AI is not only reshaping the role of software engineers, but also improving their skills.
Abishai Abrahami, CEO and co-founder of website management company Wix. He told Business Insider that the technology gives developers “superpowers” and that the value of smart, talented engineers will be “dramatically enhanced” by AI tools.
“What would take a month can be done in hours,” Abrahami said, adding that not all tasks can be reduced this way, but most can.
What entry-level candidates need
According to a Google Cloud report released in September, AI adoption jumped to 90% among software professionals, an increase of 14% year over year. Abrahami said the emergence of AI tools means “the quality of software engineers is more important than ever.”
He said the first thing “every company” is looking for is candidates who know how to code and understand AI models. Beyond that criteria, he said, Wix aims to hire entry-level candidates with “tremendous passion” for the role, which he said is essential to meeting demand. job demands [didn’t want to repeat roles] .
“With the advent of AI, the speed of change is so fast that we need to spend a lot of time learning and experimenting,” Abrahami said, adding that passion has become even more important.
John Stecher, Blackstone’s chief technology officer, similarly told Business Insider that many young software engineers have “insane skill sets,” and that the best ones have a deep passion for: their work.
As tools increase the burden of coding, Stecher said companies increasingly want to hire people who understand how to use the tools and can recognize when the tools are producing the wrong answer.
How will the way we work change?
The role of more senior engineers will increasingly move toward architecture and code review rather than writing code, he said. Experienced engineers need to read code “much faster,” Abrahami said, adding that architecture, software design and code understanding will become even more important.
But the CEO warned that AI could be a double-edged sword for engineers.
“If you’re smart, you can do more,” Abrahami said of engineers using AI. “And you could do something really bad if you don’t.”
