[aurareturn]

I'm going to make an optimistic and contrarian prediction: there will be even more jobs for software engineers in the future.

Current companies will hire fewer new grads and layoff older engineers. However, I believe AI will make it far cheaper for new software companies to develop their products. Therefore, we will have more software companies spring up. Those companies will in turn, hire more software engineers.

For example, let's say there are 10 total software companies today employing 100 employees each for a total of 1,000 software engineers employed. In the near future, I can see 100 software companies employing 12 engineers for a total of 1,200 software engineers. The net will be 200 engineers.

We will see an explosion in software products - some software fields will have more competitors due to the lower cost of creating an alternative and we will see brand new software fields spring up because it's now economically feasible to do them.

However, I think new grads that can make efficient use AI in developing software will be in very high demand - even today. Those who can't will have a hard time getting hired. Same for current software devs.

I believe that the reason we don't see this in 2024 yet is because of high interest rates and we are in a transition period. I can see the field getting very hot again in 2025/2026.

[charlie0]

Yes, but the increase in supply with likely decrease the wages for most (but not all) engineers as software itself get further commoditized.

[aurareturn]

Maybe in the distant future, yes. But I don't think the digital transformation has peaked yet. If there is 20% more demand for software engineers (like my example above), then I don't see wages decreasing.

When we have AGI that can completely replace engineers, then yea, maybe. But I'm not accounting for that because all bets are off if/when we have AGI. We'll have to start getting into weird scenarios at that point. For example, our wages could decrease but services/products are far more abundant and better, leading to a better quality of life despite a decrease in wages.

[charlie0]

If "intelligence" becomes a service, it means that things are easier to build. If things are easier to build, then it becomes harder to develop moat because every app becomes easier to copy. Like Peter Thiel said, "competition is for losers". Wages will decrease in the face of lots of competition as everyone begins to compete on price.

[aurareturn]

The vast majority of startups fail to find a moat and eventually fail completely. It didn't stop VCs from investing. It didn't stop people from starting startups.

Perhaps those failed startups would have been viable if they could have built and maintained the product with 10 engineers instead of 100.

So instead of a single large software product that might not fill specific niches well, we might have a medium size product and many smaller products that fill more niches in the category.

For example, Clerk.com auth supports React mostly. But what about Vue or Svelt? Someone can come along and say, I can build that for Vue and Svelt and be economically viable because I build it much faster with fewer engineers leveraging AI.

A quick Linkedin search says Clerk.com has 112 employees. What if I can build an alternative for Vue and Svelt with just 10 employees?

Not being able to maintain a moat just means that software engineers will be switching to different jobs more frequently. It doesn't mean that the overall software market will decrease.