Assuming it's a real trend rather than hype/excuses... It'll be interesting to see all the bugs and maintenance headaches that occur on a delay. That said, the job market can probably stay irrational longer than I can stay solvent.
I expect to lean heavily on softer skills like "being able to collaborate with product owners help them figure out what they actually want to build", or "able to usefully simplify concepts in a way that helps non-developers make decisions."
I recently wrote my thoughts on this topic.
https://github.com/paradite/ai-replace-swe
Short answer: Leverage AI, become more productive with AI and make sure you can output more value than just AI itself. Also move up the value chain to product management, team management.
It’s a strange idea that team management is going to be more valuable if individual engineers are more productive.
I’m actually _more_ worried about team managers than line engineers when it comes to AI impact.
It’s funny, when this article was submitted earlier today…
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/you-blamed-dei-for-hur...
Someone said that people would start blaming AI.
It’s not AI. There are too many people chasing too few jobs and the BigTech companies aside from Google are focusing on profitable segments.
The IPO market is dead and which caused the entire VC Ponzi scheme to collapse.
As far as upcoming CS graduates? They are screwed. Why would most companies want to hire new grads when there are proven experienced people looking for jobs?
New grads will work for less and less compensation?
And they are spending months doing negative work. How much use are new grads for the first year? Especially with remote work, you can find plenty of experienced CRUD/enterprise/framework devs willing to work for $125K.
Learn a trade.
So, Salesforce stops hiring software engineers, but OpenAI has 20 pages of open positions? That doesn't sound quite right.
That makes complete sense to me. OpenAI is selling shovels and putting $$$ into improving and selling those shovels.
Salesforce (and other app builders) are buying those shovels (AI) to lower costs to build applications
Keeping this analogy, I guess it would be like not using shovels to build a shovel factory. Obviously, OpenAI needs a group of very talented experts, which are not getting replaced by AI soon, but they hire for all kinds of positions, including regular software engineers.
Even if OpenAI hires 1000 people this year at $1M salary each, that’s just $1B. This year they plan to spend $8.7B. People they hire are still competitive with their best models, so why not hire people?
Though I’ll be surprised if they’re still hiring two years from now.
Is it really AI or an excuse for a COVID / low interest rates over-hire?
I find it very confusing that everyone took the AI narrative at face value, and the AI "replacement" as fait accompli. Did it happen at all? At best, AI is intern level right now.
I'm buying AI tech stocks and studying AI in depth.
> I'm buying AI tech stocks
I'm not sure that's really hedging your bets, since there are a bunch of potential futures where you might lose your job and those stocks lose value.
So is everyone else…
Start a food company. People need to eat.
That's where my thoughts are