Meta is reducing headcount and canceling software-engineering hiring requisitions, while Google reports most new code is AI-generated. Employment of software developers ages 22 to 25 has dropped 20% since late 2022. Despite these signals, a 50-person consulting firm hired full-stack developers in January and April and expects another hire before year end. AI is changing the developer profession, but hiring continues because new capabilities lower barriers and increase the amount of software work. A prior example at Microsoft showed that tools that make a job category cheaper and more accessible did not eliminate specialists; instead, the overall surface area of work expanded and complex projects increased, keeping elite professionals in demand.
"Meta announced last month that it is cutting 8,000 employees and canceling another 6,000 open requisitions, many of them for software engineers. Google's CEO told Cloud Next in April that 75% of new code at the company is now AI-generated. Stanford researchers report that employment of software developers between the ages of 22 and 25 has fallen 20% since late 2022."
"And yet, in the same window, my 50-person consulting firm hired its first full-stack software developer in January. We hired a second in April. We're likely to hire a third before the year is out. Big Tech is right that AI is rewriting the developer profession. We're right to be hiring into it. Both things are true - and the gap between them is the most important workforce story no one is telling."
"Sixteen years ago at Microsoft, I helped build a product that severely threatened an entire job category. Power BI was a direct challenge to the elite priesthood of Business Intelligence developers - highly-paid professionals who'd spent years learning a deeply technical craft. Our explicit goal was to unlock professional-grade BI for a much broader audience. Good for the world. Bad, on paper, for the priesthood."
"But the priesthood didn't disappear. They got busier. A profession formerly numbered in the thousands now numbers in the millions - and the original specialists, the ones who actually understood the hard parts, found themselves more in demand than ever. The total surface area of BI in the world grew by orders of magnitude. Even if most of that new work was beneath their pay grade, the number of complex projects also exploded. Elite professionals were the natural choice for those."
#ai-generated-code #software-engineering-workforce #hiring-and-layoffs #full-stack-development #business-intelligence-automation
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