Kun Chen 四篇长文解析 AI 时代软件业：软件没有死，工程师需求反而在增长

part 4 of "software is taking off" through recent discussions i realized many people saying "software is dead" were actually thinking about software engineering as a profession so.. is software engineering dead? when i was a kid, my mom was an accountant. when i was doing my homework in the evenings, I would hear the sound of her using abacus. it was very loud and noisy over the years, the sound of pushing abacus became punching calculators, then typing on keyboards, and eventually making phone calls. she just retired a few years ago, as a director of an accounting team if you thought of the accounting profession as "pushing abacus", it died a long time ago. but if you understood accountants' jobs are actually "helping businesses make the right financial decisions", you'll realize it'll never stop being relevant so whether software engineering is dead pretty much all depends on your mindset on what the profession even is if your definition is "i write code others tell me to write", yup that's already dead if it's some form of "i write very good code", it's not quite dead yet, but i speculate it'll be dead within the next 1-3 years. i'll link in the thread below another post where i explained why so what's the type of engineer that's seeing growing demand? fig. 1 shows SWE overall seeing a growth in job posting in the US. it tells quite a story when that's happening during a year when coding agents have seen the craziest advancements and adoption fig. 2 shows a lot of the growth came from senior, or AI related roles. i will touch on why below fig. 3 shows the rise of FDEs the growing demand for software engineers is for those who has the right capability to solve problems with high precision, agency, and leverage - these traits have always been desired long before AI came along, and are seeing no sign of stopping just think - when two competing companies both have access to the same AI, who wins? it's going to be their humans that make the difference, and they are going to get as many of such humans as they can the software engineering profession has never been about writing punch cards, writing assembly, or writing C. it's never been about using vim, emacs, or visual studio. the code, the tools, and the activities have always been changing nonstop the profession has always been about "solving problems with software". now there are a lot more problems that just became solvable, and everyone has gained quite an insane amount of leverage - there's never been a better time