About

Software Sentiment is a daily index from Awesome covering the news, debates, and developments shaping the software industry.

The dial

The dial is a single number, updated every weekday, on a scale from −100 (It's so over) to +100 (We're so back). It reflects how I'm reading the state of the software industry on a given day, drawing on the news, the discourse, and the work I do as an engineer trying to figure out what's actually going on. The labels come from the way working engineers oscillate between euphoria and doom, but the underlying reading is meant to be taken seriously.

Methodology

I set the dial by hand, every weekday, drawing on five things:

• what's happening in the labor market (hiring, layoffs, how companies are talking about engineering headcount)
• what AI coding tools are actually doing in production rather than in demos
• where money is moving and where it's being pulled out of
• what working engineers and industry leaders are saying when they're being honest
• whether the underlying work of building reliable software seems to be getting easier, harder, or just stranger