Crypto Cope and the Curve of Software Jobs
Also: A castle of mist atop a soap bubble of seriousness inflated by confused wind from a man who thinks gilt is paint.
Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business, and power.
It’s Monday morning, and I’m stoked. Reading our weekly economic calendar, we have Oracle earnings today. Adobe and UiPath Wednesday. Docusign and PagerDuty Thursday. And there’s tasty economic data in the offing from around the world. What more could we ask for in any given week but a run of interesting financial results? — Alex
📈 Trending Up: Counter-tariffs in China … counter-tariffs in Canada … Soviet Economics … Chinese bond yields … self-censorship … fusion power (TWiST) … tax cheats … tanker fires … American support for Russian demands …
Doordash, which is joining the S&P500. That’s a massive endorsement of the former startup, which reported $2.87 billion in total revenue during Q4 2024 and GAAP net income for the full year. Sadly for its backers, Coinbase did not make the cut.
📉 Trending Down: American investability? … risk tolerance … US soft power … free speech … China-Philippines relations …
Stocks, which are set to fall in the United States this morning (again) after declines in Europe and a mixed set of trading in Asia.
Chart of the Day: Via Brookings, here’s a chart showing Federal spending in 2024 compared to 2025. Data correct through March 6th.
Who’s hiring?
One of the most insane charts in technology today is the curve of software developer job postings on Indeed, a job board, providing a proxy for the health of the market for developer labor. Sadly for folks out there who type code for a living, it has recently taken a fresh turn for the worse:
That little dive at the end hints at a floor that is lower than many anticipated and an acceleration in the 2024-era trend of slow decline. Now we have faster decline!
If you are hiring today and are hunting for AI-slinging developers, the market for talent is, conversely, miserable. Everyone, the Journal reports, wants to hire those same workers:
Nearly 1 in 4 U.S. tech jobs posted so far this year are seeking employees with artificial-intelligence skills [… and in] the information sector, which includes many of the tech giants investing heavily in AI development and deployment, a leading 36% of IT jobs posted in January were AI-related.
The same Journal article notes that amongst “newly listed technology jobs,” less than 10% were “AI-related” right before ChatGPT was released. Today? Nearly 25%. In just a few years, that’s an insane pace of change. And it explains why the general market for developer talent can be poor despite a gold rush in one of technology’s sub-sectors.
Being prosaic and obvious:
Developers are turning to AI code-writing and code-helping tools en masse, data indicate.
Those same tools are expected to boost developer productivity.
More productive developers, comparatively high industry salaries, and businesses with an eye on cost-cutting are a recipe for at least limited net-hiring, perhaps even net-zero hiring, and at most net-negative staffing.
The change in the developer labor market could persist, as top-performing engineers are hired to build systems that as an either first, or second-order effect make developers more productive on an individual basis, reducing market demand for their labor.
If the above was playing out as we expected, we’d anticipate major technology companies announcing a cessation of net-positive developer hiring (Salesforce: “we're not going to hire any new engineers this year.”), reports of huge time-savings from AI software development tools (Amazon: “Amazon has migrated tens of thousands of production applications from Java 8 or 11 to Java 17 with assistance from Amazon Q Developer [saving] over 4,500 years of development work for over a thousand developers.”), and regular layoffs as tech companies worry less about a reduction in their overall software development capacity (Microsoft, Meta).
Hell, startups are being born today with AI-first code. As TechCrunch reported:
A quarter of the W25 startup batch have 95% of their codebases generated by AI, YC managing partner Jared Friedman said during a conversation posted on YouTube.
That’s probably why we’re seeing smaller teams build faster, and grow revenues more quickly than in prior technology cycles or eras. You can do more with less. And the less in this case really does seem to be humans.
Rocket + Redfin
Rocket, a digital mortgage and personal finance company, announced plans to buy Redfin, an online real estate brokerage, for $1.75 billion. In response, Rocket fell 11% while Redfin soared 76%. The ∆ is easy to understand, thanks to Rocket paying $12.50 per share (in shares) for the smaller company, which is a massive 115% premium over its Friday close of $5.82 per share.
The synergies are easy to suss out. Hell, the companies actually managed to phrase them in simple language:
By combining Redfin’s home search and real estate agent network with Rocket’s mortgage origination and servicing capabilities, the company envisions a more seamless experience from search to close, to servicing and future transactions.
Fair enough. Stapling a huge consumer search destination with attached agents (demand generation) to a mechanism that offers mortgages (supply generation) seems reasonable.
What matters for these pages is that an aggressive deal is in the offing. Thank the heavens. IPOs remain mostly stuck in neutral, and dealmaking has yet to pick up much pace. But here, at least, we see signs of life amidst the M&A market. More, please.
Crypto cope
This meme from Banana over on Twitter had me laughing:
The gist here is that there was at least some market hope that the United States would plough some of its national wealth into bitcoin holdings. Through a sort of reserve. That changed quickly when President Trump announced not bitcoin or even ethereum’s token to start, but instead Caradano and XRP for a digital asset reserve. Trump later added that he wanted bitcoin and ether involved, too.
The selected digital assets were not well received by the market, who found them somewhat random.
Things devolved from there, with the United States deciding to take its extant bitcoin holdings and put them in trust. Which is about what they were in before, though I suppose you could argue that pressure to sell them is now reduced, near-term deficit reduction be damned.
This is a castle of mist atop a soap bubble of seriousness inflated by confused wind from a man who thinks gilt is paint. From America’s crypto godhead:
"From this day on, America will follow the rule that every Bitcoin knows very well. Never sell your Bitcoin. That’s a little phrase that they have. I don’t know if that’s right or not. Who the hell knows? Who knows? Who knows? But so far, it’s been right. Well, let’s keep it that way."
Bitcoin’s price is still above where it was pre-election, so the crypto world is still enjoying something of a Trump bump. That said, as with equities, crypto assets are losing steam and aren’t far off from losing their entire set of gains that came since the last election.
Why? The usual reasons. Economic uncertainty leading to less risk tolerance amongst investors, leading to a rotation out of more volatile assets into safer havens, I’d reckon. You know, just like any other asset out there.