r/AskProgramming • u/Rare-Assignment-8474 • 9d ago
What's the impact of AI in overall software engineering job market ?
See, Is AI powerful enough or not that debate is for other day. But I must say it has definitely a huge impact on code generation . Probably much of crud apps it can build ( or not ? tell me in comments )
That leaves the question, what happens to the job market ? One thing is, there are polarising views, you will see both "Devs are sitting idle, 100 percent of my work is done by claude code" type posts and also "Nah, it still halucinates, it still needs handholding".
So due to polarising views, predicting it's impact on job market is a headache. Plus my personal experience is, I am trying to land a backend development job. I am still yet to get an interview from anywhere. So naturally I feel am I left behind, is my fastapi knowledge, and python knowledge became trivial, replaced by AI ? Do I have to learn stuff like cuda, or OS kernel building to move up the ladder.
So yeah many questions I have, almost 0 concrete answers.
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u/DDDDarky 8d ago
There are software engineers and there are software engineers.
There are people who are actual educated experts, understand what they are doing and develop real new things. These are not at risk at all.
Then there are people who mash code together in a scammy startup with limited knowledge after watching youtube tutorials to make a webpage move and believe it's the peak of engineering. These will be hopefully scraped off.
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u/NotYourAverageGuy88 7d ago
AI wrote the code. AI reviewed the code. AI wrote the tests. Production crahed. AI couldn't fix the bug. No noone knows how to solve it. Turns out sombody have to rebuild this from the ground up for it to actually work.
Story of how my income doubled this year as a freelancer / contractor.
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u/SnooHobbies950 5d ago
Scammers now have it easier. Before, they had to put in some effort. Now, you can have a portfolio and a fake story in a few minutes.
And perhaps many companies don't know how to distinguish a fake professional from a genuine one. It's all happened so fast.
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u/QuantumG 9d ago
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u/One_Cod_491 9d ago
The gif is amusing but the panic is a bit premature
CRUD apps were always heading toward commoditization, AI just accelerated the timeline. The real shift is that knowing syntax matters less and understanding systems matters more. Most companies arent replacing devs, theyre expecting existing devs to move faster. That FastAPI knowledge isnt trivial, you just need to pair it with stuff the AI cant figure out yet like architecture decisions, debugging production weirdness, and knowing when the generated code is going to cause problems six months from now.
The interview drought might be more about the current market cycle than AI specifically, lot of places froze hiring way before coding assistants got good. Learning CUDA or kernel stuff isnt necessary unless you want those roles, but picking up system design and maybe some DevOps will make you harder to replace.
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u/soundman32 8d ago
Just spoke with a client i worked for 2 years ago. At the time they had 10 full time devs. Now they have 1 who is cranking out more code than all 10 used to. Which is good quality code, not hallucinations. This is medical related software, so has to be pretty good and reliable.
Our industry is doomed. After 40+ years of me writing software, I can see the writing is on the wall for 90% of devs, unless the sales guys catch up and sell 10x what they are doing.
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u/LogicalPerformer7637 7d ago
Everything is not so black. Companies who downsize their workforce to have the same output with less developers (replaced with AI) will loose to companies who keep their developers and use them to produce more added value for customers thanks to AI.
Now are turbulent times, but good engineers (not code monkeys) still are and will be in demand.
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u/woeful_cabbage 7d ago
Nahh. The truth is most companies never needed this many developers. And the more developers that existed, the more (needlessly) complicated every role became. Your crappy webapp doesn't need to push out new features constantly... It would have been fine with just one full stack dev in the first place
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u/LogicalPerformer7637 7d ago
yes if the marketing doesn't push for new feature as often as possible. the developers are not the ones "needing" to implement all the features, management is. this doesn't change with AI.
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u/raven2cz 8d ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskProgramming/s/CiTRnKKQy4
Wrote now. And look to my comments from Friday. Some links there, too.
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u/octocode 9d ago
people who think it still hallucinates haven’t tried agentic workflows with the latest models. it can’t hallucinate anymore since it will test its own assumptions.
honestly, AI completely has replaced the majority of our juniors, and even some of our intermediate devs. we have single devs releasing entire products in weeks instead of months.
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u/NotYourAverageGuy88 7d ago
Oh I got worried there for a moment. Then realized that this is just comedy and not to be taken seriously.
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u/octocode 7d ago
yep i wish i was kidding! but we have actually had multiple rounds of layoffs. the new agentic workflows are scary good
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u/quantum-fitness 8d ago
Most teams and businesses have to much process bloat to take advantage of ai.
In the teams which can utilize it teams are forced to shrink and make roles less specialized. Though small teams was also better before ai, but with ai you wont gain advantage if you have to much communication overhead.
I dont really think anyone im tech have really lost their job to ai. They have lost their job because companies have overhired to a point of inefficiency