---
id: "t-2026-03-01-jevons-paradox"
type: "thought"
title: "Software engineering hiring and the Jevons paradox"
date: "2026-03-09"
week: "2026-W11"
url: "https://nosov.ai/writing/jevons-paradox/"
linkedin: "https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn%3Ali%3Ashare%3A7436691593828655104"
frames: ["jevons"]
author: "Ivan Nosov"
---

# Software engineering hiring and the Jevons paradox

Software engineer job postings are up 11% year-over-year in the most AI-automated profession on the planet - a textbook case of Jevons Paradox, where making a resource cheaper to use increases total demand instead of reducing it.

Overall job postings are flat. The field with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor,  and dozens of specialized coding agents... is the outlier hiring more.

Citadel Securities published a macro strategy report last month that frames why this holds. Recursive technology capability does not mean recursive adoption. Technological diffusion follows an S-curve - slow and expensive early adoption, then acceleration, then saturation. AI is still in the early phase. St Louis Fed real-time population data shows daily AI use at work is flat. No inflection.

The mechanism is specific. When coding gets 3x faster, companies don't cut engineers by two-thirds - they greenlight three times the projects. Internal tools that were never worth building suddenly have a business case.

Prototypes that took a quarter take a week. The backlog doesn't shrink, it explodes, because the organization sees what's possible at the new speed. Resistance goes down, ambition goes up, demand follows. Keynes predicted productivity gains would give us a 15-hour workweek. Societies consumed more instead.

There's also a hard economic ceiling most workforce planners ignore. Compute has a marginal cost. When the cost of automating a task exceeds the cost of a human doing it, substitution stops. That boundary exists, and we're nowhere near crossing it for most knowledge work.

This matters for anyone building a workforce strategy. The displacement question - "which roles disappear" - is the wrong frame. Roles change shape, output expectations rise, and the people who can work effectively with AI tools become more valuable.

The strategic move is capability building at speed. Finance controllers running 10x the scenario analyses. Commercial teams modeling pricing permutations they used to send to consultants. Operations managers automating reporting they used to spend Fridays assembling.

The data says complement. Build for that.

Source: Citadel Securities, "The 2026 Global Intelligence Crisis," Frank Flight, Feb 2026. Indeed Job Postings, Software Engineers vs Overall, daily + 21-day moving average.