Meta announced last month that it is cutting 8,000 employees and canceling another 6,000 open requisitions, many of them for software engineers. Google’s CEO told Cloud Next in April that 75% of new code at the company is now AI-generated. Stanford researchers report that employment of software developers between the ages of 22 and 25 has fallen 20% since late 2022.
And yet, in the same window, my 50-person consulting firm hired its first full-stack software developer in January. We hired a second in April. We’re likely to hire a third before the year is out. Big Tech is right that AI is rewriting the developer profession. We’re right to be hiring into it. Both things are true — and the gap between them is the most important workforce story no one is telling.
I have done this before
Sixteen years ago at Microsoft, I helped build a product that severely threatened an entire job category. Power BI was a direct challenge to the elite priesthood of Business Intelligence developers – highly-paid professionals who’d spent years learning a deeply technical craft. Our explicit goal was to unlock professional-grade BI for a much broader audience. Good for the world. Bad, on paper, for the priesthood.
