With realistic optimism, view AI as growth opportunity or change career: GitHub CEO

When the first large language models of OpenAI Chat GPT gen AI made its way to the market in 2022, many were skeptic about it. Some called it gimmicky, but the advancements in gen AI have grown with breakneck speed, and now, the latest models can perform several tasks independently. The use cases of gen AI are more than ever. It can be used to automate the mundane task of finding bugs in software, testing it and deploying it in a very short time.

In 2025, Google, Microsoft, IBM and other major corporations worldwide announced over 100,000 layoffs.

Recently, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) in India announced let go of 12,000 employees, particularly affecting mid- and senior-level staff. The decision was part of the company's cost-cutting measures to diversify investments in technology, generative Artificial Intelligence (gen AI) deployment, and market expansion.

This further raised concerns that Gen AI's rising usage in corporate companies may further lead to job loss in the coming years.

For those engineers who are wary of gen AI, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke has a word of caution and also motivation for the challenging time ahead.

"We tend to see optimism and realism as opposing mindsets. But the developers we heard from had an intriguing blend; they were realistic optimists. They see the shift, they don’t pretend it won’t change their job, but they also believe this is a chance to level up," said Dohmke, who spoke to several developers about their thoughts on gen AI.

“I think of myself as [a] mediocre engineer, and I feel this AI reset is giving me a chance to build skills that will bring me closer to excellence,” one developer said to Dohmke.

Software engineers have to be optimistic and realistic about the agentic AI. They have to view it as a collaborative tool to improve their efficiency. This may help the engineers get a role as a validator, as not all solutions produced by gen AI are not fool--proof. Particularly if the application is deployed in big corporations and used worldwide, it has to be tested.

We don't want another Microsoft software outage (problem created by CrowdStrike update) that stopped operations of airports, corporate and government service centres worldwide, right?

Engineers have to embrace generative AI. Dohmke wants engineers to explore all the available AI tools and understand their limitations, and try ways to improve them and get the required results.

Reportedly US Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that software developer jobs are expected to grow by 18 per cent in the next decade, nearly five times the national average across occupations. But Dohmke noted that there won’t be the same software developer jobs as we know them today, but there is more reason to acknowledge the disruption and lean into adaptation than there is to despair.

“Either you have to embrace the AI, or you get out of your career”, one developer said to GitHub CEO.

Dohmke also added that there is a need for change in the curriculum for Computer Science in schools and colleges, where students are still being taught coding programmes, which are easily completed by current AI models.

" The future belongs to developers who can model systems, anticipate edge cases, and translate ambiguity into structure—skills that AI can’t automate. We need to teach abstraction, decomposition, and specification not just as pre-coding steps, but as the new coding," said GitHub CEO.

"The reinvention of the software developer role also opens doors for interdisciplinary thinking and diverse paths into software careers. We can blend CS with design, ethics, systems thinking, and human-computer interaction and encourage students to see themselves not as coders, but as computational creators," added Dohmke.

Software engineers have to be pragmatic about the new reality of AI and view it as a growth opportunity. For that, they have keep themselves abreast of the latest AI tools and become an expert in skillfully executing the given work in less time.

If you are good enough to embrace AI and master it, you are certain to get big opportunities at tech companies.

Mark Zuckerberg is offering millions of dollars as joining bonus to world's top AI experts for his ambitious 'AI Superintelligence Team' at Meta.

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