Software boom due to SMEs looks very unnatural to me, because what makes software so special is its ability to scale, so it naturally tends to monopolization
Right so you might see a CTO, a CDO (development?) CAI? I dont know.
basically small and medium business mostly do not invest in having programmers on staff. Maybe you have an IT guy, half the time its someone whos real job is accounting, warehouse, etc and he knows printers and can type without looking
My bet is more software then ever, more dispersed and more lego like than ever.
Well, alright, scalability + expensiveness create ideal conditions for monopolization. Assuming it's cheap now, scalability still doesn't go away. So it's a) cheap b) easily reusable, you make it once cheaply and quickly and it stays with you forever, and can be used by others too - I don't see a condition for lots of job creation in software engineering here.
One could argue that scalability matters more when software is expensive to make, as you need to reuse it to make the cost worthwhile.
So, for context, two data points I have that make me want to argue for the opposite side.
First, some time ago I worked for a startup that had a B2B offering that in most cases involved integration costs to align with whatever the client was already using. We tried to eat this as much as possible, but we still had to have some “integration price” we asked. More than once we had a potential client who just couldn’t lift it. They needed the software but just didn’t have the cash buffer for the initial cost (us neither). With how things are now, we’d have onboarded all of them. And much faster than it normally took. And yes, they still would have bought our solution instead of rolling their own (see the next point).
The next point that kind of ties into the previous one if you squint. I’m in a position now where I see non-technical people building stuff with AI. _Most_ can’t. As an example, the AI says they need a database. But they don’t really know what that is, and deploying one sounds scary, so they ask the AI if they can build it without a database. And the AI happily complies and makes a “CRUD” API that “persists” data in RAM. And the AI is not being dumb here. The best, most perfect model is still an LLM at the end of the day, so it completes the context window. Sure, you could make a mod that “sticks to its guns” more, but that comes across as the model being “non-compliant” and “difficult”. Now, I’ve also seen non-technical people who have succeeded. But then they have the kind of a mindset that they could’ve been engineers in the first place in different circumstances. But also, even they build fragile monstrosities that they don’t understand.
So, going back to the first point. Our clients were deeply nontechnical for the most part. Most of them wouldn’t even have attempted to build their own. But also, getting the system up and working involved more than just code - relationships with suppliers, some legal stuff, etc.
So, I can totally see how the amount of software produced might grow exponentially leading to “pre-AI” engineers being worth their weight in gold due to that. That doesn’t exclude a painful transition though.