Raimo Seero, Chief Technology Officer at Uptime
Will artificial intelligence take developers’ jobs? Yes and no. None of the skills and roles that are essential today will disappear entirely. At the same time, it is important to understand which roles are currently needed and what value they bring to the IT job market.
We no longer need the same volume of developers in the way we once did, but the need for developers is not going away. Over the past two years, artificial intelligence has brought about a major shift in the IT world, and its impact extends to the labour market as well. Whereas the bottleneck in software development used to be a shortage of strong specialists and skilled developers, technological progress now requires a somewhat different combination of skills in software development projects.
AI is taking on an ever-growing share of routine work, from writing code snippets to initial data cleaning and analysis. This means that human value no longer lies so much in carrying out technical steps or simply completing tasks, but rather in the ability to bring together technology, business, and strategic thinking into a coherent whole, and to define tasks and formulate hypotheses.
As a result, the role of the developer is changing significantly. In the past, a strong technical background and familiarity with tools were enough. Today, developers are also expected to ask why something should be built in the first place, how it fits into the existing architecture, and what value it creates for the client. In this context, the right combination of skills means blending technical competence with business understanding and the ability to see the bigger picture.
Developers must also be able to view a solution in the context of the client’s processes and performance metrics. Only then can they provide the right context to AI and properly verify the outcome. Assessing the quality and purposefulness of the work done is the domain of the next generation of developers, and those who do this well are in very high demand.
This means that technical excellence is not going anywhere, but on its own, it is no longer enough. A valuable developer can assess different alternatives and explain both to the client and to the AI coding agent why a particular solution is or is not worth pursuing. They are able to take into account costs, time, and risks, and connect those factors to a long-term strategy. In this way, the developer becomes a partner both to the client and to the AI tool, helping the company make more informed decisions and avoid solutions that may be technically elegant but commercially useless, or vice versa.
The same shift also affects analysts. AI can process numbers quickly and generate reports, but that is of little use if a person does not know which questions to ask in the first place. The role of the analyst is therefore increasingly about understanding the business value of data – identifying which metrics matter and which should not be used as a basis for decision-making.
This is making IT roles as a whole more business-oriented. Technology is rapidly moving from being a support function to becoming a core part of the business itself. A developer or analyst who can take the client’s strategy into account and is not afraid to say “no” when necessary is more valuable than someone who simply executes a technical request.
From Uptime’s perspective, this means we can focus even more on solving clients’ business challenges through technological means. At the same time, we can now tackle more challenges at once, because the bottleneck is no longer implementation, but rather the clarity of the task and expectations.
We are looking for people to join our team for whom technical competence is only one part of their professionalism, and whose ambition is to identify pain points and goals and find the right solutions for them. We value the ability to think more broadly, connect one’s work to the client’s business outcomes, and use AI to do things more intelligently, not just more quickly.