AI Skills Are Redefining What Makes a Great Developer: Today’s Job Market Requires Knowing How to Use AI As Much As Traditional Computer Science

Dear friends,

There is significant unmet demand for developers who understand AI. At the same time, because most universities have not yet adapted their curricula to the new reality of programming jobs being much more productive with AI tools, there is also an uptick in unemployment of recent CS graduates.

When I interview AI engineers — people skilled at building AI applications — I look for people who can:

• Use AI assistance to rapidly engineer software systems
• Use AI building blocks like prompting, RAG, evals, agentic workflows, and machine learning to build applications
• Prototype and iterate rapidly

Someone with these skills can get a massively greater amount done than someone who writes code the way we did in 2022, before the advent of Generative AI. I talk to large businesses every week that would love to hire hundreds or more people with these skills, as well as startups that have great ideas but not enough engineers to build them. As more businesses adopt AI, I expect this talent shortage only to grow! At the same time, recent CS graduates face an increased unemployment rate (e.g., see this study using data from 2023), though the underemployment rate — of graduates doing work that doesn’t require a degree — is still lower than for most other majors. This is why we hear simultaneously anecdotes of unemployed CS graduates and also of rising salaries for in-demand AI engineers.

When programming evolved from punchcards to keyboard and terminal, employers continued to hire punchcard programmers for a while. But eventually, all developers had to switch to the new way of coding. AI engineering is similarly creating a huge wave of change.

There is a stereotype of “AI Native” fresh college graduates who outperform experienced developers. There is some truth to this. Multiple times, I have hired, for full-stack software engineering, a new grad who really knows AI over an experienced developer who still works 2022-style. But the best developers I know aren’t recent graduates (no offense to the fresh grads!). They are experienced developers who have been on top of changes in AI. The most productive programmers today are individuals who deeply understand computers, how to architect software, and how to make complex tradeoffs — and who additionally are familiar with cutting-edge AI tools.

Sure, some skills from 2022 are becoming obsolete. For example, a lot of coding syntax that we had to memorize back then is no longer important, since we no longer need to code by hand as much. But even if, say, 30% of CS knowledge is obsolete, the remaining 70% — complemented with modern AI knowledge — is what makes really productive developers. (Even after punch cards became obsolete, a fundamental understanding of programming was very helpful for typing code into a keyboard.)

Without understanding how computers work, you can’t just “vibe code” your way to greatness. Fundamentals are still important, and for those who additionally understand AI, job opportunities are numerous!

Keep building,

Andrew