As promised in my earlier post on the same topic, I have a little more to say.
There never was a software engineer role which just involved coding and debugging. Knowing something about the customers or the product or the business was a must. Now that AI makes software engineering applicable to many more areas, we will most likely see ‘vertical’ roles. Some examples, in my opinion, are
In short, there should not be much of a market for a ‘plain old software engineer’.
It usually takes a while for a new employee to be productive with an existing system. Some exceptional companies, of course, have reduced the time it takes to onboard new people - but that’s not universally true. With the advent of AI-based onboarding systems, a new person should easily be productive in a matter of days. Hence, it should be much less expensive to bring in an additional engineer at the time of a company crisis - even if he/she cannot commit to the role all year long. This might make contracting in other professions more common as well. One very successful startup is doing something like this right now.
Usually it takes a while before a software system needs to think about performance, because it used to take multiple iterations and many months to get the functionality right. This is going to change. Performance will become important much earlier in a software product’s lifecycle.
I am going to end with a happy prediction. Gone will be the days when you needed to sit at a desk for 14 hours at a stretch. I feel engineers will have a choice. They can build a new product and also go out for a hike (or a scuba dive) on a weekday. They might not choose to do so - and that is perfectly okay. Engineering will be a ‘deep work’ activity, requiring a few intense dedicated hours where AI agents and systems will be instructed and orchestrated. After that you can hit the gym, or go out for happy hour - who cares!