AI is killing software developer jobs

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Compared with five years ago, the number of active job postings for software developers has dropped 56 percent, according to data compiled by CompTIA. For inexperienced developers, the plunge is an even worse 67 percent.

“I would say this is the worst environment for entry-level jobs in tech, period, that I’ve seen in 25 years,” said Venky Ganesan, a partner at the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures.

For years, the career advice from everyone who mattered — the Apple chief executive Tim Cook, your mother — was “learn to code.” It felt like an immutable equation: Coding skills + hard work = job.

Now the math doesn’t look so simple.

Since their emergence in the mid-2010s, intensive courses in basic coding skills have been praised as a quick route to a high-paying career, especially for people who didn’t graduate from college. President Barack Obama made them part of his jobs initiative, nonprofits set them up to propel people of diverse backgrounds into tech careers, and universities from Harvard to Berkeley offered their own versions.

And they worked. In a 2020 survey of 3,000 boot camp graduates by CourseReport, 79 percent of respondents said the courses had helped them land a job in tech, with an average salary increase of 56 percent.

But the industry pulled back from hiring at the same time that new A.I. coding tools were starting to become mainstream. In 2022, Google’s A.I. team, DeepMind, reported that it had tested its A.I. model AlphaCode in coding competitions, and that it was as good as “a novice programmer with a few months to a year of training.”

It took a few more years, but the tools available to a typical programmer have since improved markedly. This September, OpenAI released a new version of ChatGPT. It computes answers in a way that is different from previous models and may be even better at writing code. Tools like AlphaCode from Google and Copilot from GitHub generate snippets of code for specific purposes, testing or optimizing existing code and finding bugs.

The real proof is among developers: About 60 percent of 65,000 developers surveyed in May by StackOverflow, a software developer community, said they had used A.I. coding tools this year. .

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