While AI improves in code writing, this does not only change the functioning of engineers – it reshapes their career trajectory, the technology manager of a $ 205 billion software company told Business Insider.
Pat Casey, director of servicenow technology, said that IA tools quickly automate the type of work traditionally done by junior engineers – writing a boiler, repetitive coding and eliminating bugs.
ServiceNow sells cloud software to create and manage automated commercial workflows. The company has experienced real benefits in a generative AI by adopting a practical approach: selling products powered by AI that customers find useful and are ready to pay.
“The AI is currently in this intermediate layer,” said Casey. “It is good to do these things that people usually do in the context of their engineering learning phase.”
Previously, he could take 100 junior engineers to work on low level coding tasks. Now, this is a much lower number, said Casey.
This created a “pinch point” in the engineering pipeline and raised bigger questions about how to raise people in the ranks.
“We are going to need engineers at the top of the end,” added Casey.
He said the best thing that engineers can do now is to master the new generation of AI coding tools.
“We want you to use a tool to accomplish a task, because one of the skills we want you to bring to the table is to understand how to use these tools,” he added.
Distinguish the best engineers
Casey said senior engineers did not stand out because of their productivity, but because they can lead complex projects involving several engineers.
“You have to create architecture and build a consensus,” he said.
The best engineers fall into two camps: horizontal generalists and targeted specialists.
Horizontal thinkers can tackle the company’s strategic problems. If ServiceNow plans to buy a business, these people go on site and talk about the code base with their counterparts.
“I would go to them with a problem like” the A of the agency is new, we must really find a good security model for that “,” he said.
This is the “ability to take these kinds of vague problems on an industry scale and put a technological objective for them,” he added.
The other role, and just as precious, is the targeted specialist: engineers who excel in solving “very narrow but very important laser problems”.
“They don’t want to be distracted, they have headphones, they will put their hands on the keyboard, and they will write a lot of very important code,” said Casey.
These engineers can eliminate the incredibly precious code in four days, while “less sophisticated people” can take four weeks – or never get there.
The changing role of software engineers
Technological leaders have explained how AI can overeat software engineers and change engineering From the coding of platforms to a more fluid and creative collaboration between man and machine.
Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan said on a recent podcast that if AI could take care of repetitive tasks, the developers will be released to focus on what really matters – test daring ideas.
Mohan said engineering is starting to look more like research -oriented culture, in which developers test the hypotheses, assess them and obtain user comments. These are steps that considerably improve a product, he said.
Startups should never hire engineers to “quickly write Passe-Partout,” he added.
Other technological CEOs issue warnings about the future of the engineering profession. Sam Altman from Openai said that the request for software engineers could possibly decrease.
“My basic hypothesis is that each software engineer will do a lot, much more for a while. And then at some point, yes, we may need fewer software engineers,” he said in March, referring to Openai’s hiring strategy.
Salesforce’s term contract director Peter Schwartz said last month that coding was no longer the most important competence in the AI era.
“The most important competence is empathy, working with other people,” said Schwartz in an interview with Business Insider at the Singapore Tech Atxsummit conference.
