Hurrah! AI won't destroy developer or DBA jobs Developers worried about their careers in the age of AI might be able to relax a little after the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) predicted employers will hire another 300,000 coders by 2033. The Bureau’s predictions came in its annual ten-year forecast that considers the impact of new technologies on future employment and …
Reads like a parting (or is it Parthian?) shot by from a BLS employee soon after receiving his DOGean RA missive.
More likely AI generated manglement bullshit concerning an unrequested feature that inevitability disarticulates the user's existing workflow.
A fun AI search that documents AI functionality is do a search for "ore stabit fortis arare placet ore stat" and you see a load of what are errors ... until you set the search for images.
I lived in Oxford and remember working that out years ago ... you only need to read, and say it, as "o rest a bit for tis a rare place to rest at" ...
AI can't figure that out these days, but I couldn't understand it the first day on the bench either.
Anyone who ever predicted 'AI' could replace (real) software engineers was obviously outing themselves as knowing nothing about it.
Because real software engineering (any engineering) is all about balancing the requirements and tradeoffs using the things you know. What works fine for one application would be disastrous in another because the use cases are different. A competent engineer takes all the design requirements, design constraints, all the other constraints (time, money, available power, data size, latency, throughput, etc. etc.) and delivers the best solution for this very specific set of requirements and constraints. For this job I'm fine with C# on any random laptop. For that job I need C and actual RTOS and hardened hardware.
An LLM 'AI' can't do that at all because it has no idea about any of those and it's not actually thinking. It does not care that re-reading the 3 million line file every time you do an operation is inefficient because all it's doing is spitting out code it's stolen that claims to do the same thing and hacked them together till it compiles. In theory you could actually describe all the constraints and requirements in detail to the LLM, but guess what? You need a software engineer for that, because nobody else has any idea. And LLMs ignore a lot of what you tell them to do anyhow and certainly can't develop novel functional solutions. So AI is no threat to software engineers till we have AGI - and that point all bets are off for anyone doing anything, anyhow.
Yes, they might eliminate some offshore outsourced coders or the code pigs sitting in cubicles (now hotdesking?) at Microsoft just mindlessly spitting out buggy and/or evil crap to make Windows 11 worse. That entire sentence starting with 'It does not care' accurately describes a lot of people on StackExchange too, mindlessly stealing code snippets and bashing them together till they compile. And I'm fine with losing those jobs. As with telemarketers or online influencers, I don't think any job is inherently good just because it provides some schlub with a job kicking people in the crotch.
I can't speak much from the DBA side, but 'every solution depends a lot on the specific requirements and constraints' holds up strongly there too.
This is a pretty good summary. The challenge however is what you describe is a senior engineer. The jobs that are currently delegated to juniors are often the ones that an AI will be able to manage (though just like a junior it will need guiding and prompting). This gives the challenge of who will actually hire juniors to give them the opportunity to become seniors?
DBA is a job that I can see declining rapidly. Much of what it seems they bring is the knowledge of the arcane configuration setting and rules of the database software and performance tuning methods. That type of knowledge is what AI is/will be good at as it is essentially following patterns and basic inference. For many other tasks other engineers will probably pick up the slack aided by the AI.
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