energy trading. The scarce combination is not two languages, it is one language plus knowing what a reconciliation break means. Domain knowledge lives in conversations and regulations, much of it unwritten, and that is exactly the material no corpus contains."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Stay close to the consequence.","b":true},{"text":" Roles insulated from whether the software worked are the exposed ones. Roles where you are woken when it breaks are not."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Do not specialise in the thing that is currently easy.","b":true},{"text":" If your work has been getting noticeably easier without you getting better, that is a signal, not a reward."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"the-access-question","runs":[{"text":"The access question"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"One good change: the capital requirement for learning this work fell close to zero. A usable assistant, a free editor, free hosting, free CI minutes and a free database are all available to somebody on a second-hand laptop with an intermittent connection, and open-weight models can be run locally on modest hardware when the connection fails."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Be honest about what still gates, though. Reliable electricity and bandwidth are not universal. Most documentation and most hiring is in English. Time zones and payment rails decide who can take which contract. The barrier moved; it did not vanish, and claiming it did is a story told by people who never faced it."}]}],"check":{"question":[{"text":"Someone argues that the drop in junior technical hiring from 2023 proves assistants are replacing entry-level engineers. 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