Contrary to predictions that generative artificial intelligence (AI) that may code will jeopardize the employment of developers, a study has found that it has not yet had an impact on the developer hiring market. It’s true that hiring of software (SW) developers has decreased, however the diagnosis is that this shouldn’t be resulting from generative AI but resulting from the economic recession and decreased investment.
The Software Policy Research Institute published on the seventh ‘Changes within the SW developer recruitment market and the impact of generative AI’ reportrevealed in-depth interviews with seven current developers.
They agreed that “it’s difficult to say that the emergence of generative AI has directly affected the developer recruitment market.” Nevertheless, it’s believed that the role of a beginner developer focused on easy repetition will be replaced by generative AI.
There have been also opinions that generative AI didn’t help work productivity in actual development sites. When using generative AI, problems equivalent to ▲deteriorating code quality, ▲development time not being reduced as expected, or ▲increasing the frequency of bug occurrences were identified.
As well as, it was said that generative AI can’t be used resulting from security issues resulting from “the likelihood that sensitive codes, secret keys, API tokens, etc. entered by the user could also be stored and learned within the AI model.”
Alternatively, opinions emerged that generative AI contributes to improving the work capabilities of beginner SW developers.
The reason is that it supplements insufficient development knowledge and experience with generative AI equivalent to ‘ChatGPT’ and questions and answers, and helps the user be in command of a wider range of tasks. He said intermediate to advanced developers may also give attention to architecture or solving core problems through generative AI.
Because of these changes, it’s predicted that the extent of competency required for entry-level SW developers within the recruitment market will increase, and more emphasis can be placed on practical understanding fairly than existing evaluation methods equivalent to coding tests.
The research institute explained the background of the research by saying that the spread of COVID-19 in 2020 accelerated digital transformation in all areas of society, and the demand for hiring SW developers, the core foundation of digital transformation, increased explosively.
Afterwards, in 2022, the usability of generative AI coding tools equivalent to ChatGPT and ‘GitHub Co-Pilot’ was highly evaluated, and opinions were raised that they may replace the work of developers.
The institute said, “It’s predicted that integrated system design capabilities, soft skills, AI tool utilization capabilities, AI ethics and risk management capabilities, etc. could also be emphasized when evaluating SW developer capabilities in the long run.” He added, “Because the recruitment market changes, the federal government will provide training for SW developers. “There may be a necessity to organize a policy,” he suggested.
Reporter Park Soo-bin sbin08@aitimes.com
