Like the grand parent,
I think at a macro scale there will be more projects and more software engineering jobs over time as productivity increases.
But that’s across the whole economy. Individual businesses will very much behave idiosyncratically. Businesses tend to have an upside U in terms of their growth; unlike the economy as a whole, they don’t go up and to the right forever. And the economy as a whole, if you zoom out, does go up an to the right, but it is bumpy.
I guess in summary, I don’t think it makes sense to extrapolate long term trends by focusing on just the last 2 years, when the market for software engineers has cooled. After all, these cooler years followed what I can only feel were 3 or 4 years of a scalding hot market for software engineers.
I do believe on a macro level there will be more software engineering jobs in the short term (which is not contradictory to software engineers being laid off from some companies as part of AI workforce reshuffling among companies).
However there are at least 3 tipping points in the medium term that can alter this dynamics:
- AI becoming more capable and cost-effective than human in most aspects of software engineering. This would dramatically shift the ROI calculations and tip towards AI over human.
- We reach a stage where software resources and products are abundant, they solve most of our problems, and we don't need more software anymore. Sort of like WALL-E. Obviously we don't need so many software engineers then.
- AI systems take over software systems as the backbone of our technology layer, where AI is cheaper and more capable than software. Maybe we only need 100 different AI systems instead of 100k software systems. At this stage, we are going to be replacing software with AI, so we need less software engineers.
But that’s across the whole economy. Individual businesses will very much behave idiosyncratically. Businesses tend to have an upside U in terms of their growth; unlike the economy as a whole, they don’t go up and to the right forever. And the economy as a whole, if you zoom out, does go up an to the right, but it is bumpy.
I guess in summary, I don’t think it makes sense to extrapolate long term trends by focusing on just the last 2 years, when the market for software engineers has cooled. After all, these cooler years followed what I can only feel were 3 or 4 years of a scalding hot market for software engineers.