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AI and globalisation are shaking up software developers’ world
The Economist | September 29, 2024
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Two big shifts are under way in the world of software development. Since the launch of Chatgpt in 2022, bosses have been falling over themselves to try to find ways to use generative artificial intelligence (AI). Most efforts have yielded little, but one exception is programming. Surveys suggest that developers around the world find generative ai so useful that already about two-fifths of them use it.
The profession is changing in another way, too. A growing share of the world’s engineers come from emerging markets. There is no standard definition of a developer, but one way to assess this is to look at the number of users of Github, a popular platform for storing and sharing code. In 2020 the number of users living in poorer countries surpassed those from the rich world.
These shifts matter because software talent is greatly treasured. Salaries are high. The median wage of a developer in America sits in the top 5% of all occupations, meaning that coders can earn more than nuclear engineers.
New technologies have often aided developers; the internet, for instance, ended the time-consuming task of answering questions using textbooks. Generative ai looks like a bigger leap forward still. One reason why it can be especially useful for developers is the availability of data. Online forums, such as Stack Overflow, hold enormous archives of questions asked and answered by coders. The answers are often rated, which helps AI models learn what is helpful and what is not. Coding is also full of feedback loops and tests that check if software works properly. ai models can use this feedback to learn and improve. The consequence has been an explosion of new tools to help programmers.
AI’s helpfulness is still somewhat limited, however. When Evans Data, a research firm, asked coders how much time the technology tends to save them, the most popular answer, given by 35% of respondents, was between 10% and 20%. Some of this is from churning out simple “boilerplate” code, but the tools are not perfect. One study from GitClear, a software firm, found that over the past year or so the quality of code has declined. It suspects the use of ai models is to blame. A survey by Synk, a cybersecurity firm, found that more than half of organisations said they had discovered security issues with poor ai-generated code. And ai still can’t tackle the thornier programming problems. The next generation of tools should be better.
Much of this seems to give inexperienced engineers a leg up. They will be able to do more complex tasks more quickly and some of the work they used to do may be picked up by laymen. A rising trend towards “low-code-no-code” platforms, which allow anyone to write software, will also be boosted by ai. Another result of the coding upheaval is that junior developers in rich countries will face more acute competition from abroad. Offshore capabilities have also been growing more sophisticated.
What all this means for developers is still unclear. One vision is of ai and offshoring taking Western software developers’ jobs en masse. That seems far-fetched. Huge amounts of technical know-how are still required to string pieces of code together and check that it works.
A more optimistic view is one in which the most boring parts of making software are done by computers while a developer’s time is spent on more complex and valuable problems. This may be closer to the truth. For customers, meanwhile, the trends are welcome. IT managers have long said that their bosses want ever more digitisation with ever tighter budgets. Thanks to ai and offshoring, that may no longer be too much to ask.
2 key takeaways from the article
- Two big shifts are under way in the world of software development. Since the launch of Chatgpt in 2022, bosses have been falling over themselves to try to find ways to use generative artificial intelligence (AI). Most efforts have yielded little, but one exception is programming. Surveys suggest that developers around the world find generative AI so useful that already about two-fifths of them use it.
- What all this means for developers is still unclear. One vision is of AI and offshoring taking Western software developers’ jobs en masse. That seems far-fetched. Huge amounts of technical know-how are still required to string pieces of code together and check that it works. A more optimistic view is one in which the most boring parts of making software are done by computers while a developer’s time is spent on more complex and valuable problems. This may be closer to the truth.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Technology, Programming, Artificial Intelligence, Outsourcing, India, Software Developers
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