Coding jobs were supposed to be safe
If you were unlucky enough to have lost your job in the last 15 years, someone might have suggested — often unhelpfully — that you “learn to code.” It was shorthand for “do something actually useful.”
Lots of industries are speculating about what AI means for their futures. It could be an “especially big deal” for the legal profession and may “reinvent” market research. It could change what it means to be a graphic designer. It could empty out call centers.
Inside the tech industry, though, there is a bit more confidence about where AI automation will matter the most, the soonest. The future may as well be on auto-complete: AI is obviously coming for software first.
The latest round of layoffs at Facebook parent company Meta is impacting workers in core technical roles like data scientists and software engineers — positions once thought to be beyond reproach.
Software engineers were the most overrepresented position in layoffs in 2023, relative to their employment, according to data requested by Vox from workforce data company Revelio Labs. Last year, when major tech layoffs first began, recruiters and customer success specialists experienced the most outsize impact. So far this year, nearly 20 percent of the 170,000 tech company layoffs were software engineers, even though they made up roughly 14 percent of employees at these companies.
Tech companies grew rapidly during the pandemic, when people were home and their services were needed more than ever, but much of that demand has died down. In the meantime, the tech companies that hugely expanded their head counts in that time failed to come up with the next big thing, meaning they don’t have new sources of massive revenue to pull from and have been forced to switch from growth mode to maintenance. Meanwhile, the economy is not as strong as it was, and Wall Street is telling tech companies that less is more.
The rise of AI at work is also a contributing factor, since it allows coders to be more productive, or potentially allows employers to do the same work as before but with fewer workers. OpenAI was early to release usable AI coding tools, but this week, Google announced that it was partnering with Replit, a popular software development environment, on a general-purpose coding assistant.
In its own analysis, OpenAI suggested that certain tech jobs would be highly exposed to LLM-based tools. “We discover that roles heavily reliant on science and critical-thinking skills show a negative correlation with exposure,” the company claimed, “around 80 percent of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10 percent of their work tasks affected by the introduction of LLMs, while approximately 19 percent of workers may see at least 50 percent of their tasks impacted.”
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