“Just one word . . . plastics” is the career advice offered by the family friend Mr McGuire to a bemused Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, in the 1967 movie The Graduate. A modern-day Mr McGuire might well advocate coding as the route to decently paid job security. Or he might have done before the tech industry axed 200,000 jobs in the past 12 months — and the clamour around the artificial intelligence platform ChatGPT raised awareness that machines can write code, too. Computers, it seems, may soon be programming themselves. So is what we’ve been telling our kids about safe jobs all wrong?
Parental panic would be premature. Widespread lay-offs may indeed signal that the days of perpetual growth in Big Tech companies are ending and they are starting to behave more like banks — hiring in good times and firing in bad. Some are, for the first time, being pressed by activist investors to raise profitability. But after their extraordinary hiring sprees during lockdown, the job cuts represent only a modest retrenchment. Many of the axed roles are in sales and marketing, not programming. And if the arms race among tech companies to secure computer science graduates is abating, other previously outgunned sectors — from engineering to media and finance — will be happy to pick up the spare talent.
The need for software will only grow. The pandemic drove demand from consumers needing to work, shop, educate and entertain themselves at home — and from businesses struggling to control supply chains. Now organisations are looking to IT to blunt the impact of inflation. Robotics, automation, and the digitisation of even everyday products will require a lot more code. And a lot of legacy systems will need replacing.