Why is everyone saying that software engineers are done?

More and more CEO's say it and like to put AI in the mix. It's almost becoming a joke in the SWE community.

I see many reasons for that but the main ones are:

They will get cheaper devs

Yes, the job market is still pretty good for software engineers. Until recently, you could still go to an interview and say: "No, sorry, I'm not interested for X reasons".

It was one of the last sector where you had the choice. But big companies doesn't like it. They want you to crave for a job and more than anything to lower your salary expectations or your feeling of entitlement.

How many time did you hear: "You should be happy to work for us". It's not a gift! It's a business relation. Give me a good manager and I'll be happy.

So if anyone tells you: "You will be replaced by AI", it's not forecasting, it's intimidation.

They will sell you an AI

Let's go and have a look inside NVIDIA's offices. Go to the R&D department and ask how many developers lost their job because of AI.

The AI solutions they sell you is built by software engineers.

Yes, AI is helping us in some menial tasks. It's "auto-complete on steroid" like Linus Torvalds likes to say. And if you think that the job of a SWE is to write boilerplate code all day long then yes ! Please, buy an AI.

GAFAM, FANG, NATU etc. are not representative

Take X.com for instance. They over-hired like many others, but their main product is there. So the time where they need to build a great product with great features and have a legion of SWE to scale it, is over. Now they need marketing and communication. They need Elon Musk, hate or free speeches and influencers.

Same for Instagram, Facebook, Youtube ... they can do anything they want, if a new kid appears (Tik Tok) and take a huge market share, no SWE or AI can do anything about it.

But there is still so much new apps and products to create and maintain!

Conclusion

I remember the time where freelance devs were doing small websites for small companies and WordPress came and some people said the same thing: "We will be out of jobs". But they became WordPress developers and nobody lost their jobs.

So keep calm and carry on.