From the Archives asked
answered Mar 21
Hope you're doing well. My name is [redacted], and I'm a 2025 UW CS grad. Your career seminar advice made a big impact. Thought I'd reach out for more advice.
I'm an SDE I at Expedia Group in platform engineering. The field is changing drastically. I was listening to a Lenny's podcast where Boris, the head of Claude Code, states that software engineering as a role will no longer exist by the end of the year. (I know he's simultaneously showing off for investors, but still.) A non-SDE friend called this AI boom a "suicide mission" and said that tech/IT jobs were all going to be replaced soon.
This was a startling thought, because most of us like to have an answer prepared to "where will you be career-wise in 5 years", preferably that our career will still be around.
To be clear, I'm not anti-AI. I think AI is an amazing tool that makes writing software more accessible than ever. But the way I see it, there are 3-4 options for a new grad right now.
1. Stick with software engineering. Integrate AI into your workflow, but believe that AI can never fully replace humans. Try to play the politics game and hope you don't get laid off during the routine layoff cycles.
2. Stick with software engineering, but move to roles that will still retain a high demand - AI/ML, cloud computing, cybersecurity. (Probably not QA testers or UI/UX front end engineers?)
3. Stick with computer science in general, but go back to college for a higher degree in something smart that might stick around, like quantum computing.
4? Go back to college for an entirely different degree, for a job that will be less likely to be replaced with AI (teaching, architecture, etc.).
Thoughts? I've read your Molochinations article on this, but still wanted your opinion. Feel free to redirect me if you've already answered the general sentiment of this email elsewhere.
Philip's answer
Farmers went from 40% of our population to 4% in 100 years. AI's dominance will happen much, much faster than that — but I don't think any job goes to 0%. The question is whether the job becomes like farming, where millions are still employed, or like carpet weaving, where only artisans charging $10,000 per carpet are employed.
Anyone right now who says they know what's going to happen in AI or in job displacement is likely just guessing. I don't see how anybody could possibly know the answer for sure. But I think there are a few broad positions:
Nothing stops AI from continuing to get smarter than the average US worker. In this world, moving into other intellectual work doesn't make much sense either.
I'm doubtful, though, when people recommend you go into plumbing. It's not clear to me how much longer robots won't be able to do plumbing, especially if you've kept up at all with the advance of robots over the past few years.
AI gets very good, but not good enough to replace senior engineers. This is a world where AI becomes good enough to replace junior people, but can't quite do the big architecture and design things that senior engineers can do. In this world, a percentage of people will remain employed in software development. If this is the world you think will happen, you should gain skills as quickly as you can to always stay above the rising tide.
AI gets good, but remains a force multiplier for every worker, not a replacement. In economic terms, it's a "complement," not a "substitute." This is the world most people who doubt AI's job disruption fall into. They rightly say that in the past, Luddites were always wrong, that the progress we see does not eliminate jobs; it simply causes people to need to do different jobs. People in this belief system will quote things like the lump of labor fallacy.
I think there's no way to know which path is right now. Some of it depends on knowing yourself well enough to know what you will be differentially good at. In a world where change is happening much more rapidly than before, I think the person who survives best is not necessarily the person who guesses the future most accurately, but the person who changes most quickly to adapt as the environment changes. If you buy into this, it suggests not doing commitments of multiple years down certain paths unless you are sure that path is going to work out well. For instance, suppose you do get another college degree, taking three years to get a bachelor's in architecture or something you think will be safe from AI. You need to be pretty sure that that's the case because you've put a three-year dent on your ability to keep up with AI as you do all the schoolwork.