The best engineers I know write less code than they did two years ago. They ship more.
Everyone wants the clean story. AI replaces developers. AI makes developers 10x. Juniors are cooked. Juniors are saved. Pick a side.
The reality is messier.
Big Tech new grad hires dropped to 7% of all new hires, down from 25% in 2023. Computer engineering graduates now have the second-highest unemployment rate of any US major. Higher than philosophy. Only physics is worse.
Then Klarna replaced 700 agents with AI in 2024 and reversed in 2025. Duolingo went “AI-first” in April 2025 and walked it all the way back in April 2026. Netflix hired a junior engineer last year for the first time in 25 years. OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring juniors for the first time ever.
Both things are true. The old junior role is dying. A new one is forming.
The next three years
The bottom of the pyramid does not come back. Writing syntax, basic CRUD, standard integrations, these are prompts now, not jobs.
But the middle gets squeezed hardest. The mid-level engineer whose main value was translating a ticket into working code has the weakest position in the industry. That translation layer is what the models eat first.
Companies that killed their apprenticeship pipeline will spend these three years paying the bill. Code review debt. Architectural drift. Nobody under 35 who understands why the system looks the way it looks.
The next five years
By 2030 the word “programmer” will feel as current as “webmaster.”
The spec becomes the code. GitHub shipped Spec Kit. Amazon shipped Kiro. OpenAI’s Sean Grove argued code is 10 to 20% of the value an engineer brings. The other 80 to 90% is writing specs that fully capture intent.
He’s not wrong. He’s a year early.
By 2030 the primary artifact of engineering work is the specification. The PRD. The detailed story. Executable English. The human writes and owns the spec. The AI writes and maintains the code. The human reviews, steers, and refuses.
Amazon’s working-backwards culture turns out to have been an accidental prophecy.
The next ten years
Here is the part nobody wants to hear.
Software developer employment in 2036 will be higher than it is today. Not lower.
Every “developer-killing” technology in history created more developers. 4GL, Visual Basic, outsourcing, low-code. ATMs were supposed to destroy bank tellers. Teller employment grew for thirty years before mobile banking eventually killed it.
Jevons paradox applies to software. When the cost of producing software collapses, demand explodes. Internal tools that were never worth building get built. Bespoke apps for teams of six get built. The demand has no ceiling I can see.
But the jobs won’t look like today’s jobs. A typical org in 2036 has a thin layer of humans directing a thick layer of agents. Taste, judgment, review, direction for the humans. Production for the agents.
The age of the programmer is ending. The age of the builder is starting. Most people reading this will be fine.
Final Words
I could be wrong about all of this. Ten-year predictions usually are. If you disagree, I want to hear it.
You can reach me on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/ivanturkovic, on X at x.com/ithora, and on Threads at threads.com/@ithora. I read everything.
If you want to talk about what this means for your team or your career, the contact form is at ivanturkovic.com/contact.
If the spec is the primary artifact of engineering work in 2030, what are you doing today to get better at writing specs?
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