It seems like just a few years ago everyone and their mom were pivoting careers to become coders, engineers, and developers. As the mobile app market soared, coding was the most beneficial skill to learn, not to mention an attractive career for many introverted loners and connoisseurs of the early internet.
Yet, today, there are fewer programmers in the U.S. than there ever were since 1980. The data comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics but is rather curious because other computer-related occupations, like software developers, haven't been experiencing such a decline.
First, it's useful to define what exactly the difference is between programmers and other "computer-related" jobs. Take software developers, for example: their job description is often broader, involving planning and vision.
Programmers ("coders" is also an appropriate term to use) are usually behind the mechanics of writing code, testing, and debugging. Software developers, on the other hand, meet with other departments to discuss strategy, plan design, and set goals. Programmers are the ones who carry out the tasks to reach those goals.
Because of the nature of their work, there has been a lot of speculation that AI is going to replace programmers. We'll get to whether that's really true later, but it's important to mention that programming can be the occupation in which workers rely on AI tools the most.
AI startup Anthropic recently analyzed the use of AI among people in many different fields, from phlebotomists, professional drivers, and computer scientists. They found that programmers used their AI chatbot Claude the most. Software developers came in second, above more than 700 other occupations.
While that may seem a bit bleak and discouraging, experts aren't so quick to give in to the "AI is going to steal our jobs" rhetoric. A researcher at Anthropic, Alex Tamkin, told The Washington Post that people use AI to help them with repetitive tasks instead of asking it to automate them. "Usage tilts more towards augmentation — which is things like having the AI check your work, asking questions to teach you things, iterating on a piece of work — rather than automation."
Still, many job ads for programmers today will most likely include requirements to at least be able to apply AI tools. In other, more extreme cases, companies will lay off workers and replace them with the technology. Earlier this year, recruiting companies Indeed and Glassdoor decided to lay off 1,300 of their workers while planning to embrace AI.
The CEO of the parent company of both Indeed and Glassdoor, Hisayuki "Deko" Idekoba, explained that one-third of their company's new programming code is currently written by AI. In the near future, they expect that to be 50%. And Indeed and Glassdoor aren't the only companies relying on AI to write their code. Last year, Google bragged about how 25% of their code was written by AI.
