AI Is Not Coming For Your (Developer) Job

But the job is changing

No, AI is not coming for your developer job, regardless of the nonsense the hype mongers are pushing. (I'm talking just about developer jobs—it obviously impacts other areas.) That's not to say the layoffs aren't real, but rather that the corporations are hiding normal corporate behavior behind a smokescreen of "AI makes us vastly more efficient!" Those layoffs are a hedge against the current economic downturn. They are downsizing to game the next quarter's earnings numbers. Don't expect the layoffs to stop, but they have nothing to do with "efficiency gains, because AI!" The problems are tariffs, isolationism, and the failure to reinvest wealth concentrated in a very few hands back into the economy.

For example [from https://t.ly/jQyZO]:

"Asked about the cuts on an October earnings call, Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy told analysts that the decision was 'not really financially driven and it's not even really AI-driven. Not right now, at least.'"

"A recent survey of global executives published in the Harvard Business Review found that although AI has been cited as the reason for some layoffs, those cuts are almost entirely anticipatory: executives expect big efficiency gains that have not yet been realized."

Execs are making decisions based on magical thinking. "Soon" is always six months away. Many of these companies will not survive while they chase the end of that particular rainbow.

AI just doesn't yield the imagined gains, at least not if you consider the entire product lifecycle and you want a reliable, secure, extensible, and scalable product that does what customers need. I'm not saying an LLM isn't a useful tool, only that it's not the panacea these execs imagine. The only way to speed up an entire system is to address the entire system, especially any bottlenecks. The bottleneck is only rarely the coding. Spotify, which has gone full AI to write its code, hasn't laid anybody off because it understands these issues.

There is one place where an AI-related layoff might be justified. Working with AI requires skills that some developers seem unwilling or unable to acquire. Coding alone, no matter how good you are, is no longer sufficient. You need to understand systems thinking and software architecture. You need strong written and verbal communication skills, as well as the social skills to make that communication effective. You need to talk to your customers and have empathy for their problems. Focusing on the technical side alone is no longer sufficient (though still necessary). The "programmer" job description has changed, and you need to adapt to remain employable. That's always been the case in our profession, of course, but the changes wrought by AI seem particularly challenging.