In 2023, not long after ChatGPT made generative AI mainstream, a poll on the anonymous workplace forum Blind asked, bluntly, whether young software engineers were “fucked.” Some 42% of the more than 13,000 respondents picked the response “Yes? U guys are pretty much fucked.”
This past October, Sundar Pichai proudly announced on an earnings call that AI was writing more than 25% of new code at Google. Mark Zuckerberg has said that Meta will build an AI engineer to write code. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff announced a hiring freeze for engineers in 2025, saying AI had increased productivity by 30% — and then news broke that Salesforce planned to lay off 1,000 workers. (It’s still hiring salespeople for AI-powered products.) Stripe intends to cut some engineers while also growing its overall head count this year.
All of this raises the question of what junior engineers will take on if some basic tasks become automated. Some product managers have speculated that AI will increasingly take on some technical coding tasks and circumvent their need for engineers. Overall, job postings for software engineers on Indeed are at a five-year low.
Are engineers really coding themselves into obsolescence?
AI is knocking down the career ladder by doing more of the coding work of entry-level engineers, but, at least for now, the increased coding output from AI is also increasing the demand for and value of experienced, creative developers to interpret and put the AI’s work to good use.
While many obituaries have been written to mourn the death of coding, engineering is more than writing code: It requires creative thinking to solve problems and expertise to read code. As it is now, AI isn’t an original thinker.
“AI can’t support what it doesn’t know,” says James Stanger, the chief technology evangelist at CompTIA, a nonprofit trade association for the US IT industry. “I still don’t think that it is something that can fully replace a good developer.” He adds, though, that “if a developer is not creative, then you can replace them very easily.”
oftware engineering has been around since the 1960s, but hiring boomed in the ’90s with the dot-com era. Coding boot camps became common in the 2010s as the demand for engineers outpaced the supply. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1.9 million people worked as software developers, quality-assurance analysts, and testers in 2023. The bureau projected that the industry would grow by 17% from 2023 to 2033, outpacing the national avera
