Voices from the Community: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Tech Career Discourse on Reddit
Resumo
The technology labor market has experienced major changes in recent years, driven by the consolidation of remote work, the adoption of generative AI, and successive corporate layoffs. As these changes reshaped career paths and employment prospects, professionals increasingly turn to online communities to exchange experiences and discuss their concerns. In this work, we present a longitudinal, multidimensional analysis of career discussions across three technology-focused Reddit communities (subreddits) covering 2018–2025. We collected Reddit discussions and applied a two-stage BERTopic pipeline. The first stage identified relevant publication domains, yielding a curated dataset of 143,933 publications and 2,015,841 associated comments, while the second modeled the thematic structure of their discussions. The analysis was complemented by sentiment analysis, emotion classification, temporal analysis, and engagement metrics. Our findings reveal nine major thematic areas spanning technical skills, education, job seeking, workplace conditions, and broader labor-market disruptions. Discussions of market instability, including layoffs, unemployment, and the disruptive effects of generative AI, generated high engagement, while social and labor-rights discussions produced the most sustained conversational activity. In contrast, technical and educational discussions were more strongly associated with knowledge sharing and positive emotions. We further observe a marked increase in career-related discussions after 2022, coinciding with major shifts in the technology labor market and the emergence of generative AI as a salient concern in careerrelated discourse.
Palavras-chave:
social media analysis, topic modeling, emotion detection, technology market, labor, remote work
Referências
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G. Prenassi, A. Machado, E. Souza, et al. 2025. Narrativas de Jogos de Azar em Plataformas de Vídeo: Um Estudo Linguístico-Temático sobre o jogo do Tigrinho no YouTube. In Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web (WebMedia). SBC.
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C. M. Sum, A. Konvicka, M. Wang, and S. E. Fox. 2025. The future of tech labor: How workers are organizing and transforming the computing industry. Proc. of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (2025).
M. Tomprou, L. Dabbish, R. E. Kraut, et al. 2019. Career Mentoring in Online Communities: Seeking and Receiving Advice from an Online Community. In Proc. of the CHI Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM.
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L. Yang and M. Pigultong. 2024. Sentiment Analysis on Job Descriptions in the Technology Sector: Measuring Positive and Negative Perceptions of Companies Using Natural Language Processing Techniques. International Journal for Applied Information Management (2024).
Y. Bal and N. E. Bulgur. 2023. Remote work: A paradigm shift in the modern workplace and its impact on the workforce. In Enhancing employee engagement and productivity in the post-pandemic multigenerational workforce. IGI Global.
B. A. P. Barata, A. F. Justino, A. F. L. Junior, and othes. 2023. What about data science? An analysis of the market based on Job posts. In Encontro Nacional de Inteligência Artificial e Computacional (ENIAC).
J. Baumgartner, S. Zannettou, B. Keegan, et al. 2020. The pushshift reddit dataset. In Proc. Int. AAAI Conf. on Web and Social Media.
P. Bento, Y. A. Aquino, A. Buzelin, et al. 2025. Mapping Hate and Extremism: How Brazilian Reddit Communities Spread Toxic Discourse.
J. Carpenter, C. McDade, and S. Childers. 2018. Advice seeking and giving in the Reddit r/Teachers online space. In Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference. AACE.
M. B. Çetin and S. Gündüz. 2024. From Boom to Bust: Unravelling the Global Tech Layoffs Phenomenon. In Economic Uncertainty in the Post-Pandemic Era. Routledge.
T. Chaudhary, P. Malhotra, R. Mamidi, et al. 2023. Blind Leading the Blind: A Social-Media Analysis of the Tech Industry. In Proc. of the 20th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON).
T. Chumwatana and A. Hpone. 2025. Bridging the IT skill gap with industry demands: An AI-driven text mining approach to job market trends using large language model. Journal of Theoretical and Applied Information Technology (2025).
M. Colak and B. C. Saridogan. 2023. Exploring the Remote Work Revolution: A Managerial View of the Tech Sector’s Response to the New Normal. International Journal of Contemporary Management (2023).
C. Consiglio, N. Massa, V. Sommovigo, et al. 2022. Techno-Stress Creators, Burnout and Psychological Health among Remote Workers during the Pandemic: The Moderating Role of E-Work Self-Efficacy. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2022).
S. Corvite and J. Hui. 2024. Social Media as a Lens into Careers During a Changing World of Work. Proc. of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (2024).
J. H. dos Santos, J. C. S. Reis, P. F. Melo, et al. 2025. Caracterização da (Des) Informação das Narrativas sobre Vacinação em Grupos Públicos no WhatsApp no Brasil. In Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web (WebMedia). SBC.
S. Fodor and B. Boncz. 2025. InGPT we trust: perceptions of the future of work with artificial intelligence on online forums. Data Science and Management (2025).
Stephen L. France. 2024. Navigating software development in the ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot era. Business Horizons (2024). [link]
K. Gama, G. Liebel, M. Goulão, et al. 2025. A Socio-Technical Grounded Theory on the Effect of Cognitive Dysfunctions in the Performance of Software Developers with ADHD and Autism. In Proc. Int. Conf. on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society (ICSE-SEIS).
P. Guenes, R. Tomaz, B. Trinkenreich, et al. 2025. Impostor Phenomenon Among Software Engineers: Investigating Gender Differences and Well-Being. In 6th Workshop on Gender Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in Software Engineering (GEICSE).
M. Hollander, D. A. Wolfe, and E. Chicken. 2013. Nonparametric statistical methods. John Wiley & Sons.
E. Kaloudis, V. Kouti, F. Triantafillou, et al. 2025. AI-Powered Analysis of Weight Loss Reports from Reddit: Unlocking Social Media’s Potential in Dietary Assessment. Nutrients (2025).
M. Kosar and F. Lee. 2024. Using topic modeling to identify factors influencing job satisfaction in the it industry. J Inf Syst Appl Res (2024).
M. S. Locatelli, A. S. da Costa, V. Thome, et al. 2025. From Inclusion to Contention: Analyzing DEI and “Woke” Narratives on Reddit. In Int. Conf. on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining. Springer.
C Madding, A. G. Ansari, C. Ballenger, and A. Thota. 2020. Topic Modeling to Understand Technology Talent. SMU Data Science Review (2020).
P. S. Malheiros, R. R. Lima, and A. C. Oran. 2024. Impact of Generative AI Technologies on Software Development Professionals’ Perceptions of Job Security. In Proc. of the XXIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Quality. ACM.
T. Massoni, N. Ginani, W. Silva, et al. 2019. Relating voluntary turnover with job characteristics, satisfaction and work exhaustion- an initial study with Brazilian developers. In Proc. Int. Workshop Cooperative Human Aspects Softw. Eng. (CHASE). IEEE.
S. Z. S. Naing and P. Udomwong. 2024. Public opinions on ChatGPT: An analysis of Reddit discussions by using sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and SWOT analysis. Data Intelligence (2024).
S.E. V. S. Pillai, K. Polimetla, R. Avacharmal, and year = 2022 others, journal = Journal of Recent Trends in Computer Science and Engineering (JRTCSE). [n. d.]. Mental health in the tech industry: Insights from surveys and NLP analysis. ( [n. d.]).
S. Popoola, A. Vollem, and I. K. Nti. 2025. What do Computing Interns Discuss Online? An Empirical Analysis of Reddit Posts. In Proc. ACM Conf. on Cybersecurity & IT Education (SIGCITE.
G. Prenassi, A. Machado, E. Souza, et al. 2025. Narrativas de Jogos de Azar em Plataformas de Vídeo: Um Estudo Linguístico-Temático sobre o jogo do Tigrinho no YouTube. In Brazilian Symposium on Multimedia and the Web (WebMedia). SBC.
J. Ribas, J. Carneiro, and T. andothers Sousa. 2025. Pain in a Safe Space: Mapping Emotions and Discourse in theWomenintech Subreddit. In Simpósio Brasileiro de Engenharia de Software (SBES).
N. Salari, M. Beiromvand, A. Hosseinian-Far, et al. 2025. Impacts of generative artificial intelligence on the future of labor market: A systematic review. Computers in Human Behavior Reports (2025).
C. M. Sum, A. Konvicka, M. Wang, and S. E. Fox. 2025. The future of tech labor: How workers are organizing and transforming the computing industry. Proc. of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (2025).
M. Tomprou, L. Dabbish, R. E. Kraut, et al. 2019. Career Mentoring in Online Communities: Seeking and Receiving Advice from an Online Community. In Proc. of the CHI Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM.
T. S. Vaillant, F. D. Almeida, P. A. M. S. Neto, et al. 2024. Developers’ Perceptions on the Impact of ChatGPT in Software Development: A Survey. arXiv:2405.12195 [link]
Watchful1. 2025. Subreddit Comments/Submissions (2005–2025). Academic Torrents. [link] Dump no longer publicly available.
L. Yang and M. Pigultong. 2024. Sentiment Analysis on Job Descriptions in the Technology Sector: Measuring Positive and Negative Perceptions of Companies Using Natural Language Processing Techniques. International Journal for Applied Information Management (2024).
Publicado
27/10/2026
Como Citar
AZEVEDO, Matheus S.; OLIVEIRA, Geovana S.; FERREIRA, Carlos H. G.; LIMA, Helen C. S. C..
Voices from the Community: A Multi-Dimensional Analysis of Tech Career Discourse on Reddit. In: BRAZILIAN SYMPOSIUM ON MULTIMEDIA AND THE WEB (WEBMEDIA), 32. , 2026, Lavras/MG.
Anais [...].
Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação,
2026
.
p. 516-525.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/webmedia.2026.30965.
