It's in the news that Salesforce will freeze hiring programers for 2025, basically because AI is improving the speed and the quality of the programmers they already have, and AI costs less than hiring new people.

This is also happening in the midst of layoffs, basically to cure the overhiring of the previous years and to cut costs.

I must say, many AI evangelists have been warning us that AI will take our jobs, but I never thought this could impact us. Indeed, there is a good reason why we are the first category to be impacted:

• We were the first category to recognize its value.
• We immediately started to use AI to solve our problems. And we saw the limitations, but also the benefits.
• Solutions have been developed to integrate AI directly where the work is done, i.e. in the IDE.
• Managers did notice the difference in productivity.

As a result, we thought "ha! poor creative people, they'll be eaten by the AI revolution" while the shark was already under our boat.

So what?

• If you are a programmer, you should understand how to gain benefits from this stuff. (I can hear your inner voice saying, "I don't trust / I don't like / my code is better / etc", but the sad reality is that who's not using it, it's slow).
• Using AI doesn't mean your job has less value. You still need to think, analyze, understand the requirement and verify that the solutions (that you or the AI have generated) are correct. This is no trivial job.
• Life will be harder for junior devs: they will have to learn to think in an age where we delegate much of the thinking to the computer. (This, combined with remote work, which I think it's bad for juniors, can lead to slowness of their growth).

So, dear programmers, embrace the change. We're the first. Many categories will follow. We'll have a tough time explaining to managers, customers, stakeholders why a programmer is still worth to hire.