Software jobs are being automated away, but not by AI. If you think about it, any time-saving library, service, or tool is going to reduce headcount at an efficient organization.
For example, I currently have a company that I technically manage. It has one employee who does maintenance on the infrastructure (AWS Elastic Beanstalk), database (AWS RDS), and code for five different products. The only other people who touch the code are security auditors.
That just wasn't possible 10 years ago. Managing servers alone for those products (~50 EC2 instances, ~10 load balancers, 10 database instances) would've been a full-time job.
Yep, this came up at a previous company (with 700 people at the time) that had existed before the cloud did. As AWS became more and more prevalent in 2010/11 they had to decide whether they wanted to be in the business of running physical servers and racks in data centres or whether they wanted to move to cloud hosting providers.
It was a non-trivial exercise, and to the best of my knowledge they still have some physical servers, but slowly but surely almost everything moved to Amazon.
Those physical server operations employees slowly left for other jobs.
They company kept growing and employing tech people though. Just tech people doing other things.
For example, I currently have a company that I technically manage. It has one employee who does maintenance on the infrastructure (AWS Elastic Beanstalk), database (AWS RDS), and code for five different products. The only other people who touch the code are security auditors.
That just wasn't possible 10 years ago. Managing servers alone for those products (~50 EC2 instances, ~10 load balancers, 10 database instances) would've been a full-time job.