This comes up regularly when I talk with software developers in the communities I'm part of. Developers are scared. Not just of losing their current job, but of not being able to find a new one if they're let go. That's why you see resistance to AI adoption and AI changes in development departments.
Out loud, I hear developers say AI code is slop. That AI code is insecure. That AI code needs a lot of review and massaging before it can be committed.
In private, many of those same people tell me they're digging in their heels because the change scares them.
A lot of us lived through the Internet bubble in the late '90s and the Web 2.0 bubble around 2010 to 2012. There are some similarities, but honestly, AI is fundamentally different. After the first two bubbles, people were laid off because companies had hired way too many people. With AI, the fear is that a company lets engineers go because it can get the work done with fewer engineers. Or even get more work done with fewer engineers.
So people are digging in their heels.
My advice, and anyone I've talked to has already heard this speech: lean into it. Learn how to do more with AI. No company I know of has a shortage of things it wants built. A company that can ship more with the same team is not going to shrink the team. It is going to ship more.
For the foreseeable future, that takes people who understand software development. Yes, a product manager can talk to AI and get a feature built. But it takes a lot more than that to build a system. That is where developers come in, and the ones who come in first will be the ones who already learned how to do more with AI. (I wrote about what the job looks like once typing stops being the scarce skill.)
Originally posted on LinkedIn: "Software developers are scared, and not just about being fired because of AI"