I think a lot of the crunch in the labor market for programmers is “monkey see monkey do” thinking at the big tech companies. It might even be somewhat calculated, though I hesitate to call something a conspiracy when it could simply be due to stupidity on the part of senior management.

Large tech companies tend to have a lot of flexibility and their total headcount because they have a wide variety of departments and tasks that they can set aside for an extended period before it causes any problems. Those problems will eventually catch up with them, though, as will a code base written by somebody who doesn’t understand what they’re trying to accomplish.

So I think the pendulum is going to swing back to a labor crunch at some point. My guess is at least another 6 months before we see any hint of that, though. I don’t think it will be as bad as it was before the advent of LLMs, though. They really are a productivity enhancing tool, particularly for software developers who know what they’re doing.