What is the future of the entry-level software engineering job?

I don’t think there’s going to be much change if any in the next 5 years. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when I see people say LLMs can replace software engineers. Maybe if you’re writing basic CRUD web apps, but most systems have enough complexity that an LLM cannot currently ascertain. Not to say they’re not helpful - ChatGPT is jawdroppingly good at pointing out bugs in code. They’re going to make people more productive but not enough to impact the labor market and remove the need for junior engineers.

People aren’t hiring juniors right now because of the hiring freezes that are only beginning to thaw. Teams are understaffed after having to do more with less and need to hire people who can hit the ground running. The headcount for juniors will come.

I'm going to make an optimistic and contrarian prediction: there will be even more jobs for software engineers in the future.

Current companies will hire fewer new grads and layoff older engineers. However, I believe AI will make it far cheaper for new software companies to develop their products. Therefore, we will have more software companies spring up. Those companies will in turn, hire more software engineers.

For example, let's say there are 10 total software companies today employing 100 employees each for a total of 1,000 software engineers employed. In the near future, I can see 100 software companies employing 12 engineers for a total of 1,200 software engineers. The net will be 200 engineers.

We will see an explosion in software products - some software fields will have more competitors due to the lower cost of creating an alternative and we will see brand new software fields spring up because it's now economically feasible to do them.

However, I think new grads that can make efficient use AI in developing software will be in very high demand - even today. Those who can't will have a hard time getting hired. Same for current software devs.

I believe that the reason we don't see this in 2024 yet is because of high interest rates and we are in a transition period. I can see the field getting very hot again in 2025/2026.

Where I work, things seem to take about 5-10 years longer than anyone plans.

Even if there are companies on the cutting edge of AI, there will always be those that take more time to adopt it. Others will never adopt it in any meaningful way, unless there is something affordable and off the shelf that can actually fulfill the business needs.

I’m going to remain highly skeptical of the promises of AI, until I see them actually come to fruition.

WYSIWYG HTML editors were supposed to be the end of needing web developers, now those are mostly gone, some template based services exist, and there are more web developers than ever.

Low-code was also supposed to be the end of needing developers, as anyone who knew the business requirements could plug some LEGO blocks together. That also seems to be dying, as the logic still needs to exist and that’s where people get lost, not to mention the lack of flexibility and customization than those systems can lead to.

Will AI replacing software engineers be any different? Only time will tell.

AI systems are "trained" using what is scraped from the internet. So if the application domain is well documented then there is a chance that AI might produce working code. But you still need competent programmers to assess whether that code is correct. Writing prompts and tests is likely to remain critical.

My prediction is that specialized domain knowledge plus SWE (with smart use of AI) skills are increasingly going to be the better way to gain employment.

Both my jobs have indefinitely axed co-op and new grad roles due to Co-pilot.

It isn’t just AI, as entry level people have always been poor value, but at this point we basically just want entry level to be a favour for employee’s kids.

I’m an overemployed Senior SDE, one at a unicorn and one at a generic company.

If entry-level software jobs are being eliminated by AI or other means, how will people gain the experience necessary to become more senior developers?

Prompt engineering will become an important skill -- i.e., finding the right words and ways to harness the power of generative AI.

Learning to stitch together AI tools (using the output from one tool as an input into another tool) seems like it will be in demand as well.

Prompt engineering along with being able to describe problems exceptionally well will become important.

Just the other day I needed to write a complex script using a library I knew very little about. I knew "what" I wanted to do and that the library could solve the issue, but did not know enough about the lib to to solve it. I wrote pseudo-code and ChatGPT was able to generate a working script on the first shot.

I predict more of our work will shift towards describing problems well and knowing less specifics about certain libraries.

Given the amount of times I've seen your question pop up, along with other vaguely related ones concerning the job market writ large, there's a lot of justified fear that this isn't a viable career path at all anymore.

I'm not a junior, or a grad, but I do have a shit resume that in total contains about 5-10 years of varied experience. I've been unemployed for a year, and am considering alternatives, like being a real garbage collector or electrician if I can find a way into those.

I'd note also that most of the responses in this thread are the same that Jon Stewart just lampooned in his recent episode on AI, with most CEOs describing how AI is actually a huge productivity boost and the best thing for humanity since literal fire, or that people will need to retrain to become "prompt engineers" (laughable, and why would you want to do that anyway). Anyone with an optimistic take still has a job, and everyone else doesn't see one coming along any time soon.

That said, there is way too much hype imo, I've found some use for ChatGPT and anticipate that there will be more, but it's mostly boilerplate or explaining things that already have some explanation somewhere. Asking for a solution to some performance problem that nobody's really documented anywhere hasn't proved useful, it'll just imagine something. It's not documenting Apple APIs that Apple themselves haven't bothered with, but it'll generate approximately passable examples of AppKit stuff that have been on the internet forever, and that's a great starting point for solving more interesting problems.

I do feel like most of the impact on the market is due to interest rates and layoffs, and there being a lack of profitability in most software anyway. The nature of the problem however doesn't remedy the fact that it'll be way way more competitive than it already was, and if you hadn't run the interview gauntlet prior to 2023, you sure as hell won't want to run it after 2025.