Software engineering will never fully disappear as a field, but we’re on the cusp of a vast permanent contraction of the workforce.
I’ve been a professional software developer for eighteen years. In that time, one of the things I’ve learned is that unremarkable code is good code. As is following industry standards. Doing both reduces cognitive complexity which mitigates bugs, as well as eases onboarding and refactoring.
In other words, exactly what AI is good at: being derivative.
Another lesson is that it’s more productive not to reinvent the wheel, but only write what doesn’t yet exist: mostly glue code. Everything we do is to realise new features for a product faster and cheaper than competitors.
Achieving this allows consumers to tolerate outages with your product, which in turn can be leveraged to take more shortcuts especially around quality. Consumers don’t reward bulletproof products. What they reward is having a good enough version of what they want today.
I’ve seen so many threads online where people lament the disappearance of high quality products including bug-free software. But over and over, mainstream consumers make their values loud and clear with where they spend their money, and it’s not on waiting/spending on quality.
This incentive structure makes AI slop acceptable even with the inevitable downtime. That every company is jumping on the slop wagon further raises the acceptable threshold for downtime, because there’s no alternative.
The Bubble is Inconsequential
Leadership across tech are enamoured with the marketing of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. I suspect it’s a mix of excitement at the prospect of being able to cut staff, thus increasing profits, as well as fear of being left-behind.
The agentic coding products themselves fall short, but they won’t always. These AI ecosystems are already technically impressive and are rapidly improving.
For all the hype, the principles for this technology are here to stay. It’s a bit like the dot-com bubble: the tech was sound even if the investments weren’t. Our job descriptions have already changed and little new code is now AI-free. We’re only a few years away from its capabilities to catching up to the marketing, and not that much longer if the bubble implodes.
A New Startup Model
We’re still going to get to a point where a startup only needs a few engineers. Code won’t be persisted anymore; they’ll be replaced by a list of requirements. These will produce a code black box – the engineers won’t even know how it works; even internal architecture will be outside their purview. Developers will just be there to set-up the general infra and finesse requirements following undesired behaviour. Every new CI/CD run will generate a new black box from scratch. It could be that the internal architecture completely changes from build to build.
Remember, the marketplace rewards good enough not good.
Eventually, this approach will spread to established companies. Software developer jobs will evaporate in much the same way as automation has already decimated other fields like payroll, travel agents, tax preparation, etc. In much the same way junior developer jobs are already disappearing.
I believe this future is immediate enough that I cannot recommend students enter this field.
The Future is Bleak
We’re already in a brutal culture of annual mass lay-offs combined with sparse openings. Laid off colleagues report it took up to a year to find work. This will worsen.
I only see a few ways out for software engineers.
- Become proficient enough with AI tools that you remain employable through successive lay-offs.
- Get promoted out of dev work and end up high enough to be the one to implement job reductions rather than be subject to them.
Neither solve the underlying problem of a future where there’s far more developers than jobs to fill. This mismatch between supply and demand will produce a downward pressure on quality of life; expect more on-call, worse hours, worse benefits, worse pay.
I can’t even say join this other profession because the automation train is accelerating and no occupation is immune.
Chickens Coming Home to Roost
Some of this is karma. Software development is depicted as creating new experiences, but these have almost always been at the expense of livelihoods.
My first professional gig was writing a system to monitor a fleet of aircraft in real-time so that Search & Rescue could be sent if they crashed. I single-handedly replaced a whole department who satphoned planes ever half-hour to query position and status. Yes my system was better: aircraft locations were tracked to the minute instead of every half-hour, vastly reducing the search area. But real people lost their jobs.
My last workplace replaced the need for workers to go on the roofs of homes to assess how much solar energy they could produce. Our product provided accurate results in minutes, at the expense of the incomes of contractors.
My whole work history has been like this. Now other devs have figured out how to eliminate coding and it’s already good enough to displace some jobs. The technology has been rapidly improving, and its impact will only be more felt.
Previous innovations had already made my day-to-day worse over the past two decades. I now do the jobs of more people as a result of those advancements- customer support, testers, devops, database admins. I went from having in-person/phone conversations, inherently slow, to three at a time on Teams or Slack. I went from consulting books, again slow, to StackOverflow, to AI. I needed those breaks for my mental health, and they were slowly taken away with these advances. No wonder I’ve had three burn-outs by age 40. Now the job itself is endangered.
I’ll hold on for as long as I can. I’m going with that first route I listed earlier, being more proficient with the tools that are the source of my career’s demise.
And then? I don’t know. It doesn’t look good. My whole adult life has been watching the basics like homes and groceries become more unaffordable, and the job market get worse and worse. Not just for me, for everything.
It feels like all I can do is prep for poverty.