For a while (2018-2022) it was hot to buy up software companies that dominated a single niche and jack up prices. The bet was that since software is such a 0-1 business that they would have great moats and have strong pricing power. My father-in-law is blind and used to use JAWS until it got bought up by a private equity firm (Vispero) which tried to dominate the software accessibility market and jacked up the prices to annual subscriptions. He's a electrical engineer so he was comfortable switching to free software NVDA, but a lot of people paid up.
Now with LLM's that business model is in shambles and the finance side of it is less attractive with interest rates so high. I suspect that this is actually driving the software engineer hiring slow-down, because these companies were actually doing most of the employing of software engineers, much more than the big tech companies.
Now with LLM's that business model is in shambles and the finance side of it is less attractive with interest rates so high. I suspect that this is actually driving the software engineer hiring slow-down, because these companies were actually doing most of the employing of software engineers, much more than the big tech companies.