AI did not Replace Software Engineers, Companies did!

Developers have been let go in record numbers in the last couple of years. Some say it's due to AI, some say it's due to COVID over hiring. Regardless, we have become expendable.

Software engineer used to be a respected profession, but over the last 20 years, it lost a lot of its lustre. The title "Software Engineer" fell out of fashion, and we became "developers" or "coders", which I believe made us invisible to the higher-ups.

So what's going on?

Learn To Code

For 10 years, I worked mostly with degree-educated people, and we built stable software at a reasonable pace. I could give anyone a task, and I knew they would get it done. If they didn't know how to do it, they would figure it out.

Then 10 years ago, the "learn to code" movement happened, and developers became a bit less reliable. Four years of training turned into a two-week course. I think the quality of software went down across the board as a result. That's why the quality of a lot of the software today is so poor, not just because of enshittification. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against new-collar workers. I have worked with more than a few good ones. They often bring expert knowledge to the team because they were once users of the system. However, when they are not interested in coding, they are a nightmare to manage.

My biggest gripe is not with new collar workers personally, but how they were educated. They need to know basic theory: programming principles, algorithms and data structures, databases. Not knowing this puts them at a disadvantage, and also makes them a bit dangerous. If they build something unsupervised, they can break systems. I have been forced to fix more than a few projects because one of the new-collar workers did something silly.

Every project manager knows this rule to be true: you need experts on your team, or your team will fail. Those experts are the folks with degrees, or the folks with experience. I don't believe managers further up the tree knew this. So when AI came out they thought, "Let's get rid of the coders; all they do is write code."

This year, I am happy to say that a lot of folks are getting hired back. Why? Because you need developers to build and maintain your software. It is the same with other disciplines; AI makes you more effective, but it's not a replacement for human intelligence.

Who is to Blame?

Big tech companies for sure! They should have adopted the technology gracefully and removed folks on a case-by-case basis. Instead, they just cut everyone across the board. They also should not have sold AI as a people-replacing technology.

Controversially; I believe software engineers are to blame also. We let ourselves become invisible. I think when the new-collar workers appeared, they should have been labelled as programmers, and we should have been labelled as software engineers! We should not have been thrown in the same bucket.

What's interesting, though, is that "Software Engineer" has become a common label again. I think that has happened because businesses have realized the worth of their people, and that's a good thing. I just wish they were much more responsible about it, and hadn't sacked people just to learn that lesson.