“Will software developer jobs be destroyed by AI?”, this was asked by a friend of mine (he is a software developer) in a WhatsApp group with many software developer members.
One immediate response to this question came quickly by another friend of mine, a former software developer, and now an AI expert by profession:
“Junior developers are not being hired anymore. The 10 person software teams are now 5 person, because juniors are eliminated. Current reasoning models are eliminating the mid-level software positions. Next will be the elimination of senior software positions with AI Agents that are currently being developed. The last step is elimination of tech/team leads and product owners with advanced fully autonomous AI Agents.”
So we are done here, right?! easy, fast, simple!
My answer? not really…
I’m not going to dive deep into fact-checking every part of that statement. But let’s highlight two specific claims:
Ten-person teams are now five-person teams, because nobody hires juniors anymore.
This sounds more like an anecdote than an actual market trend.
My team size hasn’t changed, and I haven’t heard from any real person who’s experienced a major shift.
Plus, just two weeks ago, I hired a junior developer myself—for a hobby project!
There’s no broad industry data suggesting a mass elimination of junior roles. While some companies may reduce hiring, others still bring on junior developers.
Current reasoning models are eliminating mid-level software engineers.
I write code every day. I also use the latest (paid and unpaid) GenAI coding tools daily.
My experience so far is this: these tools are useful for specific tasks, and they can speed you up if you know how to use them—and know their limitations.
So is AI eliminating mid-level software engineers now?
My answer: what!?!! wrong question.
The correct question:
Is AI helping mid-level software developers have 10-20% productivity boost in a 2 week sprint?
My answer: if you are fluent with these tools, probably yes. But only applies for some specific coding tasks.
I will not get into AI agents part and senior/lead elimiation…
I think you already can guess why.
But what do I think AI will do to the software industry?
I think it will have a counterintuitive effect!
Just like people thought, ATMs will be the begining of an end for human bank tellers and a significatint reduction in the bank teller jobs will follow, but the opposite happened: The number of bank teller jobs started growing for 2 more decades!!
Why?
Because the cost of operating a branch of a bank was reduced beause of invention of ATM.
It made financial sense for the banks to increase their branches all over the cities and as a result a boom in demand for bank employees followed!
I think something similar will happen in the sofware industy:
The size of the software industry will grow significantly over the next decade and we will have an order-of-magnitude more software developer jobs than we have now!
Why?
Simply because AI will reduce the total cost of building software, by reducing the time that developers spend building.
The company/business/individual who didn’t have the capital to hire a software development team to build a specific software for 6 month, will be able to the same thing in 4 weeks with less than 1/6 of the cost.
So AI will increase the access to software developers for a lot more people. They will start to aford it. So they will start spending money on it. They money that otherwise would’ve not came to the industry!
and the size of the market for the whole industry will grow as a result.
We will have 100-1000X more software than what we have now!
And that’s my reponse the question of “Will software developer jobs be destroyed by AI?”
Love to hear your thoughts on this topic.
Please don’t hesitate to comment and share what you think.