It’s too early to talk about the disappearance of the profession, but the entry point into it and the role itself are changing dramatically.
It’s too early to talk about the disappearance of the profession, but the entry point into it and the role itself are changing dramatically.
One of the key signals is a change in the division of labor within teams. According to one of the engineers quoted by EP, about 80% of his tasks are now not writing code, but formulating queries and setting tasks for the model. Then the AI generates the code itself, and the engineer’s role is reduced to checking the result.
The most questions are around juniors. It is their tasks that AI begins to perform first. But, according to SoftServe CTO Serzh Gaziev, the role of Junior will not disappear — it will shift to the stage of final refinement: checking the result, finding errors and bringing it to a working state. Knowledge of programming languages remains important at the level of understanding the architecture, but not at the level of syntax.
At the same time, a new type of specialist is emerging — an AI-native engineer. This is not necessarily the strongest programmer in the classical sense, but a person who knows how to work effectively with AI tools and achieve results. And also — the so-called super-junior: people without much experience, but with the right thinking and no attachment to a specific stack. At the age of 18-20, they can show results at the level of specialists with many years of experience.
The market already reflects this. While DevOps (41%), Cloud (37%), and Full-stack (36%) engineers were previously the most in-demand, in the next two years AI engineers (51%), Software architects (32%), and Data engineers (29%) will be in the lead.
AI Director of EPAM Ukraine Vadym Vlasenko formulates the new standard clearly: basic AI literacy is no longer an advantage, but a minimum. Clients are willing to pay more only for those who have rebuilt their workflow and produce results 2-3 times faster — and not for an «engineer with a regular Copilot.»
