The number of vacant positions in the Software Development category has decreased from 32,692 in May 2022 to 299 in January 2023, in case there were any nagging doubts that Amazon was no longer hiring. The number of open positions decreased from 32,692 in May to, 30,124 in July, 24,747, in September, 2,829 in the month of November, and 373 in December, according to Internet Archive captures of Amazon’s Software Development jobs category.
Currently, there are 299 open positions for software development, 164 of which are in the United States. This is less than 1% of the 32,692 positions available in May.
Amazon publicly urged Congress and legislatures across the U.S. to support and fund computer science education in public schools in May, stating that “the U.S. isn’t producing nearly enough students trained in computer science to meet the future demands of the American workforce.” This would “create a much-needed pipeline of talent that will carry us into the future.” And in July, Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon, joined other CEOs of IT giants in signing a public letter urging state governments and educational authorities to expand computer science teaching to K–12 students.
“The USA has over 700,000 open computing jobs but only 80,000 computer science graduates a year,” the ‘CEOs for CS’ explained. “We must educate American students as a matter of national competitiveness.”
Amazon has postponed start dates for some university
A few days later, the challenge was accepted by 50 of the country’s governors, who then signed the Compact To Expand K-12 Computer Science Education in their states and territories.
A new $15 million computer science curriculum was launched countrywide last autumn with funding from Amazon with the goal of significantly increasing the proportion of high school students who enrol in the Java-based AP CS A course (Java founder and AWS employee James Gosling recently noted that “A lot of the guts of AWS is Java, and AWS has a pretty big Java team”). And in December, Amazon News noted that “through the Amazon Future Engineer ‘childhood-to-career’ initiative,’ 600,000 pupils in 5,000 schools received computer science education.”
The Financial Times reported the following business day that Amazon had postponed start dates for some university graduates who had been scheduled to join the company in May 2023. Amazon cited the “macroeconomic environment” as the reason for the delay and informed students that they would now not be able to begin until the end of 2023. The FT story appeared after a New York Times article on the declining Big Tech job market that CS students were facing.
