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The Pragmatic Engineer: Early Trends

This page is a collection on software engineering industry trends that The Pragmatic Engineer reported on, well before mainstream media outlets picked up on these. Read more of these trends here – many of which are yet to be reported by mainstream media. Or just wait for larger publications to eventually come around to these in a few months' time.

See all deepdives identifying early trends

Interested in learning about software engineering industry trends months before it becomes mainstream news? Subscribe to The Pragmatic Engineer. Early trends like the ones below are typically only shared in The Pulse, which is a column only full subscribers receive.

The impact of Section 174 reversal

  • First analyzed on 10 July, predicting the change will result in more software engineering hiring in the US
  • Wall Street Journal: one month later came to the same conclusion.

The trimodal nature of software engineering compensation

Four months after publishing, The Economist re-published research by The Pragmatic Engineer

Section 174 tax changes resulting in fewer software engineering jobs in the US

Big Tech becoming more cutthroat

On the hottest tech jobs market in history

On Apple going against the job cuts tide

A trend of fewer middle managers

Cloud development environments surging in popularity

On cutting back on cloud costs & vendor spend

On Apple enforcing it's return to office (RTO) policy

On the Big Tech hiring slowdown

Changes across tech recruitment thanks to GenAI

The % of full-remote software engineering jobs shrinking

Devtools startups challenging Visual Studio Code?

What the end of 0% interest rates mean for the industry

Did a detailed deepdive with analysis and what trends this change is likely to start:

Many trends proved out to be correct, such as an increase in M&A activity across tech, Series A rounds being harder to raise, fewer IPOs, and many others.

A trend of more bootstrapped companies

Did a deepdive on lessons from bootstrapped companies in October 2023, expecting far more bootstrapped companies, expecting to see an increase in bootstrapped startups. 15 months later, data from Carta showed more bootstrapped companies founded than the decade before.

On something fishy happening at events tech company Pollen

  • First reported on events tech Pollen in May 2022, commenting on poorly executed layoffs. On 22 June 2022, on an engineering Town Hall, answering the question on what he thought of this article, the CEO of the company, Callum-Negus Fancey responded: "I do find like there's a real lack of accountability, no checks, and balances with this kind of investigative journalism. You know, it's not like [BBC] Panorama and things that are done properly and where it's broadcast. It's a very small organization. They chose to take a very one-sided view."
  • Published a deepdive on many alarming details on how the company went bankrupt – and how there could be something fishy happening with a $3.2M double charge in May 2022 with no postmortem – in September 2022, in Inside Pollen’s Collapse: “$200M Raised” but Staff Unpaid - Exclusive
  • Worked with the BBC who then produced the documentary Crashed: $800M Festival Fail in June 2023. The documentary re-confirmed several parts of my reporting (and all parts of the original reporting has stood the test of time). The CEO got his wish, in the end to be covered by BBC – with a little help from me as well.

Analysis that turned out to be incorrect

I cannot predict the future and am sometimes wrong about how events will unfold. I reflect on when this happens.

For example, throughout 2022 I regularly reported how both my analysis and details from software engineers at Meta pointed to layoffs being a low likelihood (e.g. Meta's historic growth challenge in October 2022). Meta did layoffs in November 2022, which I reflected on here.