When Florencio Rendon was laid off from his third construction job in three years, he said, “It was the straw that broke the camel’s back”. He was 36, a father of two, and felt time was running out to find a career that would offer higher pay and more stability. An Army veteran, Rendon explored training programmes he could fund using his military benefits. He landed on a coding boot camp. Next, his application to a course run by the company Fullstack Academy was accepted. He graduated from an online programme that he completed from his home in the Bronx, New York, US. The setback came after graduation.
Between the time Rendon applied for the coding boot camp and the time he graduated, what Rendon imagined as a “golden ticket” to a better life had expired. About 1,35,000 start-up and tech industry workers were laid off from their jobs, according to one count. At the same time, new artificial intelligence tools — like ChatGPT, an online chatbot from OpenAI — which could be used as coding assistants, were quickly becoming mainstream, and the outlook for coding jobs was shifting. Rendon says he didn’t land a single interview.
Compared with five years ago, the number of active job postings for software developers has dropped 56 per cent, according to data compiled by CompTIA, an American non-profit that issues IT certifications. For inexperienced developers, the plunge is an even worse 67 per cent.
“I would say this is the worst environment for entry-level jobs in tech that I’ve seen in 25 years,” said Venky Ganesan, a partner at the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures.
Since their emergence in the mid-2010s, intensive courses in basic coding skills have been praised as a quick route to a high-paying career, especially for people who didn’t graduate from college.
But the industry pulled back from hiring at the same time that new AI coding tools were starting to become mainstream. About 60 per cent of 65,000 developers surveyed in May by StackOverflow, a software developer community, said they had used AI coding tools this year.
As with any discussion about automation, there are two ways people tend to forecast the outcomes of this development. Armando Solar-Lezama, who is leader of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Assisted Programming Group in the US, believes that AI tools are good news for programming careers. If coding becomes easier, he argues, we will just make more, better software. We will use it to solve problems that wouldn’t have been worth the hassle previously, and standards will skyrocket.
The other view: “I think it’s pretty grim,” said Zach Sims, a co-founder of Codecademy, an online coding tutorial. He was talking specifically about job prospects for coding boot camp graduates.
To be clear, both Solar-Lezama and Sims — and just about everyone working in technology whom I interviewed for this article — still think you should learn to code. It’s an arguably necessary exercise for learning more advanced mathematics. But on its own, it gets you only so far.
In the future, entry-level coders may need a broader range of skills and more training to be effective. They may have to understand more about how their code works within a broader system. Strategising around business problems is also becoming more important, said Stephanie Wernick Barker, the president of Mondo, a tech staffing and recruitment firm, “So college degrees are still king.”
In other words, the biggest change taking shape in software jobs may be not that AI replaces software engineers, but that it makes it more difficult to become one.
In the arena of cliché job advice, “learn to code” has been replaced by a call for “AI skills”.
MIT, Cornell, Northwestern, Columbia and other universities in the US now lend their names to AI certificates. The most popular job titles specific to AI include “machine-learning engineer” and “artificial intelligence engineer”, according to CompTIA. Some skills listed in these job postings are “deploying and scaling machine-learning models” and “automating large language model training, versioning, monitoring and deployment processes”.
Another category of “AI skill” feels more elusive. In a recent survey of more than 9,000 executives by Microsoft and LinkedIn, 66 per cent said they wouldn’t hire someone without AI skills, but it’s unclear exactly what those skills look like.
It doesn’t help that the technology is moving quickly: depending on whom you ask, we may be either a few years or many decades away from AI that can basically do anything the human brain can. When I asked Matt Beane — who teaches technology management at the University of California, Santa Barbara — what we should be teaching young people to make them employable, he said: “You have to just stay sharp. You have to keep learning. Until further notice.”
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