By Uma Ganesh
After the spike in demand for IT professionals during Covid times, 2023 witnessed massive layoffs. Companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce and Meta have continued with the layoffs and have also indicated this trend may continue through the year. While the global economic outlook has improved and companies have started showing better results, the focus now is to enhance the efficiency in business. In other words, doing more with lesser resources is the obvious approach.
In this context, tech businesses have started making significant investments in AI by reducing their focus on other businesses. Google for instance laid off thousands of employees across various divisions including their advertising business. Amazon laid off hundreds of employees in its streaming and studio operations. What we are now experiencing is likely to be a new normal — of ongoing process of shedding headcount, hiring new talent with AI skills and employees changing jobs and moving to greener pastures.
In the next five years, 30% of entry-level coding jobs would be replaced by AI, industry pundits predict. The demand for AI and ML skills would continue to rise. In fact, a high percentage of coders are seeing the benefit of using AI as it has changed their coding ways and also resulting in speedier output. The future of software development is going to look very different from what it is today. The landscape of software development is changing rapidly with the approaches to development, testing and maintenance getting transformed with AI getting incorporated in every stage. Programmers should keep track of these changes and learn to use AI tools to their advantage.
Considering AI as complimentary to one’s own skills and leveraging AI to overcome areas of weakness could be a smart way to achieve the desired results quickly. AI could add strength to the capabilities of programmers and enable them to work efficiently. Mastery in the chosen domain, building AI/ML skills and building life long learning capability are some of the ways to create job security in tech careers.
AI is unlikely to become an existential threat to programmers but there is a need to recognise the role this technology could play to make programming more efficient and the process of creating solutions more enjoyable. The output of large language models are not always accurate, hence manual intervention to check the codes created by generative AI tools would be essential. The intuition of programmers with their awareness of code vulnerabilities while considering codes generated by AI tools would make the software codes resilient and secure. Sufficient safeguards should be taken before proprietary codes are shared with generative AI tools for decoding.
Analysing the problem, creating the system design and software architecture would continue to be the forte of humans. In order to survive in the AI era and thrive, embracing AI into the software development process and knowing where to rely upon human coding skills would be necessary.
The writer is chairperson, Global Talent Track, a corporate training solutions company
