Will we still need software engineers in 2030?

I broke down the question in 3 themes worth exploring.

What will happen to software?

AI makes writing software radically cheaper, so we’ll build far more of it. Niche use cases that weren’t worth the effort yet. Customer experiences nobody had the budget for. Software-for-one that is uneconomical today. The world gets more software, not less.

Will that still be human work?

The only thing that’s real in software, are 0’s and 1’s. Everything else is an abstraction. Software engineers use these abstraction layers to build better and more efficiently. The more abstractions, the more an engineer can focus on the hard and meaningful problems instead of the 0’s and 1’s. AI is another abstraction layer that will allow engineers to focus more on what matters, and that’s not writing code. It will be working on the ‘non-AI solvable problems’.

What will the job of an engineer look like in 2030?

There will always be a wide gap between writing code and building software. Bridging that gap is the job of the engineer. I see two very valuable directions for engineers to move to in the coming years.

Upstream.

Closer to the question of what’s worth building. As building gets cheaper, the value shifts. It gets easier to make things and harder to know what to make. Understanding customer needs. Asking the right questions instead of jumping to solutions.

Downstream.

There’s a big difference between code that runs on your laptop and software that holds up for years, at scale, under regulation. Architecture, security, SRE, DevOps, integration. The place where AI-generated code meets the real world, and where people who understand what happens under the hood are indispensable.

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For those who understand that mission, the coming years will be nothing but amazing!

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In conclusion: in 2030 we’ll need more software engineers than we do today. Not fewer. And while the job will look completely different, the mission stays the same: understand a problem worth solving, build a solution, get it into the hands of end users safely and reliably. For those who understand that mission, the coming years will be nothing but amazing!