Engineering video
1:00 · 6 March 2023
The speaker explains: as building web applications has gotten easier over the last 20 years—moving from teams of hundreds in the 2000s to small teams today—the total number of developers has actually increased because cheaper software leads to building more software.
Hear it at 0:25 →2023 has changed software engineering forever. For the first time in history, we've seen companies like Google, Meta, and even Microsoft laying off developers. On top of that, the world has already entered in a recession. And finally, chat GPT launch. This means AI can now write code as good or even better, in some cases, than many developers. A lot of developers I talk to are terrified. They don't know if they will have a job in the future.
I think that fear is not really justified. Think about it. In last 20 years, building web applications only got easier. Back in the 2000s, you need teams of hundreds of people to deliver what a team of two can deliver today. Did that decrease the number of developers? No. It increased it. Because the cheaper it gets to build software, the more software we build and the more developers we need. Now, I'm not saying that what it means to be a developer won't change.
It will, for sure. Like any profession. Will it disappear? No. Because the more layers of complexity you add on top of a certain technology, whether it's AI or not, the more you need an expert to call when things go wrong. And if you've been writing code for a while, you know things go wrong pretty often.
