Travel agents are the classic example of an industry killed by the internet. Software engineering is facing the same disruption, but the timeline is compressed.
The other move is to broaden. If you’re a backend engineer who’s always avoided frontend, now’s the time - agents can bridge the gap while you learn. If you’re frontend-only, lean into backend, devops, infrastructure. The engineers I see thriving are the ones who can own an entire problem end-to-end, not just their slice of it. The generalist travel agents got wiped out, but the generalist engineers - the ones who can move across the stack - are more valuable than ever.
Anecdotally this is what is happening and I see it the 15 years i have been at my current job and the 25 I’ve been in Corporate IT. As budgets shift the focus is on people in IT understanding more and more while automation (LLM) taking more and more. You are expected to be a full stack dev IMHO. It could be python. It could be java. But you’re expected to know it all.
Anecdotally this is what is happening and I see it the 15 years i have been at my current job and the 25 I’ve been in Corporate IT. As budgets shift the focus is on people in IT understanding more and more while automation (LLM) taking more and more. You are expected to be a full stack dev IMHO. It could be python. It could be java. But you’re expected to know it all.