I noticed an existential risk for a software development career around 2015. I saw then that software development was becoming commoditized and that the market was becoming saturated with “good enough” developers that could do the CRUD/framework development that most companies needed. AI has accelerated the trend.

Back then my concerns wasn’t getting a job, it was compensation plateauing at best or being a race to the bottom at worse. I was right.

Before anyone mentions the eye popping compensation that the BigTech and adjacent companies are paying, those positions are just a small subset of companies out there and most of the 2.8 million developers in the US will probably never make over $200K inflation adjusted in their entire career doing “enterprise dev”. (Yes I did a stint at BigTech).

I see I wasn’t wrong, in 2023 and 2024, when I was looking for your bog standard enterprise dev jobs with AWS experience remotely as a plan B, “senior” [1] dev jobs were still offering $150K - $160k in most major cities and “architect” roles were going for $175K - $180K. These are the same numbers I’ve seen since 2016-2018.

What’s even worse, every job I applied to had hundreds of applications (LinkedIn show you) and I heard crickets.

I pivoted into working for cloud consulting companies full time (and before that working in the consulting department at BigTech) mid 2020 and found a full time job at a 3rd party consulting company.

That being said, projects that I would have scoped as a two person project with my leading it and adding a mid level person to do some of the grunt work coding, I now know that I have the bandwidth to do myself with the help of AI.

That also means that the company as a whole needs fewer developers. But still needs just as many customer facing people who can fly out to customers site and be on calls gathering requirements and pushing things through the sales cycle.

The solution? Quickly move up and become a true “senior” as defined by every tech company with leveling guidelines.

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/swe-level-framework.html

On a side note, you don’t need to “learn AI” as far as how it works under the hood, save that for the PhD’s. You need to learn how to leverage it for coding, writing, and how to create features and products that add business value. I have my own niche within AWS that I had before LLMs were publicly available where I use it in for now novel ways when I need to.