Dario Amodei, the CEO of $61 billion AI startup Anthropic, said last month that AI will take over coding for software engineers within a year. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in January that Meta was developing AI that could code as well as a mid-level engineer this year. Last month, Sam Altman said that eventually, fewer software engineers would be needed. Meanwhile, a recent Pew Research survey found that half of AI experts predicted the technology would lead to fewer software development jobs over the next two decades.
But despite so many CEOs and experts predicting that AI will replace, or at least change, the scope of a software engineer’s job, the CEO of identity and access management company Okta says the notion is “laughable.”
“I just laugh every time I hear about it,” Okta CEO Todd McKinnon told Business Insider on Tuesday. “This whole ‘we’re gonna have fewer software engineers.’ It’s laughable.”
McKinnon stated that he expects more demand and a higher number of software engineers and developers in the industry in the next few years than there are now.
“In five years, there will be more software engineers,” McKinnon told BI.
McKinnon disputed the idea that demand for software engineers will wane as AI’s coding capabilities grow. He said that more software engineers were needed in every era of advancement in the technology industry, from the rise of PCs to the growth of mobile phones. And while AI can tackle the “grunt work,” engineers will level up to designing systems and handling more complex problems.
Okta CEO Todd McKinnon. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Even if McKinnon is optimistic about the outlook for software engineers, hiring for the profession has decreased since the pandemic. Data from ADP shows that, by January 2024, the U.S. employed fewer software engineers than it did six years prior. Indeed data revealed that software engineer positions were down by more than one-third in March compared to five years ago.
Still, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) predicts that from 2023 to 2033, software developer jobs will grow by 17%, “much faster than average,” and add 327,900 new jobs. The 2023 median pay for the profession was $130,160 per year, per BLS.
Okta, with a market value of over $15 billion, provides software for companies to use in multi-factor authentication and other user access methods. As of April 2024, the company employs close to 6,000 global employees and has more than 18,000 clients.
