The Premium on Years of Experience Is Disappearing: In the AI Era, How Do Programmers Differentiate Themselves?

The software development industry is seeing a very brutal phenomenon.
A programmer with seven or eight years of experience may find themselves unable to compete with a fresh graduate who has only worked for half a year.
Why?

In the past, when a company developed a management system, it needed programmers to write code, build pages, connect to databases, and implement business functions.
The longer a person worked, the more efficient they became, the richer their experience, and naturally the higher their salary.
But now, AI can help you generate code, build pages, write interfaces, and even troubleshoot some common problems.
If a programmer has spent the past seven or eight years mainly doing simple management systems and repetitive business functions, then many of the skills they have accumulated are precisely the parts that AI is rapidly driving costs down on.

At this point, the problem arises.
When the economic environment is good, companies have projects and budgets, and may be willing to maintain a team and take things slowly.
But when the market contracts, and companies need to cut costs while having AI to boost efficiency, they will recalculate:

For the same work, a young person skilled in AI can complete part of it – why pay a higher salary to hire an older employee with no obvious difference in technical capability?

Note, this is not to say that all programmers with seven or eight years of experience are inferior to fresh graduates.
But rather a very realistic change:

Years of experience still exist, but the premium brought by years of experience may be disappearing.This is what is most worth being vigilant about.

01A Deeper Contradiction

On October 12, the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund warned that AI could affect 40% of jobs globally, and in advanced economies that proportion could reach 60%.
On the same day, Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam also warned that AI is impacting the first threshold for graduates entering the workforce.
Putting these two things together reveals a deeper contradiction.
On one side, young people find it increasingly difficult to enter the industry; on the other side, some practitioners who have worked for many years find that the skills they accumulated in the past are no longer so valuable.

02The Future Software Development Industry Will Split into Two Types of People

So what kind of people do enterprises truly need?
The future software development industry will increasingly clearly split into two types of people.

One type is mainly responsible for completing clear, repetitive, and standardisable development tasks. The cost of this part of the work is being continuously driven down by AI.The other type can understand complex business rules, design system architecture, handle thorny problems, judge whether AI-generated results are reliable, and take responsibility for final delivery.

AI can also help the second type of people, but it is very difficult to replace all their judgment and responsibility merely by generating code.

So what truly sets people apart may no longer be how many years you have written code, but what you have actually accumulated during those years.

Have you accumulated proficiency at repeating tasks, or the ability to independently solve complex problems?

03Don't Mistake Years of Experience for Your Competitiveness

This also serves as a reminder for all professionals:

Don't mistake years of experience for your competitiveness.

Because the most dangerous thing in the AI era may not be that you don't know how to use AI, but that the skills you have used for many years are becoming cheaper and cheaper.

So, in the AI era, should a company still pay a higher salary to a programmer with seven or eight years of experience who mainly does simple development?
If you were the boss, would you choose such an older employee, or a young person who is good at using AI?