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US programmer job growth nearly halved since ChatGPT launched, Fed study finds
Programmers are among the workers whose daily lives have changed the most thanks to generative AI. A new study from the Federal Reserve Board shows the shift is now playing out in employment numbers too.
The study analyzes monthly US employment data from a large household survey and cross-references it with an occupational database from the US Department of Labor that classifies jobs by their requirements and skills. That lets researchers pinpoint occupations with a high share of programming work. The group accounts for roughly 3.7 percent of all US workers.
Growth rate has nearly halved
Before ChatGPT launched in November 2022, programming-heavy jobs in the US were growing at just under 5 percent a year, well above the overall labor market. Since then, that pace has dropped sharply. In sectors with an especially high share of programmers, like IT services and software development, growth has essentially flatlined.
The obvious pushback: wasn't this just because the entire tech sector came under pressure in 2022? Interest rate hikes, the end of the Covid-era boom in online services, and the crypto crash all hit the industry at the same time.
To strip out these industry-wide effects, the researchers built a counterfactual employment curve. It shows how many programmers there would be if their share within each industry had stayed constant and only the size of the industries had changed.
Even after this adjustment, programmer employment is still falling by about three percentage points a year. It looks like companies are deliberately cutting the share of programmers in their workforce. A control test using occupations barely touched by AI shows no comparable dip.
Half a million fewer jobs, but not necessarily job losses
Stretched over three years, the gap works out to roughly 500,000 jobs that probably would have existed without the rise of large language models. But the authors strongly caution against reading this number as a straight count of lost jobs.
Many would-be programmers likely found work in adjacent fields. AI may be reshuffling tasks across job categories, with programming skills now showing up more in other roles. The study also doesn't capture broader macroeconomic feedback effects. If AI lifts productivity broadly enough, total demand for labor could even grow over the long run.
The researchers also found no clear drop in wages. So far, the effect has shown up mainly in the number of jobs filled rather than in pay. Data from Indeed shows that job postings for software developers have been largely stable since 2024 and have ticked up slightly in recent months. Before that, they had fallen by more than half in 2022 and 2023.