{ "source": "Cooked Index — occupational AI risk register", "page": "https://cookedindex.com/jobs/computer-occupations-all-other/", "methodology": "https://cookedindex.com/methodology", "notice": "Verdicts are re-examined as evidence accumulates. Re-fetch before relying on this; the page above always carries the current score.", "scored_at": "2026-08-11", "model": "claude-opus-5", "occupation": { "title": "Computer Occupations, All Other", "soc_code": "15-1299", "category": "Tech", "us_employment": 435370, "median_annual_wage": 116580 }, "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 34, "contested": false, "near_boundary": true, "dimensions": { "task_resistance": 10, "embodiment": 4, "liability_shield": 2, "trust_premium": 7, "judgment_accountability": 11 }, "reasoning": { "task_resistance": "Writing Terraform modules, Ansible playbooks, glue scripts between SAP and Salesforce, and runbook documentation is exactly the text-in-text-out work models already do at draft quality, which pins the bulk of the day below the line — the 10 rather than a 5 comes from change management under load: reading a flapping alert against a half-documented legacy integration and deciding whether to roll back at 2am is not a prompt.", "embodiment": "Racking and cabling in a colo, swapping a failed drive, or bench-testing a device in a hardware lab shows up for a minority of these roles and is scheduled rather than improvised, so the 4 reflects occasional badge-in facility work on top of an otherwise laptop-and-VPN job.", "liability_shield": "No state licence gates any of this work — CISSP, AWS Solutions Architect, or a Microsoft cert may be in the job posting, but nobody's signature is on a filing and no board can strike you off after an outage; the employer's contract and E&O policy absorb the consequence, which is why this sits at 2 and not in certification territory.", "trust_premium": "The 7 comes from being the person business stakeholders call by name about their ERP interface or their pipeline — that internal reputation makes you hard to swap mid-project — but the artifacts you ship are pull requests and tickets that are reviewed on their merits, not sold on your relationship.", "judgment_accountability": "Deciding what gets deployed Friday, which IAM permission is too broad, which technical debt to eat and which legacy integration to rewrite are calls made with incomplete information and real production consequences, but they run through change-advisory boards, peer review, and an architect or manager who signs off — genuine discretion inside a chain of approval, not sole ownership of the outcome." }, "rationale": "This is a residual bucket — cloud and platform engineers, automation and scripting specialists, cybersecurity-adjacent analysts, ERP and integration specialists, technical writers of system documentation. The modal worker spends most of the day in configuration files, dashboards, ticket queues, scripts, and documentation, all of which current models draft, translate, and troubleshoot at usable quality. What holds is ownership of production systems under ambiguity: deciding what to change, when, and who is accountable when it breaks — plus some on-site work in data centers and lab environments.", "outlook": "Headcount in the scripting-and-documentation tier shrinks over the next decade while the incident-owner and architecture tiers hold and command higher pay.", "what_would_raise_it": { "levers": [ { "dimension": "judgment_accountability", "change": "Named-individual accountability for production changes becoming a compliance artifact: e.g. DORA (EU, in force Jan 2025) and SEC cyber-incident disclosure rules pushing firms to record a named human 'change owner' and 'incident commander' for each material change and outage, so the role owns the go/no-go call on AI-generated changes rather than authoring them", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "task_resistance", "change": "Genuine two-tier split: if agentic tooling absorbs ticket triage, script writing and doc generation, the residual day becomes multi-system failure diagnosis, capacity and cost architecture, and reviewing/rejecting machine-proposed changes in environments with no clean test replica — work models do badly because the state is undocumented and org-specific", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "Sector-specific requirement that a designated, individually identified competent person sign off security-relevant configuration: EU CRA (obligations phasing to 2027) and NIS2 management-accountability provisions, or a US federal contractor rule requiring a named engineer attestation on SBOM/secure-configuration submissions rather than a corporate attestation", "plausibility": "plausible", "would_add": 4 }, { "dimension": "liability_shield", "change": "Cyber insurers conditioning payout on evidence that a named human reviewed and approved privileged/production changes and MFA-and-configuration baselines — already appearing in policy warranties after the 2023-24 hardening cycle; would make the human signature contractually load-bearing", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 2 }, { "dimension": "trust_premium", "change": "Narrow route only: defense, classified, and critical-infrastructure work where cleared US-person staffing is contractually mandated (ITAR, CMMC Level 2/3, FedRAMP High) and third-party AI tooling is barred from the enclave — buyers there pay for a cleared human specifically", "plausibility": "already happening", "would_add": 3 } ], "ceiling_note": "This is a residual bucket, so no single lever moves the whole 435k. Licensure for software engineers has repeatedly failed in the US (Texas retired its software engineering PE exam in 2019), so a broad liability shield is unlikely; the realistic ceiling is mid-50s and comes almost entirely from accountability plus a regulated-sector subset, not from generalised trust in human engineers." }, "adjudication": { "method": "two independent runs agreed on the verdict", "outcome": "corroborated", "run_totals": [ 34, 36 ], "run_verdicts": [ "EXPOSED", "EXPOSED" ] }, "employment_history": { "points": [ { "y": 2019, "emp": 393160, "wage": 88550 }, { "y": 2020, "emp": 362580, "wage": 92870 }, { "y": 2021, "emp": 370190, "wage": 95270 }, { "y": 2022, "emp": 416320, "wage": 98740 }, { "y": 2023, "emp": 437170, "wage": 104920 }, { "y": 2024, "emp": 439380, "wage": 108970 }, { "y": 2025, "emp": 435370, "wage": 116580 } ], "from": 2019, "to": 2025, "change_pct": 10.7, "comparable_from": 2019, "spans_soc_revision": false }, "pivots": [ { "slug": "computer-and-information-systems-managers", "title": "Computer and Information Systems Managers", "verdict": "EXPOSED", "risk_resistance": 44, "median_wage": 175140, "overlap": 79, "skills_to_close": [ "Management of Financial Resources", "Management of Personnel Resources", "Management of Material Resources", "Troubleshooting" ] } ], "license": "https://cookedindex.com/terms" }