It’s a holiday here so I’ll write a long reply

What kind of impact do you think AI will have on programming/tech jobs?

I continue to think the long term impact will be incremental rather than transformative. If this were ditch digging, the current trajectory of “AI” is more like a better shovel than a replacement digger. I’ve used AI to write boilerplate and do some code translation tasks which it has done surprisingly well at (though pretty much never perfectly). But that is a far cry from being able to do all of my job which includes:

• getting full descriptions of tasks and, crucially, asking for clarification when something is under or incorrectly specified
• sometimes advocating to not to solve a problem because the maintenance won’t be worth the investment
• actually deploying the code and monitoring for problems
• soliciting feedback
• having ownership of systems and culpability for when those systems stop doing they’re supposed to

The idea that LLMs or even LLM-powered agents can replace junior SWEs simply makes no sense to me since writing code is only part of the job.

It’s telling that the video which makes the case for SWE replacement under the heading “140k job cuts” was probably the worst one. Though I do thank you for including it since it is a genuine opinion held by many. The video starts by noting all the job losses in the sector, claims “AI is probably to blame”, but then proceeds to not argue for that position in any way. It includes some quick cuts of some people restating the thesis of the video. But we don’t know who those people are or why we should trust their opinion. The video then makes the eminently baseless claim that “now there’s AI that can do the job of an entire team of software engineers and do it more efficiently.” Utterly ridiculous. Show me literally any example of this. Then it proceeds to provide the only “evidence” for the claim by saying that tech leaders are encouraging people to use AI in their work. But if workers are being replaced en masse, who is it exactly who’s supposed to be using AI?!

Pretty much every negative thing said about the job market can potentially be attributed to economic factors rather than AI directly replacing workers. So if you’re arguing that the negative factors are due to AI specifically, you need a good argument. I’m personally most aligned with the first video in this regard. At the very least, I’ve yet to encounter an argument which changes my mind.

If I had to choose what I think will be the most tangible, lasting impact to the field, it’s that familiarity with LLM-powered workflows will become an area of expected competency. Akin to working with an editor/IDE.

Have you or anyone you know been impacted directly?

No. But I’d be very curious to hear of a first hand account of this happening.

Does it concern or worry you?

I am concerned. Not about AI taking jobs because it can actually do the entirety of those jobs, though. I’m concered about the hit to the economy after the AI bubble bursts. That will affect our employment.

I also want to throw a wrench into the discussion by questioning the ability of SWEs to meaningfully weigh in on the economic impact of AI. You might think that, as we’re in the trenches, we’d have some special insight on the subject. We obviously have inside knowledge about exactly what AI is/isn’t capable of because we’re the ones using it. But I argue we don’t necessarily because the question is also about economics which isn’t our field.

There’s an infamous comment on the /r/badeconomics forum about the CGP Grey’s 2014 video “Humans need not apply” (renamed at some point) replying directly the the creator himself. The comment states near the end:

More generally we argue historically automation has not reduced employment. Automation has historically acted as a multiplier on productivity which drives demand for human labor. Pre-singularity its very hard to imagine this changing, we will undoubtedly encounter disruption effects (people will have the wrong skills, their earnings will reflect this matching issue rather then unemployment doing so) but from an economics perspective there is little difference between replacing a field worker with a tractor and an office worker with an algorithm. Certainly the office worker needs to find a new job, if they don’t have demanded skills that job may not offer earnings growth opportunities but it doesn’t imply unemployment anymore then the mechanization of agriculture did. The 2nd question in that IGM survey represents the SBTC split, while SBTC is reasonably well supported it lacks clear consensus; its not clear which of the two inequality scenarios will play out.

Basically, many economists aren’t sold on the idea that automation via pre-singularity AI will result in the level of economic disruption that is often claimed. And I think their reasoning needs to be contended with. (GCP Grey never replied, btw.)

I make this point because I think it’s easy to jump from “AI has had or will have this or that effect on my day to day” to “this is what the job market will look like due to that” without fully connecting the dots. I’m guilty of this myself!

It will be bad for software engineering as a career and bad for technology generally and cause a regression. I do for sure agree with the above comment about the technological revolt.

In short, my optimistic version of the future is technological revolt.

I would much prefer to have cassettes and CDs again than keep dealing with streaming services, ads, and having to VPN to different countries to watch things.

But to the point of AI, CEOs and managers will gleefully think they can let engineers go and not replace them because “of course AI will make our other engineers so much more productive”. And a lot of garbage will be pumped out because of that, and for a while. I predict it will mostly be a lot of proof-of-concept type projects that will then be put into production because managers and stakeholders are impatient. Those hastily produced applications will be nearly unmaintainable because of what LLMs pump out.

Systems wholesale will need to be replaced and bugs we aren’t even aware of that are currently baked into every LLM are being injected into project being produced because “we need to be efficient” and get things done quickly.