I just finished a PhD in stats, and before that, studied computer science. I had planned to go back to industry to do software engineering or be a data scientist afterwards.
However, it seems that in the meantime, vibe coding has taken over the software industry and swallowed most data scientist roles. Few open positions, and the ones that do exist are just pushing a button instead of thinking and solving problems. Is this a correct assessment? Should I try to get back in or just find a new career? I am not too keen on staying in academia either.
SWE consists of 2 core aspects: Complexity management and requirements engineering. Both work in layers. At each layer, choices need to be made.
Example: what instruction do you compile an “if” statement to? That is making a choice on how to implement a requirement on a level that we have already automated away. (Unless you are a compiler engineer.)
An AI can handle several of the lower layers with ease. But that just means we can start stacking more layers before human engineers get overwhelmed. AI won’t end software, it will just increase the expectations on how wel integrated it is, how much features is has, how fast bugs get resolved, how well tested code is, etc
It can change the job in ways people don’t like, though. In the same way that a compiler engineer isn’t necessarily going to be happy doing web frontend work in Javascript, somebody who enjoys coding in high-level languages by hand isn’t necessarily going to be happy doing AI-driven development.