Some prompts to consider:
1. If you work in software engineering, what changes are you observing today, either to the SWE job itself, and/or to demand for entry-level SWE roles?
2. How do you see the entry-level SWE job evolving in 1, 2 and 3 years? Fewer/no roles? Different job description? Something else?
3. How will the pace of change vary across industries? E.g. I imagine SWE at Google is quite different from SWE at Liberty Mutual.
Please consider stating your current role and/or any experiences that have shaped your perspective (e.g. "Engineering leader at a Fortune 500 non-tech company", "recent CS grad", "AI researcher", etc.)
People aren’t hiring juniors right now because of the hiring freezes that are only beginning to thaw. Teams are understaffed after having to do more with less and need to hire people who can hit the ground running. The headcount for juniors will come.
LLM's have been hyped up to replace developers, but have repeatedly shown that the code at best can do the job.
It will replace the offshore sweatshops that Accenture and IBM have made, where they literally pull people off the streets and give them a couple of hours course so they can meet headcount for contracts. Those people were never productive.
I've seen the outputs that people who have tried to use in my codebase, and the amount of SQL injections and XSS exploits that get churned out because the model doesn't understand context is terrible.
I'm just waiting for the big hack to come along because of too much faith in these systems that have cold indifference in your systems reliability.
Isn’t that half or more of employed software developers? The complexity that you speak of are poorly refined business requirements or unnecessary abstractions, which are communications problems not a technology problem. Nearly all of those CRUD app developers are replaceable right now, which is striking considering the current immaturity of AI.
I say this because Interest Rates will be most likely lower than what they're at right now, which will cause money to flow into companies through VC and public investment.
Just a guess though, could easily be wrong. Keep an eye on startup investment and public ipo activity as a potential indicator of things.
Current companies will hire fewer new grads and layoff older engineers. However, I believe AI will make it far cheaper for new software companies to develop their products. Therefore, we will have more software companies spring up. Those companies will in turn, hire more software engineers.
For example, let's say there are 10 total software companies today employing 100 employees each for a total of 1,000 software engineers employed. In the near future, I can see 100 software companies employing 12 engineers for a total of 1,200 software engineers. The net will be 200 engineers.
We will see an explosion in software products - some software fields will have more competitors due to the lower cost of creating an alternative and we will see brand new software fields spring up because it's now economically feasible to do them.
However, I think new grads that can make efficient use AI in developing software will be in very high demand - even today. Those who can't will have a hard time getting hired. Same for current software devs.
I believe that the reason we don't see this in 2024 yet is because of high interest rates and we are in a transition period. I can see the field getting very hot again in 2025/2026.
When we have AGI that can completely replace engineers, then yea, maybe. But I'm not accounting for that because all bets are off if/when we have AGI. We'll have to start getting into weird scenarios at that point. For example, our wages could decrease but services/products are far more abundant and better, leading to a better quality of life despite a decrease in wages.
Even if there are companies on the cutting edge of AI, there will always be those that take more time to adopt it. Others will never adopt it in any meaningful way, unless there is something affordable and off the shelf that can actually fulfill the business needs.
I’m going to remain highly skeptical of the promises of AI, until I see them actually come to fruition.
WYSIWYG HTML editors were supposed to be the end of needing web developers, now those are mostly gone, some template based services exist, and there are more web developers than ever.
Low-code was also supposed to be the end of needing developers, as anyone who knew the business requirements could plug some LEGO blocks together. That also seems to be dying, as the logic still needs to exist and that’s where people get lost, not to mention the lack of flexibility and customization than those systems can lead to.
Will AI replacing software engineers be any different? Only time will tell.
My prediction is that specialized domain knowledge plus SWE (with smart use of AI) skills are increasingly going to be the better way to gain employment.
It isn’t just AI, as entry level people have always been poor value, but at this point we basically just want entry level to be a favour for employee’s kids.
I’m an overemployed Senior SDE, one at a unicorn and one at a generic company.
Do you have a perspective on whether this will exacerbate the shortage of senior engineers in a few years, if way fewer new people enter the profession in that time period? Or will it be okay since the need for humans will reduce commensurately?
Really, I don’t think they fully replaced the juniors as only some of the job is code generation. A lot of basic support and edge case handling is falling on the intermediates who often now aren’t producing much of anything due to the support burden. Many of them are dissatisfied.
"AI can do code" -> less experienced engineers -> no one has deep understanding of the whole system -> boom.
But it will take 25 years before this series of events plays out.
Learning to stitch together AI tools (using the output from one tool as an input into another tool) seems like it will be in demand as well.
Or otherwise to recognize what type of bugs the AI will make -- like the way you know what type of bugs junior engineers will make.
Just the other day I needed to write a complex script using a library I knew very little about. I knew "what" I wanted to do and that the library could solve the issue, but did not know enough about the lib to to solve it. I wrote pseudo-code and ChatGPT was able to generate a working script on the first shot.
I predict more of our work will shift towards describing problems well and knowing less specifics about certain libraries.
Sounds like writing code
I'm not a junior, or a grad, but I do have a shit resume that in total contains about 5-10 years of varied experience. I've been unemployed for a year, and am considering alternatives, like being a real garbage collector or electrician if I can find a way into those.
I'd note also that most of the responses in this thread are the same that Jon Stewart just lampooned in his recent episode on AI, with most CEOs describing how AI is actually a huge productivity boost and the best thing for humanity since literal fire, or that people will need to retrain to become "prompt engineers" (laughable, and why would you want to do that anyway). Anyone with an optimistic take still has a job, and everyone else doesn't see one coming along any time soon.
That said, there is way too much hype imo, I've found some use for ChatGPT and anticipate that there will be more, but it's mostly boilerplate or explaining things that already have some explanation somewhere. Asking for a solution to some performance problem that nobody's really documented anywhere hasn't proved useful, it'll just imagine something. It's not documenting Apple APIs that Apple themselves haven't bothered with, but it'll generate approximately passable examples of AppKit stuff that have been on the internet forever, and that's a great starting point for solving more interesting problems.
I do feel like most of the impact on the market is due to interest rates and layoffs, and there being a lack of profitability in most software anyway. The nature of the problem however doesn't remedy the fact that it'll be way way more competitive than it already was, and if you hadn't run the interview gauntlet prior to 2023, you sure as hell won't want to run it after 2025.
