AI Insider traveled to Salt Lake City this week for The Great Coding Reset, a live event about the future of software engineering.
What we heard was both encouraging and alarming for tech workers. If you would like to attend our next one in Vegas on December 1st, register here.
At CIQ, a company that helps businesses manage complex IT systems, AI now writes more than 90% of the code, according to President Bjorn Hovland.
You might think this means fewer human programmers are needed. Not quite.
“Two or three years ago, I expected that we would never need to hire another engineer,” Hovland told my colleague Ben Bergman. “We found just the opposite. We can’t hire enough engineers now.”
There is a trap. CIQ wants experienced programmers, not beginners.
“We hire almost no junior developers,” Hovland said, adding that he didn’t think the company had hired anyone with less than five to 10 years of experience.
For what? AI can produce mountains of code, but someone still needs to know if it works. This is especially important when your clients include large corporations and governments.
CIQ founder Gregory Kurtzer offered a striking example of the power of AI. He said he used it to create a Linux-compatible operating system kernel – software that controls how a computer works – in just 11 days.
“That should scare people a little bit,” he said.
Kurtzer believes that experienced engineers using AI can become much more productive. He also warned that programmers who resist AI because they like to write code themselves risk falling behind.
The message for tech workers is complex. AI eliminates some programming tasks while creating increased demand for people with a deep understanding of how software works.
And it goes beyond programming. Whether you create videos, write software, or do other knowledge work, the valuable skill increasingly becomes knowing what to create and how to judge the results, rather than doing each step yourself.
But here’s the troubling question: If companies stop hiring junior programmers, where will the next generation of experienced engineers come from?
Hovland’s advice to young people: create lots of software projects and learn how the systems work under the hood.
Good advice. But the traditional software engineering career ladder may become increasingly difficult to climb.
Sign up for the AI Insider newsletter here. Contact me by email at abarr@businessinsider.com
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