For the last couple of decades, it had been a given that software engineers made more money than their counterparts from other streams, including electrical engineering, eechanical Engineering and civil engineering. But with the advent of AI, this might not hold true any more.
Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu has said that it was no longer a given that software engineer salaries would be more than those of other engineers. “I have often said this to our employees: the fact that software engineers get paid better than mechanical engineers or civil engineers or chemists or school teachers is not some birthright and we cannot take that for granted, and we cannot assume it will last forever,” he posted on X.
“The fact that customers pay for our products also cannot be taken for granted. This is to remind ourselves that we can be “disrupted” – and the more we assume we won’t be, the more likely we will be,” he added.
“As Andy Grove of Intel said “Only the paranoid survive”. The productivity revolution I see coming to software development (LLMs + tooling) could destroy a lot of software jobs. This is sobering but necessary to internalize,” Vembu added.
Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, AI has been extensively used in coding. In the early days, it was directly through LLM interfaces or through autocomplete tools like Github copilot, but in recent months, it’s become a lot more automated through specialized tools like Cursor and Windsurf. Companies like Google and Microsoft have said that as much as 30 percent of their code is being written by AI, and the number is as high as 80 percent in anecdotal examples from employees at top AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.
All this means that a single human programmer can create a lot more code than was previously thought possible, and it is also much easier to code than before. This can lead one to believe that if the demand for software doesn’t skyrocket in the coming years, it could take a lot fewer programmers to write the same amount of code as is being written currently, and with the supply of software engineers far exceeding demand, the salaries of software engineers might inevitably drop. This is what Sridhar Vembu seems to be saying when he talks about lowered salaries for software engineers — if the AI disruption plays out along these lines, software engineering might lose its sheen compared to other engineering fields in the coming years.