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ZDNET's key takeaways
AI is greatly boosting developer productivity, not unemployment.
One measure says the developer population has increased by 50% since 2022.
Emerging role: overseeing swarms of AI agents.
Given the dour headlines as of late concerning the diminishing amounts of entry-level software development jobs, coupled with predictions of applications entirely AI-generated, one could be forgiven for assuming that software developers may soon be an endangered species. However, the data tells a different story.
James Bessen, professor at Boston University, has been pushing back for some time against the talk of AI and automation displacing jobs on a mass scale, and lately has been arguing that the roles of software developers are nowhere near extinction.
Software developer jobs have continued to grow
AI is certainly not killing the software developer, Bessen said in a recent analysis. AI is taking over software development tasks and boosting productivity and output, but that is not translating into lost jobs, he argued. Instead, the types of software skills sought by companies are changing.
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