I’m a SWE, use AI everyday to do my job, and I think the idea that AI is the cause of reduced engineer hiring is basically false.
There is probably some marginal effect, but I instead think what we’re seeing today is because:
interest rates are high relative to the boom years of 2012-2022
this pushes the risk free rate up
this means VCs can be more conservative
thus they demand portfolio companies spend money more efficiently
an easy way to be more efficient is to employ higher productivity SWEs
this cuts out the bottom of the market because it falls below a productivity bar
If interest rates were still 0%, companies could afford to hire lower productivity engineers and things would be more similar to how they were in the past. Also, on this argument, if AI makes engineers more productive, we’d also expect AI to be putting more people over the productivity bar, and thus mitigating the higher risk free rate effects. Thus, it seems, if anything, AI is having less of a real impact than it seems like it is.
I don’t know if SWE automation is coming. Programming automation is already here. Whether that puts engineers out of work remains to be seen (so far, no).
I’m a SWE, use AI everyday to do my job, and I think the idea that AI is the cause of reduced engineer hiring is basically false.
There is probably some marginal effect, but I instead think what we’re seeing today is because:
interest rates are high relative to the boom years of 2012-2022
this pushes the risk free rate up
this means VCs can be more conservative
thus they demand portfolio companies spend money more efficiently
an easy way to be more efficient is to employ higher productivity SWEs
this cuts out the bottom of the market because it falls below a productivity bar
If interest rates were still 0%, companies could afford to hire lower productivity engineers and things would be more similar to how they were in the past. Also, on this argument, if AI makes engineers more productive, we’d also expect AI to be putting more people over the productivity bar, and thus mitigating the higher risk free rate effects. Thus, it seems, if anything, AI is having less of a real impact than it seems like it is.
I don’t know if SWE automation is coming. Programming automation is already here. Whether that puts engineers out of work remains to be seen (so far, no).