The software engineer profession is under threat from AI and intense competition

[midian182]

A hot potato: It used to be that becoming a software engineer virtually guaranteed a high salary and job security, but the market has slumped as companies continue to make mass layoffs and AI threatens to replace many workers. It's led to a situation where there is massive competition for jobs and low confidence within the profession.

Software engineering has long been a lucrative career for the majority who enter it. Google once offered $200,000 per year plus perks for those at the entry level, while an L5 engineer at OpenAI could make over $900,000 a year.

Despite being so well-paid, most software engineers are worried about the way the market is heading, writes Motherboard. The number of layoffs in the tech world may have slowed down slightly, but plenty of people are still losing their jobs.

The tech industry saw almost 165,000 people laid off in 2022, according to layoffs.fyi. The following year was one of the worst, with 262,682 being laid off from technology companies. We've not even reached the first two weeks of 2024 and already 27 tech firms have laid off 4,541 people, including the hundreds that were let go from Amazon this week.

Another major concern for software engineers is generative AI. The technology has been hailed as a new co-worker for those in the profession, able to drastically cut down project times. We've also heard companies such as IBM pledge not to get rid of programmer roles due to AI. But as with so many professions, artificial intelligence's impact on jobs in this field can't be understated; Emad Mostaque, CEO of Stability AI, believes most of India's outsourced coders will see their positions wiped out by 2025 due to generative AI.

According to a survey of 9,338 software engineers performed by Blind, an online anonymous platform for verified employees, 9 out of 10 believe it is more difficult to find a job now than before the pandemic. Sixty-six percent say it's "much harder."

Almost eight out of ten participants agree that the job market has become much more competitive over the last year. Only six percent of software engineers are "extremely confident" that they could find another job with the same compensation if they lost their current one, while 32 percent are not at all confident about doing so.

An unemployed software engineer told Motherboard that since losing his job in March, he has applied for over 250 jobs without success. Another said the job offers from recruiters have dried up, and that his decision to major in computer science at college now feels "very naïve." He summed the situation up in one sentence: "There's just so much f**king competition."

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https://www.techspot.com/news/101496-once-secure-profession-software-engineer-under-threat-ai.html

 

[oasked]

Good. Other jobs apart from software development are available (at considerably lower salaries)...

 

[VitalyT]

Cesspool cleaner pays better, and it is available, with little competition.

 

[Zsoltblabla]

Funny how the same problem doesn't apply to CEO’s or other upper management figures…. Their pay and bonuses only ever keep increasing

 

[Lowhangingfruit]

I wouldn't read too much into this. Software engineering is not going anywhere and there is still huge demand out there. Show me one thing you use on a daily basis that doesn't use software somewhere in the pipeline. Maybe breathing. Outdoor breathing because indoor breathing is leveraging HVAC.

However the field has accumulated a lot of bloat. I have been in the field for 15 years and salaries have never been more inflated. There is a glut of underperformers who expect absurd benefits for minimal work. The mantra of the "lazy programmer" has unfortunately become all too literal.

Personal anecdote: I had a previous coworker of mine reach out for some part time work. His criteria were a.) he is traveling through south america so wants remote only with flexible schedule. b.) part time. c.) focus on this or that technology. Yeah ok. good luck with that.

 

[Uncle Al]

Even if this were true and the demand was shrinking that would result in fewer people going this route and after awhile there would be very few software engineers available, meaning they can write their own ticket on wages and benefits. What's that old saying, what goes around, comes around ....

 

[wiyosaya]

Even if this were true and the demand was shrinking that would result in fewer people going this route and after awhile there would be very few software engineers available, meaning they can write their own ticket on wages and benefits. What's that old saying, what goes around, comes around ....

There are already areas in the US where it is difficult to find software engineers because they are in such high demand.

Also, I do not see AI, as long as it produces inferior and incorrect code, making much of a dent in the demand for real software engineers.

This is just another of those click-bait articles along the lines of "New technology X threatens anyone who is currently employed doing X" that we have heard through the years with things like Robotics. Heck, I bet that the same argument was heard when the computer was first developed.

 

[wiyosaya]

Cesspool cleaner pays better, and it is available, with little competition.

Good place for the use of AI.

 

[FaTaL]

I dont think its so much about software engineer / dev jobs dissapearing... its about how much they're getting paid.... because you can now hire some college kid that majored in english composition as programmer for $50k/year...because they can just use ChatGPT or other AI to do the work for em.

 

[mailpup]

I dont think its so much about software engineer / dev jobs dissapearing... its about how much they're getting paid.... because you can now hire some college kid that majored in english composition as programmer for $50k/year...because they can just use ChatGPT or other AI to do the work for em.

In that case why would you even need a college level kid?

 

[RedGuard]

I've tried to use ChatGPT since its launch. I cannot fathom what kind of developers A.I. will displace since in my case it failed 90% of the time and the rest 10% I had to spend more time debugging its generated code than it would've taken me to actually write.

 

[godrilla]

I wouldn't read too much into this. Software engineering is not going anywhere and there is still huge demand out there. Show me one thing you use on a daily basis that doesn't use software somewhere in the pipeline. Maybe breathing. Outdoor breathing because indoor breathing is leveraging HVAC.

However the field has accumulated a lot of bloat. I have been in the field for 15 years and salaries have never been more inflated. There is a glut of underperformers who expect absurd benefits for minimal work. The mantra of the "lazy programmer" has unfortunately become all too literal.

Personal anecdote: I had a previous coworker of mine reach out for some part time work. His criteria were a.) he is traveling through south america so wants remote only with flexible schedule. b.) part time. c.) focus on this or that technology. Yeah ok. good luck with that.

Maybe it's a trap, lazy developers whom by default would probably use ai to generate code that from what some say can be up to 90% faulty. Meaning it's a purge of lazy developers jobs and not actual talent. Who knows talented positions might go up with even more inflated salaries. The glass is half full. In the process the beta testers will improve the ai rinse repeat until 90 % error becomes a plautau near perfection . Imagine being a software engineer training an ai to replace your own job. If there are job security in software engineering it's probably somewhere who can proofread ai code. If ai is indeed the future cronies are pushing upon us.

 

[McMurdeR]

There's a hell of a lot more to software engineering than writing code.

 

[ibnMuhammad]

There's a hell of a lot more to software engineering than writing code.

Sadly, not in this day and age of agile methodology.

Most companies only care about writing code and delivery, no matter how shoddy, as long as it gets the job done. That's why so many development jobs are outsourced.

 

[FaTaL]

In that case why would you even need a college level kid?

cause chatGPT only works well (for coding) if you know how to ask it.. and you need to know how to think which what college supposed to teach you. but in the next 5 years or so, the guy working at mcdonalds will probably be able to do it so =\

 

[McMurdeR]

Sadly, not in this day and age of agile methodology.

Most companies only care about writing code and delivery, no matter how shoddy, as long as it gets the job done. That's why so many development jobs are outsourced.

One of the key principles of Agile, literally, is continuous improvement. The notion that it has anything to do with quick delivery is a common misunderstanding.

Software Engineering encompasses specification, requirements gathering, architecture, solution design, project management, security, networking, analytics, developement, testing, quality control, dev ops, deployment, and more.. Agile is just one of many frameworks that can be employed to organise these activities at scale.

Any notion that today's AI technology, which can certainly generate and even check snippets of code, in an enterprise environment - with respect - suggests a fundamental misunderstanding of either AI or Engineering.

 

[Jme Kerul]

Looking to see the fallout after the British Post office scandal with their buggy Horizon app and those innocents thrown in jail.

 

[WhoCaresAnymore]

Kind of like the auto-checkout lines. Notice how empty they are when there is a cashier available to ring you out. If they want to pay me to scan and bag my goods with a %off, fine. I always prefer to just line my items up on the belt and let another individual do what they are supposed to do.

I also prefer a human face to acknowledge.

ADD: Ever have a problem at a self checkout. You get the "RED ALERT" flashing and have to wait for someone anyways.

Moral to the story. AI can't do everything. People need people.

 

[MyIOnU]

Nope. AI can't do everything. Also, you need people to program AI as well lol.

 

[alexnode]

Looking to see the fallout after the British Post office scandal with their buggy Horizon app and those innocents thrown in jail.

It was a terrible thing, a scam really, but it has nothing to do with the systems that can be developed today. The problem with generative machine learning is that it needs specific training and very good data. You can't just put the thing on the internet to find solutions. You need trillions of lines of high quality code, and supervised learning with top professionals for a long time. Then you can claim that you solved coding to an extend. I doubt people will do things like that for the next few years. Maybe some hedge funds and super wealthy private companies will do it first. We are going to see a lot of ugly implementations that not only cost jobs but degrade services for all sort of things. The second generation of ML AI will start being deeper and more serious and high quality data will become more profitable than Oil.

 

[erickmendes]

Our AI overlords are looking, don't underestimate them.

 

[Crunch]

Good. Other jobs apart from software development are available (at considerably lower salaries)...

Why is that good? Terrible attitude towards your fellow man. Schadenfreude doesn't become anyone.
Also several attempts at generating usable code with AI for me, has failed in some way.