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As AI gets better at writing code, it’s not just changing how engineers work — it’s also reshaping their career trajectory, the tech chief of a $205 billion software company told Business Insider.
Pat Casey, the chief technology officer at ServiceNow, said that AI tools are rapidly automating the kind of work traditionally done by junior engineers — writing boilerplate, repetitive coding and knocking out bugs.
ServiceNow sells cloud software for creating and managing automated business workflows. The company has seen real profits in generative AI by taking a practical approach: selling AI-powered products that customers find useful and are willing to pay for.
“AI right now sits really in that middle layer,” Casey said. “It’s good at doing those things that people typically did as part of their learning phase of engineering.”
Previously, it could take 100 junior engineers to work on low-level coding tasks. Now, it’s a much lower number, Casey said.
That’s created a “pinch point” in the engineering pipeline and raised bigger questions about how to bring people up through the ranks.
“We’re going to need engineers at the top end,” Casey added.
He said the best thing engineers can do now is master the new generation of AI coding tools.
“We want you to use a tool to accomplish a task, because one of the skills we want you to bring to the table is understanding how to use these tools,” he added.
Distinguishing top engineers
Casey said senior engineers stand out not because of their productivity but because they can drive complex projects involving multiple engineers.
“You’re having to build architecture and build consensus,” he said.
The top engineers fall into two camps: horizontal generalists and focused specialists.
Horizontal thinkers can tackle strategic problems across the company. If ServiceNow is thinking about buying a company, these people go on-site and talk about the codebase with their counterparts.
“I would go to them with a problem like, ‘Agentic AI is new, we’ve really got to figure out a good security model for it,'” he said.
It’s the “ability to take those kinds of vague industry-wide problems and put a technology lens on them,” he added.
The other, and similarly valuable, role is the focused specialist: engineers who excel at solving “very narrow but very important laser-focused problems.”
“They don’t want to be distracted, they’ve got headphones on, they will put their hands on the keyboard, and they will write a lot of very important code,” Casey said.
These engineers can knock out incredibly valuable code in four days, while the “less sophisticated people” may take four weeks — or never get there.
The shifting role of software engineers
Tech leaders have spoken about how AI may supercharge software engineers and shift engineering from boilerplate coding to a more fluid and creative collaboration between human and machine.
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Windsurf’s CEO, Varun Mohan, said on a recent podcast that if AI can take over repetitive tasks, developers will be freed up to focus on what really matters — testing bold ideas.
Mohan said engineering is starting to look more like a research-driven culture, one in which developers test hypotheses, evaluate them, and get user feedback. Those are steps that make a product significantly better, he said.
Startups should never hire engineers to “quickly write boilerplate code,” he added.
Other tech CEOs are issuing warnings about the future of the engineering profession. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has said that demand for software engineers could eventually dip.
“My basic assumption is that each software engineer will just do much, much more for a while. And then at some point, yeah, maybe we do need less software engineers,” he said in March, referring to OpenAI’s hiring strategy.
Salesforce’s chief futures officer, Peter Schwartz, told BI last month that coding is no longer the most important skill in the AI era.
“The most important skill is empathy, working with other people,” said Schwartz in an interview with Business Insider at the Singapore tech conference ATxSummit.
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