Computer programming was once a foolproof field—one of those career paths that was always going to need workers, like accounting and nursing.
The industry has taken a severe downturn in recent years, specifically the past two years, wherein a quarter of all computer programming jobs have disappeared. There are currently fewer programmers in the United States today than at any point since 1980, reports The Washington Post.
What’s especially odd is that software developers, a cousin of computer programming, are doing just fine. Programming jobs have declined by 27.5 percent, at the same time software developer roles only dropped by 0.3 percent.
People often use the two terms interchangeably though they are different fields. This begs the question: what meaningful differences are there between the two jobs that can account for the eradication of one and the relative stability of the other?
AI Chatbots Are Taking Computer Programming Jobs
AI chatbots. The decline in computer programming roles almost perfectly lines up with the rise of AI chatbots entering the American workforce.
AI systems like ChatGPT can generate code with minimal input and can perform a lot of the routine tasks traditionally performed by programmers, and a fraction of the time and for significantly less money.
Automation comes for us all, though The Washington Post’s Andrew Van Dam argues that more often than not AI is used to augment and supplement the human worker rather than fully replace them.
Another factor that can be seen across careers throughout the tech industry regardless of the specific field is the broader economic factors affecting the entire tech industry. The tech job market has cooled quite a bit after the pandemic boom, and high interest rates have convinced executives that they need to cut jobs to maintain overhead.
It doesn’t seem like AI is going to fully replace computer programming soon, and it may never, but computer programming was the kind of job people who needed a lucrative career shift could quickly learn how to get themselves moving in a new direction in life.
And now AI is encroaching on that territory, slowly chipping away at a once reliable offramp.
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