I've always loved animals, and I would love to quit and own a farm where I breed and care for horses. I also like cats a lot I could see myself working as a cat therapist. My children tell me I am a very good cook too and should start a business selling crepes for breakfast.
None of these ideas are as lucrative as writing SW. I'm not technically trained as a SWE though I do write it, I'm a hardware person.
> I believe there will be a need for far fewer of us.
I disagree. Throughout the history of computing the number of SWE's has gone up and they have become, overall, more capable [0]. That hasn't cause a need for fewer of us, in fact the demand remains overall strong.
I predict instead it will drive the need for more of us rather than less. And potentially even "better" (or at least healthier as I see it) jobs. What I mean by that is, instead of outsourcing (locally or abroad) companies will be able to bring someone in-house. In the past, dropping the load on 1-2 people would have been untenable, with LLMs/AI a number of things become plausible. And this scales to every level. The company that previous outsourced their development and could have hired 3-5 developers (but that wasn't enough) can now consider hiring them.
Yes, the larger corporations might decide they can get the same done with fewer employees, or they might decide to do more with the same.
I do think a number of SaaS tools might be in more trouble if companies decide to just build in-house alternatives that are custom for their exact needs. But perhaps SaaS will adapt to "source available" or some other kind of way to allow easier extension of their core offering so that companies just build a sidecar or thin layer over the core that covers their needs better than a "one size fits all" SaaS ever could.
Perhaps this is too rosey of a view of the future but it's one that I think is at least partly backed by the history of the industry.
[0] And at least what they're able to produce, even if you disagree about the quality.
> I do think a number of SaaS tools might be in more trouble if companies decide to just build in-house alternatives that are custom for their exact needs. But perhaps SaaS will adapt to "source available" or some other kind of way to allow easier extension of their core offering so that companies just build a sidecar or thin layer over the core that covers their needs better than a "one size fits all" SaaS ever could.
Very good point, something that I've encountered at my company already.
The latter, our company is replacing tools we used to pay for with bespoke software.
Another interesting one is the hosting of the open source equivalents of SaaS products on on-prem hardware. Turns out that agents take very well to infrastructure-as-code setups, making managing deployments of software far less work than it used to be. So we can use X database (albeit an older and less feature-rich version) on our own infrastructure that we can easily scale/tailor to our needs without paying for the enterprise SaaS version
Yep, personally I'm running even more self-hosted stuff than I was previously. The cost to setup/test is so much lower. I can, and have, instructed an agent "Setup XYZ self-hosted project on my ABC server and document it in my Obsidian Vault" many times. Sometimes I tear it down later if it's not what I wanted but in the past there was a much higher bar that had to be cleared to consider adding new stuff. Even when the setup was relatively easy.
I hope that open source software and/or slightly modified open source software sees a huge surge because of this. A move to "open core" products (free or paid) that then companies argument/extend as they need for their specific use-case.
I think the process is already ongoing for the juniors and new graduates? Now, speaking as a senior, a quite mediocre one, I wouldn’t be surprised if I can never find a similar job if I’m laid off.
i'm a junior (a little over 3 yrs xp, some might consider that low senior), and never experienced pre-2023 job market, so i don't really have much to compare the market over the last couple years to. fortunately i had 1-2 years where I didn't use much ai. i don't see my company laying me off in the foreseeable future, but I don't have great pay either. over the last few months i've been getting a few recruiter emails every month, sometimes every week. about 50% are not very applicable to my experience
ai or not, i've always wanted to start my own business, and ai likely will make that easier (maybe)
I get the feeling the vast number of people already in a manager role (who are not techincally grounded) will not be able to understand the benefit of allowing SWEs to step into that role, as opposed to taking on that role themselves.
The companies that end up doing this will be more like Google with technical managers.
The other companies will stay where they are at right now.
Learning to manage code bots is way easier if you know code. Managing code bots when you don’t know code leads to how SWEs have been mismanaged in the past.
I've basically been a personal hedge fund manager for the better part of 2 years. I'm still working as a SWE because it's interesting, if I get laid off I'll be retiring.
Let's say I have 2 years to invent a new career before I'm broke.
Not a junior either, but I'd rather do anything else than be expected to turn into a middle manager for AI agents. That's not why I got into computers.
I've always loved animals, and I would love to quit and own a farm where I breed and care for horses. I also like cats a lot I could see myself working as a cat therapist. My children tell me I am a very good cook too and should start a business selling crepes for breakfast.
None of these ideas are as lucrative as writing SW. I'm not technically trained as a SWE though I do write it, I'm a hardware person.
> I believe there will be a need for far fewer of us.
I disagree. Throughout the history of computing the number of SWE's has gone up and they have become, overall, more capable [0]. That hasn't cause a need for fewer of us, in fact the demand remains overall strong.
I predict instead it will drive the need for more of us rather than less. And potentially even "better" (or at least healthier as I see it) jobs. What I mean by that is, instead of outsourcing (locally or abroad) companies will be able to bring someone in-house. In the past, dropping the load on 1-2 people would have been untenable, with LLMs/AI a number of things become plausible. And this scales to every level. The company that previous outsourced their development and could have hired 3-5 developers (but that wasn't enough) can now consider hiring them.
Yes, the larger corporations might decide they can get the same done with fewer employees, or they might decide to do more with the same.
I do think a number of SaaS tools might be in more trouble if companies decide to just build in-house alternatives that are custom for their exact needs. But perhaps SaaS will adapt to "source available" or some other kind of way to allow easier extension of their core offering so that companies just build a sidecar or thin layer over the core that covers their needs better than a "one size fits all" SaaS ever could.
Perhaps this is too rosey of a view of the future but it's one that I think is at least partly backed by the history of the industry.
[0] And at least what they're able to produce, even if you disagree about the quality.
> I do think a number of SaaS tools might be in more trouble if companies decide to just build in-house alternatives that are custom for their exact needs. But perhaps SaaS will adapt to "source available" or some other kind of way to allow easier extension of their core offering so that companies just build a sidecar or thin layer over the core that covers their needs better than a "one size fits all" SaaS ever could.
Very good point, something that I've encountered at my company already.
> something that I've encountered at my company already.
On the receiving end, as in losing customers to this? Or is your company replacing tools they used to pay for?
I'm very interested in how other places are handling this.
The latter, our company is replacing tools we used to pay for with bespoke software.
Another interesting one is the hosting of the open source equivalents of SaaS products on on-prem hardware. Turns out that agents take very well to infrastructure-as-code setups, making managing deployments of software far less work than it used to be. So we can use X database (albeit an older and less feature-rich version) on our own infrastructure that we can easily scale/tailor to our needs without paying for the enterprise SaaS version
Yep, personally I'm running even more self-hosted stuff than I was previously. The cost to setup/test is so much lower. I can, and have, instructed an agent "Setup XYZ self-hosted project on my ABC server and document it in my Obsidian Vault" many times. Sometimes I tear it down later if it's not what I wanted but in the past there was a much higher bar that had to be cleared to consider adding new stuff. Even when the setup was relatively easy.
I hope that open source software and/or slightly modified open source software sees a huge surge because of this. A move to "open core" products (free or paid) that then companies argument/extend as they need for their specific use-case.
I think the process is already ongoing for the juniors and new graduates? Now, speaking as a senior, a quite mediocre one, I wouldn’t be surprised if I can never find a similar job if I’m laid off.
I would be interested to hear from juniors + new grads tbh. They're definitely the ones most immediately impacted by this
i'm a junior (a little over 3 yrs xp, some might consider that low senior), and never experienced pre-2023 job market, so i don't really have much to compare the market over the last couple years to. fortunately i had 1-2 years where I didn't use much ai. i don't see my company laying me off in the foreseeable future, but I don't have great pay either. over the last few months i've been getting a few recruiter emails every month, sometimes every week. about 50% are not very applicable to my experience
ai or not, i've always wanted to start my own business, and ai likely will make that easier (maybe)
With AI taking over coding, you can become more manager role instead of SWE itself.
You can run agents by yourself on your 9-5 and still make crucial decisions in software industry.
I get the feeling the vast number of people already in a manager role (who are not techincally grounded) will not be able to understand the benefit of allowing SWEs to step into that role, as opposed to taking on that role themselves.
The companies that end up doing this will be more like Google with technical managers.
The other companies will stay where they are at right now.
Learning to manage code bots is way easier if you know code. Managing code bots when you don’t know code leads to how SWEs have been mismanaged in the past.
Definitely. Been thinking of police school (not in USA lol) or some other public service that is actually needed in the society.
I’m a data engineer at a massive bureaucratic institution. Working on full stack so I can build cool stuff for people
IMO its better to just wait and see how it shakes out rather than overreacting
Think about people who left the industry in the dot-com era and how that probably seemed smart at the time
I've basically been a personal hedge fund manager for the better part of 2 years. I'm still working as a SWE because it's interesting, if I get laid off I'll be retiring.
Any good tips based on your experience here?
Let's say I have 2 years to invent a new career before I'm broke.
Not a junior either, but I'd rather do anything else than be expected to turn into a middle manager for AI agents. That's not why I got into computers.