Or do you think software development is a lot more specialized and, although AI will replace some of the jobs currently done by humans, it will also create new roles similar to how the rise of online retailers like Amazon or the advertising companies we're familiar with like Google and Facebook created new roles like "Network Engineer" or system administrator.
If this time comes where AI made SWE jobs a minimum wage job, what is your game plan, then?
40 years later... I haven't been replaced.
Aside from all the tech. challenges with AI - the legal stuff hasn't been figured out yet. Epic is banning AI generated assets from their marketplace due to copyright concerns, Air Canada was just required to compensate customers for chat bot errors (so, how would that scale to banking? medical? much higher stakes), and we're still figuring out what the rules are around training data.
And that doesn't cover the tech. problems with hallucinations, bad code, etc etc.
I anticipate AI just being IDE++ (good for code exploration, generating 'skeleton's for programs, etc) for at least another 10 years. After that, it might be more capable. In short - AI still needs an 'expert' to vet its work :-D
If something like that plays out with SWEs then we probably become more like a technical product manager.
I believe there are going to be jobs that become fairly low skill+low pay. But I'm excited about the possibility that more things become approachable as custom development. There's the possibility that more software development is being done: If a $50K custom development job can now be done for $1-2K, that opens up a lot of long tail revenue. Even if the AIs can do 80-90% of it, there's still going to be a 10-20% that needs somebody that knows what is going on. A rising tide buoys all ships.
The phrase I keep thinking of is: You aren't going to lose your job to AI, you're going to lose it to a human that can leverage AI.
However, as more people become interested in software engineering and AI helps make basic tasks easier, the pay for these jobs will vary a lot. Ultimately, I expect this variation to consolidate around two primary AI-impacted groups.
- Those that sit high on the abstraction stack caused by AI, i.e. those developing, training and debugging new models.
- And those using AI to do their day to day SWE job.
There will be fewer jobs higher up the abstraction stack you sit, but the pay will probably be very competitive. The further down the abstraction stack you go, the lower the pay.
However, I don't believe software engineering roles will ever approach minimum wage levels as long as they require the ability to read, write, and comprehend code. In addition to understanding the problem at hand in the 'bigger picture' and devising scalable solutions.
If one's role is reduced to merely overseeing AI-generated code without actively engaging in problem-solving or considering alternative solutions, can such a position truly be considered software engineering?
Your teller example is interesting because it reminds me of this great novel
https://www.amazon.com/Remember-me-God-Myron-Kaufmann/dp/B00...
where the protagonist is a Jewish person trying to work is way into Harvard and one of his friends is a WASP whose family runs a bank that managers to get him an entry job as a teller and he learns quite quickly that a bank teller is a dead-end job where you can get in trouble for doing things wrong but never get rewarded for doing anything right.