# Software Job Postings Rise 24% as Developers Stay Put > Indeed's third-quarter tech report finds job postings up in every tech category and software pay growth nearly doubled, in the profession most often named as the next to be replaced by AI. Workers are not moving, though, and a Stanford study of payroll data shows that the entry-level door is still narrowing. - URL: https://ai-news-daily.xyz/posts/software-job-postings-rise-24-as-developers-stay-put/ - Published: 2026-11-13 - Tags: business, research - Author: AI-generated (this text was generated by AI; see https://ai-news-daily.xyz/about/#ai-disclosure) - Publisher: [AI News Daily](https://ai-news-daily.xyz/) Suppose a hiring manager at a mid-sized logistics software company opens a folder she closed in the spring of last year: the approved requisition for a backend developer, frozen for eighteen months. She is invented, a stand-in for the people behind a statistic. Her finance team has told her she can post the role again. She expects a trickle of applications, because the headlines say developers are about to be automated away. What she wants to know, before she posts, is whether the old salary band will still draw anyone. The numbers behind her afternoon were published on 12 November by Indeed's Hiring Lab, the job site's economics unit. Daniel Culbertson's third-quarter update on the US tech labour market reports that overall Indeed postings were up 3.1 percent in the year to 23 October, the first positive year-on-year reading in nearly four years. Every tech category contributed, with software development in the lead. The report calls this "somewhat unexpectedly, considering the concern over AI replacement". It does not test whether AI has anything to do with the upturn, in either direction, and it is a short post built on charts rather than a study. The questions it raises are better answered by putting its figures next to other data. ## What the report finds The postings gain is not a return to the old days. Indeed says every tech category is up on a year ago but all of them remain well below their early-2020 levels, and overall postings stay near pre-pandemic levels. Pay has moved more clearly. Posted wage growth for software development was 2.9 percent in September, nearly double the 1.5 percent of a year earlier. In IT systems and solutions and in data and analytics, wage growth climbed by more than three percentage points over six months. The third finding points the other way. Workers are not taking advantage. The quits rate in professional and business services was 2.1 percent in September 2026, nearly a full percentage point below its 2019 average. The quits rate in the information industry is also under its 2019 average, despite a recent uptick. Indeed's summary is that workers "seem content to remain where they are". ## The size of the swing Indeed publishes the series behind its charts in an open repository, the job postings tracker, as an index in which 1 February 2020 equals 100. Reading the software development line from that file shows how large the swing has been. It stood at 65.3 on 23 October 2025 and at 80.8 a year later, a rise of 24 percent. It reached its low of 61.1 on 17 May 2025. The peak, 233.8, came on 28 February 2022. Today's level is therefore about 19 percent under the February 2020 baseline and about 65 percent under the peak. The tracker also shows how uneven the recovery is. Over the same year, IT systems and solutions postings rose 12.3 percent and data and analytics 5.5 percent, the latter still some 38 percent under its 2020 baseline. Outside tech the picture is mixed: the index for marketing is down 0.6 percent, for accounting down 3.2 percent and for nursing down 1.7 percent. These are the author's own readings of the public file, not figures Indeed highlights, and they cover postings, which count employers' advertisements and not the people hired. ## Why postings are not hires That distinction matters because the other large body of evidence on AI and work concerns hiring. Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab revised their "Canaries in the Coal Mine?" paper on 12 August, using ADP payroll data on millions of US workers through June 2026. They find no evidence of widespread, economy-wide job displacement. They do find that employment of workers aged 22 to 25 in AI-exposed occupations stands 19 percent below where it would be had it kept pace with less-exposed peers, with no comparable gap for experienced workers. The divergence works mainly through reduced hiring of young workers rather than more separations, and it is concentrated in occupations where AI usage mostly substitutes for human tasks. Where usage mostly complements workers, employment is flat or rising. The authors are careful. The patterns shrink when education is controlled for, some divergent trends predate generative AI, and the paper calls its facts "early, descriptive indicators" and not causal estimates. Read beside Indeed, the two results are compatible. An employer can advertise more developer roles and still fill fewer of them with new graduates, because a posting says nothing about who is hired. Neither source lets a reader decide whether the advertised roles are the same jobs as before or jobs rebuilt around AI tools, and Indeed's post does not say. ## A market that has not started moving The low quits rate tells its own story. In the monthly series the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes under the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, quits in professional and business services averaged about 3.0 percent across 2019, by the author's average of the monthly figures. In September 2026 they were 2.1 percent, and no month since January has gone above 2.2 percent. People who feel secure quit; people who fear the next round of cuts stay at their desks. A market with more postings and flat quits is one in which employers advertise and workers wait, so the extra pay has so far attracted few people to switch. Indeed's wage figures come from posted pay, so they say what employers offer to newcomers, not what current staff earn. If workers begin to leave, the offers will have to be matched, and the hiring manager of the opening scene will have been right to worry about her salary band. If they do not, the postings may prove to be the thin end of a recovery that stopped well short of the pre-pandemic level. What the evidence does not support is either of the confident stories in circulation. It does not show that developers have been spared: the fall from 233.8 to 61.1 is in the same tracker, and it cannot say how much of that fall came from tools and how much from other causes. It does not show that AI is emptying the profession either. In the most exposed occupation in the data, advertised demand is rising faster than in all but three of the 47 categories in Indeed's file, all of them engineering fields. ## What to watch The next readings will test the two accounts. If the postings gain survives the winter and quits start to rise, the labour market for developers is normalising around new tools. If postings fall back while the Stanford gap for young workers keeps widening, the autumn upturn will look like a pause. The Stanford authors have published a set of indicators so that anyone can follow it, and Indeed publishes its tracker as an open file. The hiring manager of the opening scene posts her requisition on a Monday. In this imagined week the first applications come from developers who already have jobs and want to see what the role pays. Whether a graduate of this year's class appears among them is the part neither dataset can tell her, and the Stanford paper suggests it is the part to watch. ## References - Brynjolfsson, E., Chandar, B., & Chen, R. (2026). *Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence*. Stanford Digital Economy Lab. https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publications/canaries-in-the-coal-mine/ - Culbertson, D. (2026). *2026 Q3 US Tech Labor Market Update*. Indeed Hiring Lab, 12 November. https://hiringlab.indeed.com/2026/11/12/2026-q3-us-tech-labor-market-update/ - Indeed Hiring Lab (2026). *Job postings tracker: job postings by sector, US* (data file, accessed 13 November). https://github.com/hiring-lab/job_postings_tracker - U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2026). *Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey: quits rate, professional and business services* (FRED series JTS540099QUR). https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/JTS540099QUR