In 2023, not long after making chatgpt Generating Mainstream, a poll on the anonymous Blind Work Forum, asked, eagerly, if the new software engineers were “filthy”. About 42% of more than 13,000 respondents chose the answer “Yes? Boys are very filthy”.
This October last October, Sundar Pichai proudly announced a call of profits that He was writing more than 25% of the new google code. Mark Zuckerberg has said Meta will build an engineer to write code. Sale force Director General Marc Benioff announced an employment freezing for engineers in 2025, saying he had increased productivity by 30% – and then the news broke that Salesforce planned to rest 1,000 employees. (Is still hiring seller for energy products he.) strips It aims to cut some engineers while also increasing the total number of his head this year.
All this asks the question of what new engineers will take if some basic tasks become automated. some Product managers They have speculated that he will increasingly take on some technical coding tasks and bypass their need for engineers. In general, job posts For software engineers are actually in a five-year low.
Are the engineers really coding themselves in the outskirts?
it IS By toppling career stairs doing more from the work of coding entry level engineers, but, at least for now, increased production of coding by it is also increasing the demand and value of experienced, creative developers to interpret and set it-work in good use.
While many necrology are written to mourn the coding death, engineering is more than writing code: requires creative thought to solve problems and expertise for read code. As it is now, he is not an original thinker.
“He cannot support what he does not know,” says James Stanger, the leading technology evangelist in Comptia, a non -profit business association for the US IT industry. “I still don’t think it’s something that can completely replace a good developer.” He adds, however, that “if a developer is not creative, then you can replace them very easily.”
The Oftware Engineer has been around since the 1960s, but employment flourished in the 90s with the Dot-Com era. Coding boot camps became common in 2010 as the demand for engineers exceeded supply. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.9 million people worked as software developers, quality assurance analysts and testing in 2023. The Bureau predicted that the industry would grow by 17% from 2023 to 2033, exceeding the national average of 4% to all the work.
An analysis by Comptia revealed that the degree of work posts for software engineers fell by 50% from January to December 2023, recovering slightly by the end of 2024. While posting for technology, finance and accounting, and marketing , communications and creative roles also fell, DIP for software engineers was sharper. But Comptia says the reason for autumn was not clear. Technology companies – including some who accepted overload during the Pandemia – fired thousands of workers in 2022 and 2023, with many citing economic uncertainty.
But there is an extended division within the software engineering about the level of experience. Comptia revealed that the percentage of open software engineering roles required by entry level workers had fallen since January 2023, to just over 20% from nearly 30%, while posts for those with seven years of experience or more Many grew to make nearly 40% of open roles, from just over 30%.
The experienced engineers I talked to seemed sure that he would not come for work at any time soon.
Jeremy Chua, a software engineer for that Lab at the Georgian venture firm, turns into chatbots when it strikes with coding. It can promote chatgpt or claude to remove the answers from the depth of Google and Stack Overflow, a Q&A site for programmers, or to help him write in the coding languages where he is less fluent. Chua, who has more than a decade of experience, says he was skeptical about whether Gen could help him at work. He says now he can sometimes complete projects that would have taken a week in a day or two, and he thinks of the chatbots he uses as coding partners. “It’s not like it will replace me – adds the way I work,” Chua tells me.
Caleb Tonkinson, an engineer at a clinical company of he called Smarterdx, tells me he is changing programming across two trails: “I can give the same sooner, or can offer something better in the same period of time . ” He sees it as similar to other technology tools that became available to engineers – besides the most exciting as he progresses rapidly. “There have been thousands of funds for 20 years now” to debug software, generate code or evaluate code, he says. “Your best companies and the best software engineers almost always use those tools.”
Cody Stewart, a leading software engineer at the Callrail software company, says he does not use Gen for everything at work but can use it to get answers to “stupid questions” he can spend a long time by Required in Google or Stack leakage. He started using chatbots at work in 2022. “I read something like, you either learn to adopt new tools and understand how they can improve your daily life and you stay with time, or people will go over you, ”he said. “I saw it and thought that maybe I should give it a kick.”
While more experienced engineers are optimistic about him, new engineers have more reasons to worry.
Initial recognition he last year released a software engineer with the one named Devin, designed to work on flaws and small demands with features. In a December video, she described it as “a new engineer” who “works best with a great manager”. Recognition he and its Director General, Scott Wu, did not answer questions whether it is intended to replace engineers or reduce the number the companies need.
Jayesh GovindarajanA Salesforce’s executive vice president focused on him, told my colleague Ana Altchek that the company was building “a system that can solve much for you” but “just don’t know what to solve”, making it know how To encode less important. “I can be in the minority here,” said Govindarajan, “but I think something that is much more essential than learning how to cod is agency.”
Alexander Petros, an independent open source software engineer, is a holding; He tells me he doesn’t use the generator to encode. “I worry that because he is in many ways doing things you used to hire new developers to do, it removes the degree on which new developers would try to do those things, They made those mistakes and then learn, ”he says. Petros says he tried chatgt but found that the code could be clumsy. If something in that code breaks down, people may not know how to fix it. “The process of producing the LLM code, for the foreseeable future, is almost completely distinct from the process of producing good software systems that last for a very long time,” he says. Plus, using it to solve problems means that it may not learn how to go through those obstacles in itself.
Chatbots lack creativity-this is where engineers, especially those who have done the job for a while, have an advantage of demand. Stanger says he hopes companies will use it not as an excuse for cutting engineers, but as a way to help them “get deeper into this code and become more creative”.
Stanger says the treatment of engineers as a faucet that can be turned on and off as a need for business, or even replaced with it, is likely to turn into fire for the long run. “If you have toxic enterprises that are interested in that hiking, the job of developers, I’m not sure they will create very good products,” he says.
People have made a long time in panic that technology will live their lives. But even when automation eliminates some work, technology often creates a demand for new roles; Most people today are work This did not exist before 1940.
The wholesale elimination of software engineers is likely not to be realized in the near future, but the photo for more experienced engineers is brighter. In the best case scenario, he means that they take more time to bend their muscles and solve deep problems.
Amanda Hoover It is a high correspondent in Business Insider that covers the technology industry. She writes about companies and the largest tendencies of technology.