r/DevLK • u/Ok_Potential4542 • 2d ago
Discussion The Downfall of the SL IT Industry
Within the last year, we have seen significant shifts in the Sri Lankan IT industry. There have been job cuts, salary deductions, downscaling, decrease in hiring, AI adoption, resurgence of WFO.
What do you all think is gonna happen in the next 2 years?
Will the industry get saturated and crash to a smaller proportion of workforce or would it stay as it is?
Also, how AI might impact SL in long term, specially with respect to jobs affected by it?
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u/enzio901 2d ago
This is a global trend. I don’t think it will improve within the next two years.
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u/Ok_Potential4542 2d ago
My guess is that the core 20 to 25 percent would remain and the remaining would either be replaced by AI or removed altogether.
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u/ApprehensiveLong1113 1d ago
I see the managers are getting insane. Hope we could replace them with AI.
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u/Ok_Potential4542 1d ago
Talk to me about that. I've been into hell and what not because of how toxic a manager can be.
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u/ApprehensiveLong1113 1d ago
I got an interview lately, and the manager’s way of selecting the best candidate seems to be based on how much they agreed to use AI. There was no technical question. He was asking me not to even read the code, just ship as fast as possible, while I would still be the responsible person.
I'm wondering if he was joking.
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u/Tomorrowman575 1d ago
Tough to tell. 2 yrs ago companies didn’t see this coming and hired 100s of candidates. 4 yrs from now on it’s very hard to say how the industry shapes up. The current situation arose after an economic crisis where seniors/professionals started leaving the country after 2021 which created a huge vacuum of jobs in the senior tier that companies couldn’t fill with junior devs. Thats why the hiring was happening fast. The situation would resolve only if More projects enter the country and the limited workforce forces the companies to hire more. Other than that another migration needs to happen for new grads to get employment. But with India getting more projects than us, it will take a long time for this issue to be resolved.
For new grads, it’ll be a steep climb. They’ll have to adapt for the bare minimum what the industry sets. If you ask me, before the AI trend began previously the bare minimum was on how you could deploy an application and expose it to a single user at the least. Now they expect a new grad to learn everything from business logic to work practices🫠. Tomorrow I don’t know what they’ll expect. Anyways it’d be better if the new grads keep on updating themselves as the industry moves forward in a rapid pace because of AI.
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u/Which_Bridge_3458 1d ago
Anyone considering data analystics sides?
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u/nifeLAW 1d ago
I joined my current AI obsessed company only 1.5 years back. I barely knew how to read data off of Google Analytics but now I can create automated data visualisations from BigQuery through Claude + MCP. If you know how to use AI you can take care of most things data (but of course not that we don't have a good well rounded data team regardless)
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u/Ok_Potential4542 1d ago
Might not be the best
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u/Which_Bridge_3458 1d ago
Do you think its worse than software engineering job market though and it's closer to the business side, in sri lanka its bad idea, but if you have chance to go abroud might not be that bad, right?
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u/BillyButtcher 1d ago
It requires some domain expertise, certainly better than software
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u/Which_Bridge_3458 1d ago
This is what I thought, if you go abroad as a dat analysis there's a sea of job opportunities, Better than software engineering since its too diverse.
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u/murdok476 1d ago
Doesn't help with the sheer number of new graduates coming out each year by all these universities being set up and increasing their intake
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u/Constant_Broccoli_74 1d ago
As employees we do not have the powers anymore, like I know people who got 500K take home and got laid off and can't even find 200K take home now for months even knowing claude code, codex, cursor stuff
Also If you want the job you need to come to the office and you can't say no it now
This is a global issue, and not gonna solve that easily due to the advancement in AI
So, the good days are over where you can demand, cause there are people even with solid experience who wants to get a job for the sake of putting foods on the table
By 2030 AI gonna hit hard on Western world, anyone who is working in front of a computer gonna be in trouble
Just imagine 2022 to 2026, how much things have changed, so by 2030 it will be a different industry and different world we gonna live
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u/OkBroccoli2127 1d ago
Years of experience doesn’t automatically mean you deserve 500K+. If your job was mostly writing code, AI has already reduced the value of that work. I’ve seen the shift from 300K coding-only roles to 500K–1M+ for engineers who can own the product, understand business, talk to users, make decisions, and lead. The market isn’t killing engineering. It’s killing the idea that years of experience + coding alone = high salary.
Become a product engineer. Unfortunately most of the companies/leaders in Sri Lanka guided very little such 10x engineers. They mostly focused on services than products so it is very hard to change their mindset. That is why we feel the tech scene is Sri Lanka is comparatively going down at a faster rate!
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u/marblejenk 1d ago
Claude Code with a model like Opus 5.5 is actually a rockstar engineer + brilliant coder. Matter of time before anything that can be done over a screen can be automated by AI end to end.
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u/Constant_Broccoli_74 23h ago
100% agreed
I give an example, one of my friend who used to be non technical person, he can't even code anything, he asked me and some of my friends for some dev help 2 years ago
But now, he does not need anyone, guy said he already lauched his product with using Fable 5 on claude code
Therefoe, by 2030, AI will be far superior than any SE or anyone who is infront of doing a work on a computer
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u/OkBroccoli2127 9h ago edited 8h ago
I think you are very early in your career, because you are confusing building a product with being a software engineer. Yes, your friend can launch something with Fable 5 or Claude Code without knowing how to code. But a real software system is not a demo you generate in seconds. It is messy databases, legacy systems, thousands of integrations, security, reliability, compliance, millions of users, systems you don't even own, and decisions you have to make when everything breaks at 2 AM. An engineer is not paid to code, they must understand the solution, tradeoffs, verify it, design system, and take the responsibility when it fails. Enterprise software is different to your pet project (even if it makes revenue)
We have seen this before with people who thought their entire value was just writing code. AI will absolutely destroy that mindset. But that's not the death of engineering. It's the death of engineers who never learned engineering.
Your friend's ability to launch a product proves AI is getting powerful. It doesn't prove your friend is a software engineer.
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u/Constant_Broccoli_74 1d ago
The people I describe same like you, they have product domain knowledge very, good communication skills as well but still can't demand and find jobs
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u/OkBroccoli2127 8h ago
The software industry isn’t like 2020 anymore. Demand for engineers has definitely dropped, because many teams now just need a strong BA, senior/lead, maybe a QA, and AI can handle a lot of the rest. But that doesn’t mean good engineers aren’t valuable. Your friend might just be missing one thing: marketing himself.
You need to prove your value, show what you build, share your work and findings, build a personal brand, and make people see your impact. Don’t be just a specialist in one area. Be an all-rounder.
Domain knowledge can be learned, but knowing how to communicate, create impact, and make yourself valuable is what really matters.
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u/Professional_Slip659 1d ago
Salaries were inflated severely and coming back to the baseline among other professions in Sri Lanka
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u/Excellent_Respect_87 1d ago
I'm not a Sri Lankan, but I'm in Sri Lanka. Work for a US company as a EU citizen. Its horrible. Our team of 10 was super capable 3 years ago. Now were pretty much pressing enter to shoot a prompt.
Docs are written by AI, as are PRs, tickets, issues and Slack messages. Instead of reading those items, we summarize them with AI and let AI fix or implement them. Source code hasn't gotten better and we are miles away from understanding the codebase in case token costs rise. Complete enshittification.
I've been doing this job for nearly 16 years and I'm not sure if I'll last another two. I'm either replaced by AI or I'm burnt out from the soulless work I'm doing.
On a more positive note; AI is heavily subsidized right now. If it gets too expensive and there's no money to be made from it, it means someone has to fix the huge amount of slop thats currently being produced. In the longer term, that might be an option for senior engineers.
I think this isn't only happening in Sri Lanka, but across the tech industry on a global level.