The Invisible Victim of AI: A Job No One Predicted

Front-line and middle managers are the switchboard operators of today.

There's a lot of hype around AI replacing software developers and taking their jobs. I simply don't believe it.

LLMs learn from training data. They can't learn skills they weren't trained on. They hallucinate, so you'll always need someone to check their work for important tasks. Software developers only code for 15% of their day. The other 85% involves tasks with fuzzy inputs and outputs that LLMs can't be trained on.

But the biggest reason I think software developers will always have jobs is that every development team has a backlog of work like the horizon; once you reach where the horizon was, it's shifted to a new place.

Software development exists in a field of of infinite work.

The effort of one software developer in a year is a developer-year. When I worked at Amazon our backlog within the Prime Video organization was estimated to be several dozen developer millennia. An organization with several thousands of developers has a backlog of this order.

If you make software developers …