Does it still worth learning software?
Kaan Sonal
IT Project Manager | PSM I | KMP | AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate | Data Analyst | Software Product Manager , Akbank
This article is based on figures from the US and an article published in the New York Times. [1, 2] Although I do not have the figures from other countries, I assume that it is either parallel or will be soon.
There has been such an openness and appeal in the market for a while that a large group of people, other than Computer/Software Engineering graduates, wanted to learn software development and advance their careers in this direction. Recently, there have been serious changes in this trend. Various software courses/bootcamps in the US have seen serious decreases in the job opening rates of their graduates (from 90% to 60%) and some have even stopped providing service. According to CompTIA's data, there is a 56% decrease in the number of active job postings and a 67% decrease in the entry level.
Starting from 2010, the need for software development in the market has really increased. Jobs could be found even with one-year or six-month courses. It has become generally accepted that, it is not necessary to study at a university to become a software developer. In my opinion, it was clear that we were heading towards a bottleneck here. Software development is a job that requires serious focus, patience and a certain mindset, and cannot be done without loving it. It requires you to consciously grasp the reasoning that we do in our daily lives without even realizing it, break it down into small pieces and describe it to a device step by step. There is a certain percentage of people in a society who can do this job. It is not possible to evolve people beyond this to this level. This does not mean that software developers are superior people. Similarly, sales or legal professions also require different mindsets and not everyone can do these jobs well. These jobs require a different kind of analytical intelligence and high-level emotional intelligence.
In fact, everything has been turned upside down with the rapid entry of AI tools into the market in the last few years. According to the figures provided by Stackoverflow, 60% of the 65,000 software developers who participated in the survey said that they used AI tools. With AI, life would have been easier for software developers. But it did not happen that way. Especially software developers in the early years of their careers started to have a hard time.
Experts try to explain this in several ways:
The codes produced by AI are so full of errors (there are many statistics on this subject) that it is very difficult for an inexperienced programmer to detect and fix them. It has come to a point where a certain amount of experience is required to be productive, but gaining that experience is much more difficult than before.
The productivity of experienced software developers has increased thanks to AI tools. The need for new graduates has decreased.
In short, AI has not replaced software developers, but contrary to expectations, it has made it harder to become a software developer.
These two issues are actually two different sides of the same coin and are not sustainable. It is very important for new entrants to the market. However, there may not be as many new software developers as before.
So what to do?
The advice to "learn programming" has been replaced by "acquire AI skills". This is harder to do than the old advice. In addition to coding, higher-level mathematics is also required. This brings university education back to the forefront instead of self-learning. Some old methods, even if some claims is dead or may not seem as cool as it was, do not die that easy. Math graduates may have obvious advantages.
The best summary comes from Matt Beane from the University of California :
Stay sharp, keep learning, until further notice.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/24/business/computer-coding-boot-camps.html