Devs are Not the Target Market for AI

Background

The year is 2024 in the tech industry. Layoffs and downsizing are everywhere. It is a very challenging job seeker market. There are lots of recent code school and computer science degree graduates seeking their first software engineer job. Amidst all of this noise, there is massive hype about “generative AI.”

More on Artificial Intelligence (AI)

In my part of the world, software engineers are tired of hearing about AI and feel like it is mostly a solution looking for a problem. Everyday users I interact with also echo these sentiments.

To contast this, I’m seeing two groups of people that are very excited about AI 👉🏻 people selling things and business executives/investors at various companies.

The motivations of people trying to sell you something is pretty straighforward. They want to sell things to make money for their business.

The executives/investor’s motivations are less clear. Here’s my theory, many of them view employing humans as a liability both because dealing with humans can be messy but also because paying employees a salary is expensive and they think that AI can be a substitute.

A harsh truth is that many businesses exist to make money and to be profitable. If they no longer need to have the expense of paying employee salaries, this can help them move closer to that goal. Most companies do not exist for the purpose of providing jobs to people.¹

My Opinion on AI

I have concerns over AI ethics. Bias in the models, creator’s work getting stolen for use in AI models without compensation, and environmental concerns of needing to run many servers to train these huge models. Many members of the United States government do not understand how technology works, so I don’t trust that they can effectively regulate.

I think that these tools are quite good, but they’re not sophisticated enough yet to fully replace human software engineering labor on a wider scale.

I have concerns over the ability for human or AI software engineers to be able to effectively troubleshoot and maintain unvetted AI generated code that gets pushed to production.

I am excited about the potential for AI to do boring and mundane tasks for us humans, so we can focus on imaginative creativity. An example: I’d like AI to do the dishes for me, so I can write my next novel, paint my next portrait, or compose my next song. I haven’t seen many examples of this yet.

My Opinion Ultimately Doesn’t Matter

What does matter if you want to be employed as a software engineer in this industry is the opinion of those who are in positions of power that make the budget and hiring decisions.

Unsolicited Advice

If you want to be hired and maintain a job in this industry as a software engineer, you need to figure out the motivations of people in positions of power and do the work to be able to effectively and genuinely sell yourself to them.

Some Ideas

Here’s some themes I’ve seen lately with people in positions of power at various companies. Note that my bias leans toward small/medium size businesses since that is where the majority of my social network is employed. Your experience may be different.

1. They want to do more with less

I would advise being curious. When something isn’t working as expected, be willing to adventure outside of your comfort zone to figure why, fix it, and learn new things.

On the web development front, more places desire to hire “fullstack” engineers. Just doing frontend is not enough for many companies.

2. They want to deliver solutions

Focus on shipping. It’s not enough to only write code, you need to know how to get a full working application into production that satisfies all product requirements. You also need to know how to troubleshoot and diagnose bugs that happen to your users in production.

It’s also important to be someone who can be trusted to follow through with what you say you will deliver. If you get stuck on something, it’s your responsiblity to ask for help to get the assistance you need to follow through all the way.

3. They’re excited about AI and some want to replace us devs with AI because it is cheaper than paying a salary

I would advise investing time in learning and using these new AI tools. Learn what they’re good at and use them to accelerate your output. Learn what they’re bad at and invest the time in learning how to do these things well by yourself. Learning those skills is a good way to emphasize your value to executives as to why they should hire you and pay you a salary instead of using AI.

Closing

Anyway, these are some thoughts I’ve had over the past few months. I’m just another person on the internet with opinions, giving unsolicited advice. What you do or do not do with it is up to you. I welcome polite engaged feedback and conversation on this topic.