Ask HN: What is the future of software salaries in the age of AI coding agents?

2 points jplusequalt | 3 comments | 28 Aug 25 19:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.64s | source

It seems like AI coding agents are here to stay.

Given this, has anyone had any thoughts on what they're going to do when software salaries start to fall drastically? Are you able to stomach having to accept an offer in X years from now at a lower salary than what you currently make? If so, how much lower?

Or, are you making any preparations to leave the industry in the next few years? If so, what fields are you looking to get into?

1. dustingetz ◴[28 Aug 25 19:20 UTC] No.45055948[source]▶
legacy code generating lots of revenue will continue to pay well, there will continue to be low accountability to outcomes, managers will still make more money than individual contributors
2. ben_w ◴[28 Aug 25 20:02 UTC] No.45056409[source]▶
As seems to be typical for SWengs in their early 40s even before GenAI, I'm looking back on two decades where the job ad and interview suggested interesting challenges, while the reality mostly turned out to be:

  here's a REST API and a picture of what we want the UI to look like, and yet somehow this, even though it could have been satisfied *even on iOS as a webapp pretending to be native* by what little I learned of web development 1999, years before I started my degree, from book titled "Learn HTML5 in 24 hours" that cost £5.99 from WH Smiths, has been made into something sufficiently complicated that there's an entire team
So I'm finding I'm very happy that my passive income and home ownership means I don't need to care that the job market is already 95% fake ads, and my main economic concern is if the GBP-EUR exchange rate will hold and/or the global economic impact of the USA either becoming a foe or imploding spectacularly.

I'm still open for work if something interesting comes my way, but the money isn't the important thing any more.