In the USA, more than a quarter of programming jobs have vanished in the past two years, something that is blamed on AI. Is this going to get worse? Are all our jobs at risk?

It was the Washington Post that came up with this scare story, backed up with data from the US Bureau of Labour statistics. However delve a bit deeper and the news is really quite reassuring,. Whereas 27.5 percent of programming jobs vanished, jobs for developers have only fallen 0.3 percent. 

According to the Andrew Van Dam

In the real world, “developer” and “programmer” can seem almost interchangeable. But in the world of government statistics .... there’s a clear distinction. 

In the government’s schema, programmers do the grunt work while the much more numerous — and much faster-growing — software developers enjoy a broader remit. They figure out what clients need, design solutions and work with folks such as programmers and hardware engineers to implement them.

Their pay reflects this gap in responsibilities. The median programmer earned $99,700 in 2023, compared with $132,270 for the median developer. 

As with other reports of AI taking over our profession, the evidence collected by Van Dam suggests that it is the routine tasks of coding and testing that is increasingly being performed by AI rather than by human workers, a situation we can view as enriching our work experience by allowing AI to take over the grunt work, leaving us more time to concentrate on crafting elegant solutions and using the enhanced capabilities of today's computers to solving ever larger and more complex tasks.

So rather than worry about the future of jobs in the software industry, here at I Programmer all we need to do is change the labels we apply to ourselves and our core audience. We need to regard the activities we undertake as Software Development or Software Engineering or Software Architecture and, correspondingly our roles as that of Software Developer or Software Engineer or Software Architect.  Or should we just be practising Computer Scientists?

More Information

1 in 4 programming jobs have vanished. What happened?

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