The Pulse #124: Software engineering job openings at five-year low?
Data from Indeed shows software developer job openings have seen the biggest decline in five years across the US. What’s the cause, and what’s next? Also: OpenAI responds to DeepSeek, and more.
The Pulse is a series covering insights, patterns, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Send me a message.
Today, we cover:
Industry pulse. OpenAI struggles to shed nonprofit status, Anthropic bans AI from job applications, cuts at Workday, GitHub Copilot releases an agentic mode, and Linus Torvalds tells Linux contributors that social media pressure is bad for development.
Software engineering job openings hit five-year low? There are 35% fewer software developer job listings on Indeed today, than five years ago. Compared to other industries, job listings for software engineers grew much more in 2021-2022, but have declined much faster since. A look into possible reasons for this, and what could come next.
OpenAI responds to DeepSeek threat. Fresh off the shock of a relatively unknown Chinese company dethroning ChatGPT as the most-downloaded AI app on iPhone and Android, OpenAI has shaken itself up, promptly copied DeepSeek’s visualization of how its reasoning model “thinks”, and has shipped Deep Research.
OpenAI struggles to shed nonprofit status
Yet more drama at OpenAI, where cofounder Elon Musk has made a $97 billion dollar bid to take over the OpenAI nonprofit. A few details to unpack:
Yes, Musk really is one of the several cofounders of OpenAI. In 2015 it was he, Sam Altman, and 9 others (Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, and Pamela Vagata)
Musk contributed around $45M to OpenAI as a donor, as confirmed by OpenAI.
In 2017, things got messy and Musk eventually left OpenAI. This was the year when OpenAI decided to create a for-profit entity, controlled by the nonprofit. As shared by OpenAI, Musk wanted control over the for-profit part, and then later wanted to merge it into Tesla.
Musk created rival X.AI in 2023, and this company has raised $6B of funding.
OpenAI is worth a lot more than $97B; its latest valuation was at $157B in October, and there are rumors of a new raise at or above $300B!
Here’s where OpenAI’s tricky corporate structure comes into play. OpenAI published a diagram showcasing the structure, but leaving out ownership stakes. Here’s my interpretation, focusing on ownership stakes and control:
Musk is offering to buy the nonprofit entity, not the for-profit one. Musk’s offer at $97B for a 51% controlling share values OpenAI at around $195B, which is higher than OpenAI’s last valuation of $157B. The company’s board has a fiduciary duty to consider the offer. However, OpenAI is officially a non-profit, so this duty may not apply.
It’s likely that this episode’s main impact will be to highlight the ridiculous, convoluted, corporate structure of the world’s most valuable private company. I wonder if investors may opt against investing more until this structure is tidied up, with the for-profit entity controlled by investors, and not the nonprofit, with ` investors receiving an ownership stake as well.