In all the excitement about the impact of AI on software engineering jobs, the impacts I‘ve heard much less about are the ones I’m experiencing.

I’m not getting rid of software engineers, but I‘m also not hiring as many as I would have done. If I’m not alone (and I don’t think I am) that’s going to both shrink the market overall, and potentially close off routes into the market at the junior end.

The engineers I do hire are probably going to have different experience and mindsets than they would have had a few years ago. Working successfully with AI tooling is about coordinating and connecting and plumbing.

It’s much less about what I’ve come to think of as the "purity" angle. The type of engineer who liked nothing more than a hour‘s debate about whether some code was "elegant" - they’re going to be uncomfortable with the "trust but verify" world of letting an agent do the heavy lifting for you.

The software engineer of the future is going to be a lot closer to a product or project manager than they are to a computer scientist, and that’s going to have some dramatic downstream effects on where they come from and how they’re trained.