Federal Reserve Study: Programmer Job Growth Halved Since ChatGPT Launched, ~500K Jobs Missing
Fed economists Leland Crane and Paul Soto find US programmer job growth dropped roughly 50% after ChatGPT's Nov 2022 launch, with the gap widening from mid-2024. They estimate ~500,000 developer jobs that would otherwise have existed never materialized.
A new Federal Reserve study by economists Leland D. Crane and Paul E. Soto finds US programmer employment growth fell roughly 50% after ChatGPT launched in November 2022, with the gap widening sharply from mid-2024 onward. The researchers estimate roughly 500,000 developer jobs that would otherwise have existed simply never materialized.
The Numbers
Pre-ChatGPT, programming-heavy occupations were growing at just under 5% a year — well above the broader US labor market. Post-launch, growth in the most concentrated programmer sectors (IT services, software development) essentially flatlined. The Crane-Soto paper, published as a Fed Notes piece, frames this as the first institutional confirmation of what tech workers have anecdotally reported for two years.
The Lag
The gap didn't open immediately. The employment shift only appears clearly from mid-2024 — about 18 months after ChatGPT's launch. The authors interpret this as a "trust delay": companies needed time to see LLM coding capability improve through GPT-4, GPT-4 Turbo, Claude 3, and Gemini 1.5 before betting headcount on it. Once trust formed, hiring slowdowns compounded with the broader 2024 tech downturn, making causality hard to fully isolate.
Federal ReserveOur Take
500,000 missing jobs is a big number, but two caveats matter. One, the Fed's methodology compares actual to counterfactual hiring growth — it does not say AI caused 500K layoffs, but rather that 500K hires never happened. Two, the same period saw record investment in AI infrastructure roles, ML engineering, and applied research — suggesting the impact is uneven across the developer stack rather than uniform extinction. Watch the 2026 H1 BLS data: if junior engineer postings stay flat while senior infrastructure roles keep expanding, the bifurcation thesis hardens.
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