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ZDNET’s key takeaways
- AI is greatly boosting developer productivity, not unemployment.
- One measure says the developer population has increased by 50% since 2022.
- Emerging role: overseeing swarms of AI agents.
Given the dour headlines as of late concerning the diminishing amounts of entry-level software development jobs, coupled with predictions of applications entirely AI-generated, one could be forgiven for assuming that software developers may soon be an endangered species. However, the data tells a different story.
James Bessen, professor at Boston University, has been pushing back for some time against the talk of AI and automation displacing jobs on a mass scale, and lately has been arguing that the roles of software developers are nowhere near extinction.
Software developer jobs have continued to grow
AI is certainly not killing the software developer, Bessen said in a recent analysis. AI is taking over software development tasks and boosting productivity and output, but that is not translating into lost jobs, he argued. Instead, the types of software skills sought by companies are changing.
“Surprisingly, however, after three years of AI use, software developer jobs have continued to grow robustly, reaching record levels of employment — 2.5 million in February,” Bessen said in the report, citing data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number of software developers in the US has grown by over 400,000, or 19%, since ChatGPT was introduced in 2022. At that time, the employed software developer population was just under 2.1 million.
Also: This AI expert says the job apocalypse isn’t coming, even if you’re a coder – here’s why
Worldwide, the number of individuals identifying themselves as software developers was estimated at about 20.8 million, up from 17.3 million in 2022, for a 20% increase, according to data from JetBrains. Other estimates go even higher: As of early 2025, Kostas Korakitis, director of research for SlashData, estimated the global developer population at just over 47 million — an increase of about 50% from Q1 2022, when the number was just over 31 million. Of course, this includes the range of people who are involved in some form of development, which could range from working in large companies to home-based projects.
A shift, rather than extinction
There are academics who are also seeing a shift in software jobs, rather than extinction.
“AI is not killing your job options. It’s expanding them,” the director of the University of Washington’s engineering school, Magdalena Balazinska, recently told 2,000 undergraduates, as reported in CNN.
Also: AI is getting better at your job, but you have time to adjust, according to MIT
“Instead of wiping out jobs, AI is shifting the tasks of developers. They are doing less routine coding work and devoting more of their schedule to overseeing swarms of AI-powered code-writing agents — autonomous bots that can complete tasks. Engineers, in turn, are spending more time designing the structure of software and generating ideas.”
Skills in demand, as cited by a Pluralsight analysis, include working with the big three cloud providers (AWS, Azure, and GCP); MCP servers; AI and cloud security; SQL; Python; Agentic AI; executive-level communication; critical thinking; small language models; and network engineering.
Will the job apocalypse ever materialize?
So, back to the question of whether the much-talked-about technology job apocalypse will materialize.
Software and technology-focused occupations face a greater exposure to AI, as documented in a new study out of Anthropic, and many professionals in the study voiced concerns about their potential for displacement.
“Like anyone who has a white collar job these days I’m 100% concerned, pretty much 24/7 concerned about losing my job eventually to AI,” said one software engineer. In another case, a software developer felt AI was making their work harder, observing that “when AI arrived, the project managers started giving harder and harder tickets and bugs to solve.”
The productivity uptick developers are seeing may ultimately be a boost to their professional opportunities, however. “An important and possibly disruptive change is happening, but the common view misunderstands what is going on,” Bessen pointed out in his report. “Careful case studies find that AI improves the productivity of software developers — that is, the software produced per developer — by 30%, 50%, or more. And the rate of productivity improvement in software development is improving.”
Also: Half of all US employees use AI at work now – and waste almost 8 hours a week doing it
Tellingly, since 2022, when ChatGPT was introduced, developer productivity has increased noticeably, Bessen continued. “From 2003 to 2022, developer productivity grew at 3.9% per year; but from 2022 through 2025, it grew at 6% per year.”
At the same time, “the number of employed software developers has continued to increase, demonstrating that productivity growth does not necessarily imply job losses,” he said.
The reason for this, he explained, is that “the real output of software has been increasing also, much faster than productivity at about 9.3% per year. This implies that demand for software is increasing. If demand is increasing faster than the rate of productivity growth, the number of developers must increase even though the number of developers needed to produce a given quantity of software has been dropping.”
Pervasive misconception
There is also a misconception that now pervades markets that automation simply substitutes machines for humans, doing the same things in the same way. Technology, combined with human innovation, not only lowers costs and prices, but also improves product quality, and enables new and better products — including software itself.
Also: The overselling of AI – and how to resist it
“When this happens, total demand for software increases, driving output up. When the output increases enough, total employment increases even though the amount of labor needed to produce a unit of output goes down,” he continued. “So, improved software productivity has brought us lower prices, better quality, a flood of new products doing new things, and … more developers.”
A coming flood of new software products, now more likely to be enhanced by AI, will continue to create jobs for developers, Bessen predicted. “Thus, mass unemployment of software developers seems unlikely to happen soon.”
This doesn’t mean the job descriptions of developers or other computer occupations will remain static. AI is shifting and re-inventing these roles, Bessen added.
