[CM30]

I'd say it very much depends on software focused the company/industry in question is.

On the lower end, there are a lot of companies whose sole purpose is to build websites for other small/medium sized businesses that don't care enough about tech to pay for a full-time engineering team.

For those companies and developers, I suspect the increasing rise of AI will be a bloodbath. If your whole value proposition is "we can build your website using WordPress/Squarespace/Shopify/[CMS name here]", then AI can basically do about 95% of your job. I suspect a lot of these companies are going to shutter when clients take the work in-house due to AI, and many others will probably lose about 90% of their employees due to AI solutions being generally 'good enough'.

On the other hand, if your company is tech focused and needs to implement more complex functionality as a selling point, then there'll still be a place for software engineers even with AI. This is where the engineer as pseudo project manager thing comes into play, and where the actual coding side of things is probably going to be limited to things the AI can't implement properly.

Both situations will probably see a significant drop in the number of software engineers employed there, but the latter feels like it'll still have some room for a career.

[1auralynn]

I think "don't care enough about tech" is a mischaracterization. Software engineers are EXPENSIVE and many companies just can't afford it. Personally I think AI unlocks a ton of opportunity, because things that were just not possible due to the high salaries (justified, of course) of software engineers are all of a sudden very possible. Maybe these small businesses will now be more likely to hire a fresh grad who can not only build them a website in a couple weeks but also a ton of other useful internal software.