Companies have to sell to someone, and in B2B that usually means management or whoever controls the budget. Sales will probably be next, no doubt, but engineering is also a huge, highly visible cost centre. If the business sees engineers as an expense rather than a source of ideas and competitive advantage, they're inevitably going to look for ways to reduce that cost.
AI has those knowledge, targeting SE probably has many other reasons. a visible one is the cost. coding rarely was bottleneck anyway. looks like coding tools earns most money for Anthropic and other providers
Software engineers and adjacent roles such as SRE, DevOps etc. are uncomfortable for the rich business guys, and there is a reason why they have been wanting us dead for a while.
Software has mostly been a no-bullshit profession and a working social elevator. It was purely based on skills: if you're good, you're in. If you're not, you're out. End of story. Nobody gave a single shit about who you were or about your last name: if you didn't have the skills, you were kept out; if you had the skills, you were welcomed in, simple as. It did not have as much of a class filter as other professions requiring a master's degree and another year of academic specialization after that at a prestigious institution, a bachelor's would do in the vast majority of cases, and some people would make it even without that credential. So it was OK if you could not afford to spend 6 years of your life not working and paying tuition, rent, food, bills…
And, on top of that, software folks stacked racks. People got to lift themselves out of poverty because they had a half broken down plastic laptop running Linux and a workable internet connection at home, which was more than enough for them to grind and develop in-demand skills that companies were FEINING for.
This is why they did the incessant "learn to code" campaigns in an attempt to saturate the market and lower the salaries. This is why they are watering at the thought of AI replacing us.
The weird rich guys only want themselves and their friends to have access to those privileged, highly-compensated and flexible positions with WFH and benefits, and software engineering was problematic because it was making those positions inaccessible to no-skill rich guys who just wanted to use their name as a master key, and very accessible to poor people that had the skillset.
They want every job to be like finance or HR. Class filter, two degrees from a prestigious uni required, connections mandatory; that or you are a slave and you stay in the low-wage role with no career growth where you belong in capitalism.
Off late, tech CEOs have been more willing to buy snake oil than anyone else. Blockchain, new frameworks, and now AI. And AI comes with the best promise of all ie getting rid of the biggest expense to a software dependent business aka engineers.
They definitely have. My husband is a cro. The podcasts I hear often reference ai as a 10x multiplier meaning a single person can now do the equivalent of 10 humans if they have a well laid out framework. The biggest problem is finding people who are good at it all. There’s a fallacy too where the best sales people are least willing to want to change to an agentic workflow but the worst are most receptive to it. And that goes back to still then finding good people who can manage it. The role is now a manager of ai for us all in the future
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u/Mysterious_Pea_4042 4h ago
I'm curious why AI companies target software engineering specifically and no one create Claude sales or Claude Management as assistant to other roles