When AI becomes better at writing code, it not only changes how engineers work, but also rebuilds the career trajectory, but the technology manager at a $205 billion software company told Business Insider.
Pat Casey, Chief Technology Officer at ServiceNow, said AI tools quickly automate the types of work that junior engineers have traditionally done.
ServiceNow sells cloud software for creating and managing automated business workflows. The company has seen the substantial benefits of generating AI by taking a practical approach. Customers selling AI-powered products want to pay for it.
“AI really sits in that middle class right now,” Casey said. “I'm good at doing what people usually do as part of the engineering learning phase.”
Previously, 100 junior engineers had to work on low-level coding tasks. Now it's a much smaller number, Casey said.
This created a “pinch point” in the engineering pipeline, raising bigger questions about how to nurture people through ranks.
“You'll need an engineer on the top edge,” Casey added.
He said the best thing engineers can do now is to master a new generation of AI coding tools.
“Because one of the skills we want you to bring to the table is to understand how to use these tools.
Distinguishing top engineers
Casey said senior engineers stand out not because of productivity, but because they can drive complex projects involving multiple engineers.
“You have to build an architecture and build a consensus,” he said.
Top engineers fall into two camps of horizontal generalists and concentrated experts.
Horizontal thinkers can tackle strategic issues across the company. If ServiceNow is thinking about buying a company, these people will go to the scene and talk about the codebase with their counterparts.
“We're going to them with issues like, 'Agent AI is new and we have to figure out a really good security model',” he said.
It is “the ability to embrace this type of vague, industry-wide problem and put technology lenses on them,” he added.
Another, and equally valuable role, is focused experts. He is an engineer who is excellent at solving “very narrow but very important laser-centric problems.”
“They don't want to be distracted, they're wearing headphones, they're going to put their hands on the keyboard and write a lot of very important code,” Casey said.
These engineers can knock out incredibly valuable code in four days, but “unrefined people” can take four weeks.
The changing role of software engineers
Tech Leaders spoke about how AI can charge software engineers and shift engineering From coding boilerplates to more fluid and creative collaborations between humans and machines.
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Varun Mohan, CEO of Windsurf, said in a recent podcast that if AI can take over repetitive tasks, developers will be freed to focus on what's really important.
According to Mohan, engineering is beginning to look like a research-driven culture. This is a culture in which developers test hypotheses, evaluate them, and get user feedback. These are steps to significantly improve the product, he said.
Startups should not hire engineers to “write boilerplate code quickly.”
Other high-tech CEOs have warned about the future of engineering professions. Sam Altman of Openai says the demand for software engineers could ultimately immerse them.
“My basic assumption is that each software engineer will do much more for a while, and at some point, yeah, maybe we need fewer software engineers,” he said in March.
Salesforce Chief Futures Officer Peter Schwartz told BI last month that coding has become no longer the most important skill of the AI era.
“The most important skill is empathy and we work with others,” Schwartz said in an interview with Business Insider at AtxSummit, Technology Council, Singapore.
