Computer Programmers

Score — 24/100 resistance

Holding it up: judgment & accountability (9/20). Weakest point: liability shield (1/20).

Five dimensions, 0–20 each, summed. Higher means more protected. The arithmetic is shown so you can check it: 6 + 2 + 1 + 6 + 9 = 24. · Scored 2026-08-11, and re-examined when evidence accumulates rather than on a schedule.

This occupation has already been through one. Headcount fell 53.8% between 2019 and 2025 — 199,540 to 92,230 — while the median wage held roughly flat in real terms ( -7.2% after inflation). A job being commoditised usually loses pay along with headcount. One that shrinks by half while pay holds is leaving a specialist core behind, and the score above was assigned from the occupation title without sight of that history — so it may be describing the job this used to be rather than the people still doing it. Why this is a known limit.

Confidence: high · reviewed 2026-08-11 · how scoring works

What this job involves — and which parts are yours

The verdict above describes this occupation as a whole. Almost nobody does the typical version of a job — tick what's actually in your week and see how your own mix sits.

Active moats on the surviving side: judgment

How to future-proof this job

• Move from spec-implementation into requirements ownership: run the sessions where ambiguous business asks become technical specs, and sign off on the spec yourself.
• Become the person who reviews and merges AI-generated code — own the review gate, the test strategy, and the on-call consequences for what ships.
• Specialize in a legacy stack with real business exposure (COBOL, mainframe batch, embedded, old ERP customizations) where documentation is thin and context lives in people, not repos.
• Push toward the developer/SRE title: production incident response, systems integration, and performance debugging on live traffic, which pay for accountability rather than keystrokes.

Training paths for your skill gaps: OSHA Outreach Training — the 10- and 30-hour cards most employers ask for low · Coursera — engineering and procurement courses, auditable without paying free to audit · Coursera — customer service and client-facing skill courses free to audit · Coursera — negotiation courses, audit free free to audit · Khan Academy — reading and vocabulary, all levels, free free · Learning How to Learn — the most-taken course on Coursera, and free free to audit · Apprenticeship.gov — electrical, HVAC, plumbing and fitting programs that pay while you learn paid to train

All 35 skills ranked by how many jobs they open →

Where this experience transfers — occupations you could move toward

Computed from U.S. Dept. of Labor O*NET skill and knowledge profiles: high overlap with what you already do, a materially higher resistance score, no large jump in required training, and no licence you would have to start a new pipeline to get. Targets that pay meaningfully less, that are themselves COOKED, or whose own headcount is falling are excluded — a move into a shrinking trade is not an escape.

Where this work is, and what it pays there

BLS metro figures for 207 areas. The verdict above does not change by city — the rubric judges what the work involves, not where it happens — but pay and headcount do, and the national median hides a very wide range.

Percentages are against this occupation's national median of $100,390. Counts are jobs in that metro, not vacancies. Metros where the BLS suppressed the cell are absent rather than shown as zero.

Who is actually doing this — nobody, on the record

We have no reported case of a named organisation automating this occupation. Not one deployment, not one announcement.

That is worth saying out loud next to a score of 24. The verdict above is about what the work exposes — what current AI could do to these tasks. It is not a claim that anyone has done it. For this occupation those two things have come apart completely: the capability argument is on this page, and the evidence column is empty.

Read that as a gap in the reporting we can see, not proof of absence — the dispatch runs on English-language feeds and misses plenty. If you know of a case, tell us, or add a field report from inside the job.

Quick take — do you do this job?

Has AI actually changed your work? One tap, anonymous, and the running tally is public. Nothing else is asked of you.

Self-reported and unverified — a sentiment signal, not a survey. One response per person per occupation; you can change your answer.

Field reports — what people say has changed

No field reports yet. A written account takes a paragraph rather than a tap, goes to an editor before it appears, and is the one thing on this page the rubric cannot produce on its own.