Fair warning, I think this will be a more opinionated and much more personal compared to my other writings.
I’m concerned there is going to be an upcoming inadequate supply of software engineers in the junior, and therefore after, mid level positions. My intention is to describe why i’m worried, what a lack of developers would mean, why I think now is a great time to go into technology, and I'll close it out with a personal story.
Right now the pitch for becoming a software engineer is a hard sell. It is surely less appealing than it has been in a number of years. I think this is the fault on multiple fronts.
First, there is a fear that AI is going to take all the software jobs. When listening to business analyst there seems to be a consensus that AI is going to take the majority of coding jobs and that it is a bad time to study computer science. The advice seems to be that the smartest people should consider going into other careers, or just studying AI.
Second, there are fewer junior developer opportunities. There was an excellent article (and hacker news discussion) that shows there has been a decline of intern opportunities. This matches my experience as well. It also appears that many companies have tighened their belt and have been hiring fewer and investing less into their engineers. On a similar note, it seems that the employers that used to train many junior engineers, like Google, lost their engineering cultures a bit and the quality of the engineers they're producing at the early career level aren't as strong as they were on average half-a-decade ago.
There has also been a big decline in the quality and number of developer boot camps. I think many would argue this is a return to normality, but I'm not so sure.
It is my assertion or these reasons we'll see fewer people entering into the software space in the next 5-10 years compared to the previous 5-10 years. This means we'll have fewer builders to build new systems and maintain current systems. This is a scary prognosis. I suspect the future demand for technology and software will surely outpace the gained efficiency from AI. And maybe I'm ignorant here, and maybe AI really will make software engineers 50x or 100x more efficient and we'll able handle all the current and new demand for technology, but I have't seen any evidence yet those type of gains are coming in the short or medium term.
Ironically, this will be personally good for my career. As the demand for my skills continues to grow and the supply of engineers dwindle, I can expect that it'll be harder for companies to compete for experienced talent, and that will be personally rewarding to me.
In that vein, I'd like to stand on my soap box and tell people that now is still a great time to get into technology. There are many times in life where it is okay to zag when others zig, and this is one of them. If you like building, solving problems, working on a team, and you like technology and the future, you should ignore the noise and study technology.
Now for a personal anecdote. I am a third generation computer scientist. I think I am one of the few on earth. My grandfather, my mother's father, registered for the army on his 18th birthday and was sent to Korea. In the army he did some work with radios, seemed to like it, and did technical radio work for the military. This led him to eventually work for Bell Labs, where he worked on projects like the at home microwave. This in turn made my mother interested in new things, and she studied this brand new major at Rutgers: computer science. She entered into the workforce where she worked on mainframes and wrote business software in basic and cobol. Our family has seen the ups-and-down of technology come in favor, and then out of favor, and then back in favor, during many different cycles. My mom tells about when the compiler came out there was a fear that there would be no more need for programmers. Sound familiar?
If you zoom out through the cycles, the desire for technology has only grown during the last century, and I don't see that changing.