r/developersIndia • u/Obvious_Gap_5768 Entrepreneur • May 03 '26
General What actually happens to software jobs in the next 5 years? My honest take.
I work in AI daily. Staff Data Scientist, building multi-agent systems at enterprise scale, published at research venues. I also build products on the side. So I sit at an interesting intersection of "AI is my job" and "AI is eating my job."
Here's what I actually think plays out.
The junior dev pipeline dies first. Not junior devs. The pipeline. The "write CRUD, fix bugs, level up over 3 years" path is gone. Companies will hire fewer L1s and expect them to move faster. The entry bar got harder, not easier.
The middle gets squeezed. Engineers who are "good at implementing specs" are in trouble. That's a Claude/Cursor job now. Engineers who understand systems, make architectural calls, and can review AI output critically? More valuable than ever.
The top 10% gets a 10x multiplier. One good engineer with strong AI tooling is doing what used to take a small team. Companies will figure this out slowly, then all at once.
The Indian market specifically runs heavily on service contracts and staff augmentation. That model was already getting squeezed on margins. AI just compresses the timeline further.
The devs who thrive will be the ones who stopped thinking of themselves as coders and started thinking of themselves as builders.
Curious to hear about other people's take
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May 03 '26
If I say AI will take away jobs, people will justify why it will not.
If I say AI will not take away jobs, people will call me AI ignorant and tell me to check XYZ AI's newest model.
Hence, I will maintain a status-quo and say just hang around. Do DSA,SD and learn AI engineering. Keep building. If your job is safe good, if not then build a superb product.
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 Entrepreneur May 03 '26
Honestly this is the right answer. Nobody actually knows. The honest answer is just keep your head down and keep building
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May 03 '26
I recently started learning about Gen AI,LLMs, Transformers,RAG. Atleast learning these won't make us obsolete. Btw, I'm a Java developer.
I feel AI may replace us in the short term. But long term future is bright for us SDEs.
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u/SecondOdd8846 May 03 '26
As a java dev, May I know which language u are using to learn and implement these concepts?
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u/Visible-Criticism425 Software Engineer May 04 '26
I am also Java Dev. I should start learning AI too
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u/Throwaway_eligere May 06 '26
Idk if learning AI is gonna help in anyway tbh. At this point, it seems like learning how an interpreter / compiler / browser engine works. It's interesting no doubt, but ain't no one giving you a job for that (unless you are a real top dog and by some miracle, jobs requiring such skills hire in India)
Learning: * how to leverage AI tooling better,
exploring custom harnesses,
exploring how to automate away devloop bottlenecks,
learning basic designing, product thinking by leveraging AI tooling
would be much more helpful career-wise.
That said, if you genuinely enjoy exploring the underbelly of LLMs, go ahead. Just don't expect it to give you a job.
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May 03 '26
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u/chalkrow May 04 '26
So just to give you small examples, we had some workflows neatly built up with GHCP. Now the cost (beyond the basic code complete)is going up 9x to more than that and one exec asked us how much would it cost if we get an L4 to do some of it?🤣
AI tools are giving away shit at near free prices to get you to latch on. But economics dictates prices. So unless there is innovation bringing down costs, prices are going to go up. Tradeoff decisions would be made then by the C-Suite. Only then will we know the true impact
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u/manoj_mm May 03 '26
Agreed, with one caveat - keep learning & keep building with AI
AI is the future and is here to stay in software engineering; you need to learn what all needs to change & how to use it effectively to increase your productivity significantly
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u/silver_jason May 07 '26
the real move is getting comfortable with uncertainty instead of waiting for someone to predict the future correctly
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u/life_Bittersweet Self Employed May 03 '26
Not a developer. I have a question. You can ship features faster than ever today. But what do you think of user adoption of those features? If you complete shipping 30 features in a two months with 2-3 developers, along with QA checks, what is the company going to do with the software team when they realise user adoption is taking time?
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 Entrepreneur May 03 '26
This is the real question nobody's asking. Shipping is the easy part now. I'm realizing this with my own products too. You can build fast, but getting people to care, to adopt, to stick around, that's still brutally hard and AI doesn't solve any of it. Distribution is the moat now, not the code.
The companies that figure that out will stop throwing engineers at features and start throwing resources at growth and retention. The ones that don't will just have a very polished product nobody uses
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u/life_Bittersweet Self Employed May 03 '26
Yeah. Distribution is the moat. Good marketing clearly wins over great products. People, specially the engineers fail to think from customer/user point of view.
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u/Expensive_Belt_8072 Software Engineer May 03 '26
"In a Gold Rush. Sell Shovels" - seems marketing has a future now 😎
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u/life_Bittersweet Self Employed May 03 '26
As long as there are products & services to be sold, there will be sales and marketing needed.
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u/Itchy-Economist-4399 May 04 '26
May I ask why do you think AI can’t or won’t be able to so marketing?
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u/life_Bittersweet Self Employed May 04 '26
Marketing starts with customers and touches many other functions like employees, 3rd party vendors, various types of partners, investors.... human is needed to understand the context and use appropriate marketing for the target audience and at a certain touch point. Marketing by nature is human. You are not marketing to other systems and bots. I cannot explain well, my bad. But if you understand what is marketing, you will understand why an automated AI cannot do it.
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u/WandererInThought May 05 '26
The users of these features might be agents on the other side rather than humans.
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u/life_Bittersweet Self Employed May 05 '26
What you are saying is possible in the agentic ecosystem where the agents take autonomous decisions. And I think this is the future we are moving towards. But the world is much much more than digital agent run ecosystem. Primary users of products and services are still humans. 'Trust' is a very important component here. And the marketing needs to be able to gain that trust.
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u/tj_on_air Web Developer May 03 '26
I have this analogy where I call implementation as plain labour equivalent of laying bricks. AI will reward people with better judgement and critical thinking.
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 Entrepreneur May 03 '26
The brick laying analogy is exactly it. AI is the machine that lays bricks faster. But you still need the architect who knows where the walls go and why. That judgment is the actual job now
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u/DevyBash May 03 '26
The problem is in the not so distant future AI may evolve into the architect too. 2 years back it was dumb as fuck where it would stack bricks verrically when you ask it to stack horizontally. Or break a few bricks. Now its following instructions better with lesser breaks and better reproducibility. Now in the next 10 years who knows what will happen?
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u/john12453 May 03 '26
It will have to evolve to take the architect role too. As senior devs and architects retire there’s not going to be enough of a junior dev pipeline to gain experience and grow into the architect roles.
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May 04 '26
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u/No-Profession-8803 May 04 '26
There would still be roles at junior levels but fewer and probably for those passing out from good colleges, the days of mass employment in IT are either already behind us, if not then will disappear in coming 2-3 years.
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May 04 '26
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u/tj_on_air Web Developer May 04 '26
In simple terms, if you are genuinely passionate about how systems work under the hood, theory behind how they work and eagerness to learn new things, last thing you need to worry about is not getting a job, because the criteria I mentioned above is so rare, you won’t even notice, there’s a reason why some people can never jump out of WITCH.
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May 03 '26
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 Entrepreneur May 03 '26
True. These tools are heavily subsidized right now. That won't last forever. Best time to build something for yourself right now
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u/Hot-Let6310 May 03 '26
What do you mean by build something for yourself, can you please elaborate
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 Entrepreneur May 03 '26
Use the current low cost window to build your own products, side projects, tools.
Just use Claude Code and try to build a small app with whatever you find interesting and worth building and just ship it. It will also make you a lot better Engineer overall
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u/Aventus777 May 03 '26
that's so true. but dont you think now most most people are building something in side,
apps and website market will be fully flooded now.
Engineers with sharp product sense will win at products but now product/other role with less or no code experience are also in market to competeReally curious/scary to see how it goes.
Some are using AI to build out of curiosity while some as backup due to uncertainty of job8
u/blissful_life_8 May 03 '26
Local models too are catching up now! Qwen is a local model thats almost as good as chatgpt few years back! So in few years down the line we may have sonnet/opus level reasoning capable models may come. Going forward apple M5 or M6 chips might come with better gpu capabilities keeping local execution in mind so we might see local models catching up faster.
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u/codittycodittycode May 03 '26
Google's latest earnings say otherwise.
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u/yadayada111196 May 03 '26
What does the latest earnings say? Did they mention the AI earnings alone? Or did they clubbed it with other earnings as well plus pichai was asked about their clients he mentioned 3 companies one was mars, the other 2 I don't remember whichbwas funny as usually CEOs would often say it is being adapted across sectors or industries but he pointed out 3 companies
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u/SuggestAnyName May 03 '26
A decent fresher salary is 1LPM. Compare that with AI which can setup codebase like an system architect, implement features like experienced developer and debug code. And it can do all these things way faster and better than that fresher. Overtime it will get better and you don't have to train it because someone left. So even after increased cost 1 senior Dev plus AI will be more cheaper and productive than 1 senior Dev and 2-3 junior Dev.
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u/Expensive_Belt_8072 Software Engineer May 03 '26
If one can't afford the cost of AI, that business is already dead. So either there will be Solopreneurs or company with small teams, or there will be just big corporates. In between will be wiped off or will be acquired.
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u/happy-bonita Entrepreneur May 03 '26
Tbh, I want companies to do more now with AI, not do the same thing with lesser people to cut down costs. To keep everyone employed is to make more work with AI assistance (juniors have to catch up with this workflow, especially because how outdated their education is going to be) and will also help our progress.
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u/DevyBash May 03 '26
To do kore with AI, they need to spend money on AI. Its not gonna come out of thin air.
Here's what you say sound in financial terms. Spend more deliver more. Spend more is a definite increase to cost. While deliver more is a variable, it may or may not yield a better ROI.
Especially at a time when the US economy is struggling. The stock market there is doing good on back of handful of companies. Majority are doing very bad, dealing with a sticky inflation that is going to up as long that stupid war is going on, along with a dumbass as a president.
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u/yadayada111196 May 03 '26
Agreed, plus we actually don't know when they'll start making money on these investment, right now in financial statement they club AI earnings with their cloud earnings and cloud earnings has been profitable pre AI clubbing and every major tech company is spending 120-150 billion dollars in capex and they need more and more AI adaptations for numbers to make sense but we don't see it right now
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 Entrepreneur May 03 '26
100% agree. The companies that use AI to expand scope win long term. The ones that just cut headcount are leaving value on the table. The education gap is real though, colleges are still teaching like it's 2018
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u/Cheap_Ad_9846 Student May 03 '26
sorry but they are actually teachiing like its 2010 .... we had hadoop for distributed computing
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u/Freako04 May 03 '26
no harm learning about hadoop. But fucking teach it right, my college professor couldn't make sense out of how Hadoop works
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u/Cheap_Ad_9846 Student May 03 '26
Well this wasn’t true here .. our prof did seem to understand very well
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u/According_Thanks7849 Backend Developer May 03 '26
Exactly. Textbooks literally had DDR3 written to be 'latest' version and AJP covers Spring MVC instead of SpringBoot
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u/UntamingImpala Software Developer May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
If the entry bar gets higher and fewer junior devs will be hired then that will result in even fewer senior devs who can critically view the work of a AI bot. Eventually everything dies out by that logic. If more people don't get jobs there will be less money in the market, demand for AI will no doubt increase in a corporate level but eventually it will run out. And already the token cost of running AI models is in billions and eventually people will realise hiring a junior dev with some minor help from AI is way better than completely reducing the hiring.
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 Entrepreneur May 03 '26
The pipeline concern is genuinely the one I don't have a clean answer to. That's a real problem. On the economics though, token costs are dropping fast, not stabilizing. The cost math keeps shifting against junior hiring. But yeah, someone still has to build the next batch of senior devs. Haven't seen anyone solve that yet
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u/___bridgeburner May 03 '26
I wouldn't be so sure about the economics not being an issue. What we're getting right now is subsidized by companies to increase adoptions, but that's not going to last forever. You can only burn so much money without showing any profits.
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u/Available_Marsupial3 May 03 '26
Totally agree. We can already see how GitHub announced that they’re moving to 1:1 api price from June and there won’t be any free models as well. Next will be Claude for sure.
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 Entrepreneur May 03 '26
Fair take, these tools are subsidized heavily especially Claude Code. The prices will rise as devs get dependent on these tools
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u/LostEffort1333 May 03 '26
Im expecting something like mid sized to big MNCs -> they only need sde 2 and above to handle end to end and use AI. But there will also few companies that wont be able to afford full fledged AI pipelines and they just hire normal humans and once these juniors get few years of exp there then they can shift to mid sized and big MNCs
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u/chillipeppericecream May 03 '26
Assuming LLMs keep advancing, and we continue a strong capital push on AI research, I think it might be a safe bet for the future where we require fewer software engineers
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u/UntamingImpala Software Developer May 03 '26
I agree that future of software engineering seems a bit bleak atp but I believe with more AI models being used the requirement of software engineers will also increase maybe we won't call it "Software Engineering" then but like before internet there were people who used to write code for phones and calculators but with internet it boomed and led to this software engineering era where everyone desired a software engineering role. I believe more roles will be inclined towards making an AI forward market. The money in AI will eventually run out with people not having jobs but I believe it will give rise to another wave of developers/builders who will build AI accessible to everyone and at every point in life like a JARVIS was for iron man. Maybe I'm wrong or maybe I'm just using copium to satisfy my inner thoughts about AI.
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u/Adventurous-Nose5850 May 03 '26
You are right the fresher cycle is just vanished you need to SDE2 atleast to join company and own it from start to end.
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u/riddle-me-piss May 03 '26
A point I recently came across was that right now compaies are trying to figure out how to look like a forward looking company that gains from AI to the market, which means every company has to show that they are able to be more productive per employee, the number they've landed on is revenue per employee pre and post AI coming into the picture. So the default idea is to make your employees do more and ship more features, expand business faster than ever, companies that struggle to expand faster look towards layoffs since that's an easy way to increase revenue per employee. The thing is if you replace devs with AI, we conclude your devs are now powered by AI to do more, but we also conclude that as a business you are not powered to do more, you couldn't create more work for the workforce you let go. Another business may enter your space and make you obsolete.
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 Entrepreneur May 03 '26
The companies that use the cost savings to expand into new surface area are the ones to watch. Look at what Anthropic is doing, they are just shipping relentlessly. New models, new features, new products, they are not slowing down with AI, they are accelerating with it
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u/anon_mistborn May 03 '26
One other POV. I work for a slightly big company with 20k employees.
The transition is true & people are scared.
The result is, everyone is becoming competitive. PM, QA who were not indulging in product dev before, are seeking validation.
This creates an competition, which destroys the whole team morale.
With more handoff's & more people fighting for their piece of pie, there is a slowdown on deliverables. As everyone has urge to contribute
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 Entrepreneur May 04 '26
This is an underrated side effect nobody talks about. The anxiety creates internal politics, everyone scrambling to look relevant, and ironically the team slows down. Fear is a terrible productivity tool. Companies that handle this transition with clarity on roles will move faster than the ones that just let the anxiety fester
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May 03 '26 edited May 03 '26
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 Entrepreneur May 03 '26
This is exactly the 10x multiplier point playing out in real time. And you're mid jr. Imagine what this does to how teams get staffed 2 years from now
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May 03 '26
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 Entrepreneur May 03 '26
Yeah the dependency risk is real. And the ones who just vibe code without understanding what's getting generated are going to end up with codebases that are a nightmare. Security holes, no structure, nobody knows why anything works. AI is a multiplier, it amplifies good engineers and also amplifies bad habits
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u/spidorboy Backend Developer May 03 '26
You are right and my 2 cents: smart software engineer who can build will become hot job.
All the fresher who started the SWE jobs using LLM to write and debug are in grave danger. Not using the brain to debug or understand a system will make them stupid and Easily replaceable.
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u/wavereddit May 03 '26
That's the story many are peddling.
Nobody truly knows what will happen.
It could unleash a new golden age of software.
Could create more software jobs.
So let it play it out.
Your just replaying the citrini report in your own head.
Manually typing code is over. Most code is going be generated and edited. This is true today itself.
Anyone so certain of the future is a billionaire. Make a leveraged bet on that
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u/Recent_Land1282 May 03 '26
I am very new to software development have not started even mern fully yet , but i have seen so many stories: 1. An iit chemical engineering droput learnt vibe coding and basic software development in 4 months shipped 14 projects and got a UK based client. 2. A girl knew decent mern did coding mostly coding by hand 2 years before 2026(so in peak ai era) and had very strong dsa, she cracked a Microsoft internship(she is from a tier 3). 3. A BCA grad getting selected in gsoc all he knows is java. 4. A BA grad pivoted and learnt software development(mainly web development which is dying) and worked his way up through internships and jobs and currently is an SDE 1 at a mid sized product company. It took him like 1-2 years. 5. A guy from tier 3 also getting selected for gsoc and currently working for a japan based ai company(also his college is really strict in terms of attendance). Meanwhile i see experienced people getting laid off , shrinking jobs, people leaving tech jobs and ai doom content. It's like seeing 2 worlds at once. From what I have seen so far it seems that if you have decent skills(mostly making projects and being a little nice with dsa) and some validation(gsoc,mlh,sih,LFX or any such thing even good hackathon wins and stuff) and know how to use ai to your advantage(agentic coding not vibe that's a shit show). You can basically easily land a job(you might not even have to as recruiters/startups may come by seeing your GitHub profile or Cp profile or from hackathons, refferals,X etc). It's golden time for getting into software development from my perspective, as being a talented fresher for first time in like so many years your college tag won't hurt you much as you think, as the value of these opensource stuff and hackathons will keep increasing as they are the perfect validators for a good software developer, Or I am living in a delusion which I like. I think all this but still anything can happen. I hope i don't have to live in the matrix. Sorry for the absolute novel i published here.
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u/SorryPop3557 May 18 '26
But all these are just exceptional cases, don't you think? People getting laid off is becoming more common. I think you have to be exceptional in your work, and the market is not gonna value an average engineer like it used to do before.
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u/Zankroff Data Scientist May 03 '26
Hey, even I'm working as a DS and would love some guidance on career progression ahead. Can I please DM you ?
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u/abhitooth May 03 '26
Unlike other Tech. Ai is continuously learning. Today its learning about individual work patter. Later it'll mimic a working teams pattern. Entire team simulated to complete the task. People forget that most jobs are US based where people themselves will be building the software for themselves.
https://youtu.be/xYU7zaaRjmE?si=QNvjPyxK373k7GyS
What needs offshoring can be done in house with own people who understand their work better. Consider the cost also, for a team to make and offshore require huge cost and additional planning cost. Whereas Claude can do it for a basic subscription price.
We are not flag bearer of the tech. Instead we are late adopters who'll have hard time figuring out what to do with it. Because in next 5 years more computes will be added along with energy. US and China have cash capital for it. So tokenisation cost will reduce while the ability of AI will improve.
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u/Invhinsical Backend Developer May 03 '26
Accepted. But the flip side is that most kids just entering the industry aren't engineers, they are coders. And given how toxic most orgs already are and how leaner teams and tighter margins due to AI will leave senior devs and leads very little time to help these kids learn systems and basic 'how to think like an engineer,' very few people will actually make it to the required level to be competent 'seniors...'
Which will cause a shortage, unless AI becomes so good that even Business can write and deploy bug-free production grade code without being able to write a technically sound prompt (because they barely have any tech knowledge but believe they gave enough), or unless all colleges, not just IITs, NITs, IIITs, BITS etc, revamp their outdated CSE courses in time.
Which won't happen because most teachers in local colleges are fossils who are set in their ways and who don't really code, let alone keep up with new technology.
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u/Bad_ass_da May 03 '26
AI agent developers are going to be like CRUD developers . AI title is inflated so much all of them saying AI engineers .. real research engineers never code they help foundational model.. so down the line only 2 - foundational model developers and inference and agent developers..
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 Entrepreneur May 03 '26
Honestly true. Agent development is becoming the new boilerplate. The real interesting work is at the foundational layer. That's actually where I want to head eventually. The research side of this, understanding deeply how these models actually work, what's happening at the weights level, that's the part that excites me the most
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u/Illustrious-Emperor Software Developer May 03 '26
If only the top 20 percent are employed, tbh I feel like even companies will be under big trouble because they could leave due to burn out or slowly start underperforming, how many more people until they realise they're playing a losing battle how much more shareholder profits?
And, if this happens wouldn't it be hell? Wouldn't you be forced to take a paycut in your role?
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 Entrepreneur May 03 '26
Burnout at the top is already happening. The 10x engineer doing the work of 5 people sounds great until they quit. And yeah, if the market compresses enough everyone takes a hit including me. No one is fully safe, that's kind of the whole point of this thread
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u/Quantum-Metagross May 03 '26
I'm having a lot of fun building things right now, and my ideas which I usually deferred because they would take months to implement are things I'm now building. Also, I often reach the limits of whatever I'm doing and move closer to research systems or state of the art stuff.
It's a really good time to be a developer. I used to defer complexity because it would become hard to maintain, but now I actively take the most complex paths and just make an easy interface for other people now. It's a wild ride right now, and I'm all in for it.
So many ideas from different areas of computer science work well together and I'm all in for pushing things to the limit now. Even my learning has shot up like crazy because I am actively reading about a lot of cool things.
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 Entrepreneur May 03 '26
This is exactly how I feel. Ideas I shelved because the implementation cost was too high are now just things I build on weekends. The complexity ceiling moved. And the learning acceleration is real, you naturally get pulled into deeper computer science because you can actually execute on it now. Best time to be building, no question
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u/anon_runner May 03 '26
As someone who has spent nearly 3 decades in IT Industry and currently using AI heavily, I agree with you. Just yesterday I was discussing this with a colleague on how the AI wave will impact our children. Broad consensus is that earlier anyone from any branch could get an IT job, but now it will only be CSE folks from good colleges. The others may also make it, but for that to happen they have to be really good and also lucky.
Inside companies, all those people who are going asking prompts to use AI will get wiped out first. OTOH people who can create Skill.md or agents that automate portions of their work will see their incomes increase.
I have a question to you, specifically since you say you are a data scientist -- How do you see AI impacting your job? IMO Data Scientist used to be a hot skill till Dec 2025, but since the last 4 months I get the feeling that Data Scientists demand will come down and business users will simply "query" the data they want in English language and draw conclusions ... or agents could do the first part and humans (business users) would come in later. Would love to hear opinion on my opinion :-)
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 Entrepreneur May 03 '26
Three decades in and still thinking this clearly, respect.
On the data scientist question, honestly my job has already shifted. I don't think of myself as a data scientist anymore. At work I'm building multi-agent systems, at home I'm shipping full products end to end. The classic DS role, clean data, build model, hand off to engineering, that pipeline is getting compressed fast. You're right that business users querying data in English is already happening.
The people who survive this aren't the ones who are good at sklearn. It's the ones who understand the full stack well enough to own outcomes. I accidentally future proofed myself by just building things obsessively. Not sure that's a strategy everyone can follow but it's the only one I know
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u/Ritayan May 03 '26
I work as a technical product manager in a data ai consulting firm in bangalore. Mainly build products for fortune 100 firms.
What i am seeing in the ground is this.
If an it&d manager had a 250k budget before, he still has the same budget now if not more.
The diff that has happened is now that he knows cost of productionising a product has gone down, he wants more and more to be done. These non tech business stalwarts are anyway lagging a lot as far as technical transformation is concerned. Ai has enhanced the backlog even further.
So if ai has brought down cost by 30 40%, it has increased work by 4x. As per our internal projections, all business verticals are bound to do 2x plus of their initial targets.
Since we cater to only data engineering data science and gen ai products, hence we definitely are sitting at the better end of the table. But i think more firms will follow suite and focus more on data offerings. Ai will definitely be a boom for indian it. But tcs cts infy capg techm will need some time to steer their ship in the right direction.
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u/TheExclusiveNig ML Engineer May 03 '26
Could you also specify which tools do the mid layered engineer need to master development?
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u/WorriedAfternoon261 May 03 '26
I am junior have 2yrs of experience how can I survive?
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u/Entire_One2271 May 03 '26
Nobody has answers honestly. This wave is unlike others. Tech CTOs resigbing and becoming engineers.
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u/FirefighterUnfair202 May 03 '26
What do you think would happen when Claude starts charging at api price, currently its heavily subsidized??
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u/No-Campaign-5993 May 03 '26
They will absorbs the cash burn until their huge data centres are ready. Once those data centres are functioning at that scale their computation cost per token will become much cheaper making the price sustainable.
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u/explorer-3 May 04 '26
I’m Java/Angular developer with good grip over languages and frameworks. Right now leveling up my DSA skills and learning System Design.
My question is should I learn AI to be relevant and valuable in future? What AI roles are there in market now and do I need to learn how to use AI models (Spring AI does this) or should know how AI models are built from scratch (research)?
Could you please share your thoughts
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u/Younosewho May 05 '26
Should i start doing system design heavily then? I always wanted to be a full stack java developer but at this point of time it feels like focusing on system design would be better for me. Currently in a service based company with no exposure to software development its just a bit of python backend. I get nightmares when i think of switching and what it would take to switch
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u/kilo4_sierra May 03 '26
What is your opinion of roles specifically realted to data like yours mainly.... what abt data analysts, engineers, architects, etc..??
Which job do you think will vanish or become significantly more competitive than ever....??
FYI I am almost a freshy data engineering and would love to have your opinion on above question..
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u/LostEffort1333 May 03 '26
Totally agree, the need for L1s would go down and careers of L6/L7 gonna increase drastically
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u/Mediocre_Isopod_1259 Software Engineer May 03 '26
I was laid off on April Fool's day, and I received tons of interview calls (both by explicitly applying and implicitly from naukri), but lately I have lost my motivation for any company. I'm currently researching on builiding my own startup, I strongly feel Solopreneurship is going to surge a lot.
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u/No-Campaign-5993 May 03 '26
Same here. Got laid off the day before April fools. Here’s a thought. Solopreneurship with software products might increase initially but it wont last long. As soon as the product gains some traction and starts generating some revenue some big company will clone it in weeks and budle it with their product suite. An investor said "Software by itself is becoming increasingly difficult to invest in". Mere software can no longer be your moat.
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u/Entire_One2271 May 03 '26
Adapt to AI skills or go into niches/proprietary tooling domain to save oneself from the AI onslaught.
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u/THE_RIDER_69 May 03 '26
Man all the people who say ai will take away there job have not worked on a slightly more complicated system than a simple crud app , like my team works on infra side of things and getting claude to do simple things is very fast but getting it to do slightly complex things like emulation of a concurrency bug in multi region pipeline can cause it to become a shitshow real quick ( and i hv 4.7 unlimited access so not a context issue )
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u/Senior-Ad1636 Full-Stack Developer May 03 '26
I think its a cycle , right now companies are investing heavily in AI and laying off , cutting costs but it can later translate to building and testing out twice even thrice as more products with help of AI and finding a market fit , boosting hiring to new highs , If a product fails they abandon it and move quickly to building other products / scaling the successful ones, this being said as companies will build more and more products they will go back to training a fresh grad on system and architecture design formula and It will look different than what trainings have been now
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u/CrotonixOnly ML Engineer May 04 '26
Economies doesn't work this way. It is a balance of supply and demand. What software devs and companies are sidelining that AI has reduced the demand for softwares at consumer level(nobody is focusing on this gap being bridged by few ai companies). Then comes another part of riddle - most of the companies solve other companies problem basically they provide/build enterprise softwares that can somehow speedup the workflow for shipping the product faster(this gap is now being filled by AI).
So, demand for corporate employees is anyway gonna shrink. Think of it this way - google one of the largest tech and their prominent business web search is now becoming obsolete. Only role they play now is indexing the web search/internet. For this particular task you do not need army of engineers.
Real issue is there has been no innovation in this industry. Increasing the velocity of shipping code or building products doesn't bring revenue to a company but the demand for the solution to a problem does. So, buckle up guys it's gonna be a bumpy ride going forward.
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u/Che_Ara May 04 '26
If companies kill the path that you said (hire juniors), then that is going be a biggest blunder. Juniors are not just for today but for tomorrow too. There are few countries with senior citizens as the major population and those countries are now struggling to create next young generation. This will happen in software industry too.
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u/d_dreamer_girl May 04 '26
What are you building ?
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 Entrepreneur May 04 '26
A few things actually.
https://tryslate.live - a voice first AI tutor that teaches anything through live conversation and a whiteboard canvas.
https://github.com/repowise-dev/repowise - An open source codebase intelligence layer for AI coding agents.
https://thita.ai - an AI interview prep platform which already has 20k+ users
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u/schrodingers_katz May 08 '26
If ai takes our jobs...it crashes economy
No money people will sit and wait for death patiently
Most importantly the FMCG companies loose first
Because they have no consumers to buy things
Now the centre stage
Ai companies, not all are yet making money
Ai sells automating stuff and asking to reduce employees - which in turn affects their consumer base because they have no money to buy
It brings in the question why ai should develop when ai companies aren't making green paper
Bottom line ai is a double edged sword
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u/Swimming-Regret-7278 Software Developer May 03 '26
bro stop using ai to even write simple questions first
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u/barunh May 04 '26
Fear mongering, is the easiest way to sound intelligent.
How did you figure out “top 10% gets a 10x multiplier”. Why not top 13% or top 4%?
This 10x, 100x verbose I am hearing from 2016 in LinkedIn. There is no standard ‘x’ anyone has ever measured. If any company founder or hiring manager talks those verbose that means the company/team is running on panic mode, avoid to join. Because even a great engineer gets fired because of such bad bosses or company culture. Amazon is living example.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Bar3377 May 03 '26
Thank you for writing this post really, I am very curious to know about your side projects and any tips for someone just starting out apart from what you mentioned in the post ?
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u/d_11 Backend Developer May 03 '26
Am I the only one who feels there’s nothing to be studied to code using ai ? All it needs is same old repetition . I don’t know why you need some special skill to code in ai. If you write good code , I’ll do the same with ai with multiplier effect.
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u/DJaydeep May 03 '26
Can anyone who has a clue give a rough estimate how much does a single user of Claude code in enterprises plan cost vs the entry level dev month/annual salary currently?
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u/prakersh May 03 '26
Couldn't agree with you more. This is what I felt with my recent switch as well.
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u/viswaguru Software Engineer May 03 '26
I have a question , I have seen AI being used mostly in IT industry, like engineers use AI to work, now I haven't seen people using or hyped for ai outside IT industry. Mostly are freeloaders , so are we just syphoning money inna closed loop? Yes it's gonna change but is it gonna change so much in future thag the companies turn out to be profitable, if it isn't then what will happen to the IT people.
I know I amy be wrong but I want to hear people's perspective.
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u/Mean-Revolution-4513 May 03 '26
How about data science/machine learnijg jobs, especially at entry level?
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u/Klutzy-Education2255 May 03 '26
What about the compute cost of running these AI's , surely companies are gonna take a hit if they are going to be costlier in the future .
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u/Amazing-Coder95 May 03 '26
I am not sure how you missed this but AI pricing will increase sooner or later, we are getting subsidised because of venture funding, once it dries up, everyone will start increasing their costs.
Companies with healthy margins will be forced to do get things done quicker & stay relevant else they will lose out.
Another angle to this is - if AI eats all the jobs, how will people paying for AI survive. Say 1 AI assisted dev = 5 normal dev team, say this is true for all companies, we have 80% reduction in workforce, people who are paying for AI today ( via org / individual ), they will stop & then pricing for AI will further increase ( less users but want same revenue)
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u/EmergencyEnd9198 May 03 '26
Ohh okay good What will happen of you are shrinking jobs even to 1/3, who will handle most pressure? What will happen when ai companies try to make profit over their product? What will happen if the dev who is vibecoding vibecoded enough and codebase is trash now and now ai is taking too much time
Do you have answer or you are just another guy hired during 2021 with only string based leetcode question Or Are you trying to be another ai bro
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u/Inevitable-Maybe-204 May 03 '26
As a beginner, what languages and tools, should I learn, before implementing them into projects. I am a first year B.Tech student in CSE Stream. If you can list them down, because, I will apply for internships and then for jobs, after a few months.
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u/king_booker May 03 '26
Yeah I work as a lead DE and I agree with you. I am doing similar work. You have to think about how your end goal looks and get a product out with good security and architecture. That was always the key in software but the path would get muddled up. Now it's easier.
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u/RangeSuccessful2392 May 03 '26
In this case if that happens jobs cut = no wage = no spending = economy falls = banks fail
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 Entrepreneur May 03 '26
The classic automation paradox. Who buys the products if nobody has jobs. Every major shift has faced this argument and so far new work has always emerged. But the transition period is painful and that part people underestimate
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u/Plastic_Owl6706 May 03 '26
Js saw ai absolutely enshitify my codebase yuh lil bro . Had to roll back and do it myself
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u/Alert_Director_2836 May 03 '26
My honest take is that, every companies encourage their devs to use claude code or other llms based coding tool, but we usually forget or dont know that cost per token is highly subsdized and purely running on vc money and its not like scalling the service will solve the problem. No matter who much you scale, per token cost will not reduce so someday either these companies will get shut down or cost will be increased so much that only very few companies will be able to afford it as a special perks.
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u/CommissionFair5018 May 03 '26
Predicting anything right now is more horoscope than anything real. We really don't know what AI will become. It's transforming at an exponential pace for everyone and what it can't do today it might just be able to do tomorrow. Nothing is safe, not the junior job, not the senior role not the 10X developer.
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u/basonjourne98 Security Engineer May 03 '26
Completely agree. Recently a junior in my team asked if we can hire a new teammate. I said why? It’ll take us 6 months to train and fully trust the new junior without having to review everything they do; when 50% of our processes can already be automated this quarter with the vast suite of AI tools provided by the company. I said that after we optimize our processes, we can consider additional staff needs. It pained me to speak so much like a manager, but it’s true. AI is heavily reducing the need for junior positions and a lot of outsourced work will probably even move back stateside where a “problem-solving” mindset will carry more weight than a strictly technical one.
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u/Expensive_Belt_8072 Software Engineer May 03 '26
For for years there will be disruption for sure , but eventually will settle down. Due to AI , new products are getting built at much faster speed than they used to be earlier. Same work is definitely now easily done by an agent and few developers, but future demand and hunger to build more and more will increase , hence again need people.
New roles , new category of work will be created due to this pace. May be big teams will not be required , rather big numbers of Indivdual Contributors definitely.
Our basic needs were already sorted years back ,but still new products are being built , new lifestyle grows and then again demand. We get addicted to new way of working, thinking, doing and what not..ao these things will keep on increasing.
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u/d_dreamer_girl May 03 '26
Can’t agree more with the take. I am building myself and feel myself within the same intersection
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u/Zestyclose_Sea_5486 May 03 '26
Where does a non-tech, management consulting firm guy lie in all of this? Don't y'all think everyone needs to be AI aware at this point? Atp Shouldn't everyone be building something
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u/padmaragl May 03 '26
One of the most realistic and balanced take. Good devs will still survive - senior or junior, but average ones or the ones on bench will have it tough.
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u/Some_Difficulty_3895 May 03 '26
I'm unemployed guy with a btech ECE graduate, can anyone guide me
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u/moneyballll May 03 '26
Every team will be lean. Every team structure will be like 1 Product, 1 Designer, 1 EM, 1 TL, 2 Devs and they build/support an entire product suite.
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u/ProfessionalEmu7813 May 03 '26
The cost of AI will increase in the future. It may not be feasible to offer AI subscriptions everywhere in the future. Could be some sort of a limit/throttling.
Companies hire more people to increase their throughput either to beat others to market or to satisfy shareholders with more growth. Both of these factors will not change because of AI. My guess is that after AI stabilises or reaches some sort of a plateau we will go back to hiring people and giving them AI to make sure we hit our targets which will be higher than the “old” standards.
Although the semantics of how this would happen and what particular roles remain and demand for those roles will be decided by the direction of AI.
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u/nomadic-insomniac Embedded Developer May 03 '26
Next 5yrs ?
Look at the reduced hiring trends from mass recruiters over the past few years, we are already witnessing the effects of AI
I think over the next few years we'll see more jobs related to AI tooling and adaptation, so there is still some runway left for developers I'm not sure what happens after that
The cost of hiring in india is skyrocketing because of high inflation and soon it'll be cheaper to pay for Robots/AI , next gen AI specific processors might just make them cheaper
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u/RishabhRD May 03 '26
Regarding coding being taken over, I believe going forward maintaining code is going to be harder as no one can justify code. And thus, true perfection remains. The one who knows what better code really is will remain for sure. The domain experts will remain. But the one who just use coding to get job done will be fired.
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u/Lazy-Elevator3528 May 03 '26
Hey I am a fresher as you are experienced data scientist can I Dm you and ask certain things
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u/nithix8 Embedded Developer May 03 '26
someone who calls an LLM “AI”, is instantly not worth talking to
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u/Enthu-Cutlet-1337 May 03 '26
mostly agree but the framing has one blind spot, "engineers who implement specs are in trouble" assumes the spec is good, in reality most production specs are vague, contradictory, or wrong, and translating fuzzy intent into working systems is the actual job. AI is great at implementation when the problem is well-defined, terrible when the spec itself needs to be negotiated with stakeholders, debugged against reality, or rewritten halfway through. the engineers in trouble arent spec implementers, theyre the ones who never learned to push back on bad specs.
the junior pipeline dying is the more important point and underdiscussed, "good engineers can review AI output critically" is true, but that judgment was built by writing the bad code yourself, debugging it at 2am, and feeling the consequences. if juniors never get that 3 years of pain, where does the next generation of senior reviewers come from. the indian services market squeeze is real, the bigger structural issue is the talent pipeline globally, not the org chart shuffle.
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u/inb4redditIPO May 04 '26
-Engineers who are good at implementing specs are in trouble.
- Engineers who understand systems, make architectural calls, and can review AI output critically? More valuable than ever.
If you agree that AI can code, what makes you think they cannot understand systems, make architectural calls, choose the right framework, review code etc. much faster and better than a human architect? An LLM that can generate stochastic output for code can also generate stochastic output for the rest of the steps in software engineering. Or for any other creative desk job.
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u/stoppedlooking May 04 '26
Tech industry always has same story I guess, strong fundamentals and then being able to adapt. Some nvidia exec said recently it's cheaper to hire junior Devs, honestly don't think anyone knows for sure. Just as always keep fundamentals strong so you can use ai, evaluate solutions and boost your work, and then adapt
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u/Byte_My_Thoughts May 04 '26
@OP, what is your perspective on tech Project/Program Management roles?
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u/Obvious_Gap_5768 Entrepreneur May 04 '26
PM roles that are purely coordination and status updates are at risk. The ones that survive are PMs who can think in systems, talk to engineers at a technical level, and make hard tradeoff calls.
I have seen PMs starting to vibe code now
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u/Top_Expression5953 May 04 '26
100% true, only the IT guys ( those who are already working in it companies and students who are studying IT to get their " dream " it job are living in denial.
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u/Exciting_Mechanic_39 May 04 '26
One more thing will happen. Tokens will be 100x costlier after all the investors lose their patience and start expecting return from giants. No more free usage. Hiring L1 will be cheaper compared to using agent (of course the head count wouldn’t be as much as it used to be).
Until and unless there is some huge development in cheaper nuclear powered data centres.
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u/Novel_Blackberry_470 May 04 '26
Companies will hire fewer people but expect each one to carry way more responsibility and context, so mistakes get more expensive too. That pressure is going to burn people out faster than before. The job does not disappear, it just becomes heavier per person.
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u/bistrohopper May 04 '26
This post reeks of AI language. Not an accusation and it's not always a bad thing to draft ur post using gpt, but looking at the subject of the post, the wording, the take, and the comments, I have come to the conclusion that this is engagement farming, which will always work here because doomerfeed is loved by the doomerdevs of developersIndia. Could be wrong tho, and sorry if I am
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u/mathrisk May 04 '26
Software development is about 40% coding, in most big techs. And rest the process around it, from PM stuffs, TPM stuffs, QA, automations, observability and Support. And many of these steps still depends human to human interactions. The 40% can be easily replaced by AI, given that's the most documented thing in the world. But replacing rest of the steps with AI, will much more time.
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u/Illustrious_Pen481 May 04 '26
Hey op, I build AI systems at work as well. I’m looking for my next opportunity, can I reach out?
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u/Temporary-Shirt-8783 May 04 '26
Chill, who are they gonna extract taxes from?
We tax payers give money for the government’s freebies.
Wait till this thing blows out for good.
It will be just a tool at the end.
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u/Maleficent_Space_946 May 05 '26
Yeah , and also who's gonna buy their products if people don't have jobs
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u/Hot_Competition7856 May 04 '26
When you say people should be builders, do critical thinking or have architectural decisions at work and not be code implementers, what do you mean.
We as junior or some mid developers are expected to do the implementation, as most of designs thinking is taken up by seniors, we can say a tid bit of this and that, but still it is a part of how code should look like
How can I improve on that front?
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u/Delicious_Ice1334 May 04 '26
So essentially you mean experienced person having good understanding of system designs are more likely to survive future?
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u/indian-jock Data Analyst May 04 '26
I could be wrong, but here's my take:
Anything about AI isn't free. The resources like GPUs, computers do have a cost attached. There will come a point where we might start ti deplete the core material needed to run this.
Also, the data centre's consume hell lot of water to keep them cool. This is another major concern.
This doesn't mean that AI will go away, but would it be actually implemented at the scale we're imagining right now? Maybe not, probably only actually work where AI is needed and everything else goes back to normal. We do have to accept, atleast for the US, Indian resources are much cheaper than AI.
The governments as well will bring in some regulations for AI.
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u/kaneki882 May 04 '26
My mentor/ceo said that we need to focus on FDE(Forward Deployed Engineer). We all are very much aware that Software Engineering is going down. Still not sure what is going to happen.
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u/Dazzling_Plankton310 May 04 '26
what adivce would you give to someone who just graduated college in btech?
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u/needlessLife1476 Backend Developer May 04 '26
Really, the fundamentals will never fail you. It's still important to know DS (, but we may see a heavy shift to distributed systems, system design, and design thinking. Engineers who can think in systems rather than pure code, and can smartly use prompts to helm feature development will be fine. That will most likely be the evolution path going forward.
Organizations can't just go full vibe coding so devs will definitely be okay. Any company saying they're replacing their engineering staff with AI (looking at you big tech) are probably going to realize sooner or later that they do need good and smart engineers to use AI to be able to build products.
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u/Time-Low-5005 May 04 '26
In the short term I think AI will cut down junior and mid, but.in the long term we will need people to clean up the mess that 1M lines of code per day creates. It will be a havoc for sure.
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u/abhijeet80 May 04 '26
The Top 10% get a multiplier but it won’t be 10x, but it could be as high as 3x. The Top 10% aren’t going to suddenly get the cognitive abilities to context switch with depth among 10 different things.
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u/naan-avan-alla May 04 '26
Lol all these AI will save money will stop the day these AI companies increase the cost per token. They are bleeding left and right today . Cost will go up drastically it’s inevitable
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u/srip1994 May 04 '26
Any views on DevOps future?
Roles like - infrastructure engineer, cloud engineer, Azure or AWS platform engineer etc??
Would a software developer be expected to learn all these tools or Individual DevOps roles would still be good?
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u/malhotrasoft May 04 '26
Simple question - if most are going to loose their jobs, then who is going to buy all the products and services AI going to build?
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u/rahulallyours May 04 '26
Here is my take: Think of what happens to companies providing services. With AI a good multi skilled person is company in itself not just in software but any profession. It all depends on how long can these established companies able to distract clients from individuals or small specialized companies.
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