← Risk register SOC 15-1252 · reviewed 2026-08-11

Software Developers

1,687,890 US workers · median $135,980/yr · Tech

EXPOSED

Writing functions, unit tests, boilerplate CRUD endpoints, and translating a ticket into a pull request are exactly what coding models do well now, and that is a large share of the median developer's week. What persists is deciding what to build under vague requirements, owning a production system at 3am, negotiating tradeoffs across teams, and being the person accountable when a design choice costs money or leaks data. The occupation splits: the junior implementation tier compresses hard, the systems-and-accountability tier holds, and no license protects either side.

10-year outlook: By 2035 the job title survives but the headcount pyramid inverts — far fewer people paid to type code, more paid to specify, review, and own systems, with entry-level hiring the hardest hit.

Score — 41/100 resistance

Five dimensions, 0–20 each, summed. Higher means more protected. The arithmetic is shown so you can check it: 11 + 3 + 3 + 9 + 15 = 41.

Task resistance 11/20

Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. An 11 reflects the split week: ticket-to-PR work, test scaffolding, API glue, and framework migrations are now draftable in minutes, but the parts that eat the other half of your time — reproducing an intermittent race condition in a distributed system, reading a decade of undocumented business logic to figure out why the invoice total is off by a cent, and deciding which of four broken proposals to ship before quarter-end — still need someone holding the whole system in their head.

Embodiment 3/20

Fully desk- and screen-based. A 3 rather than 0 because on-prem deploys, hardware-in-the-loop debugging, and embedded or firmware work put some developers next to physical devices, but the median job is a laptop, an IDE, and a Slack window from anywhere with WiFi.

Liability shield 3/20

No licence, no signature requirement. A 3 is where no-licence sits: there is no PE stamp for most software in the US, no bar admission, no statutory sign-off, and CI/CD means a broken commit gets reverted rather than litigated — the employer's EULA disclaims warranty and the company, not you, absorbs the outage.

Trust premium 9/20

Some relationship component. A 9 covers what actually holds: users never meet you and your commits are interchangeable to them, but your product manager, on-call rotation, and the two colleagues who know why the payments service is shaped that way rely on accumulated trust and context that a fresh contractor or a model prompt cannot inherit in a sprint.

Judgment & accountability 15/20

Exists to be accountable for ambiguous calls. A 15 is earned by the calls with no runbook — approving a schema migration on a live table, choosing to log or not log a field that turns out to be PII, deciding at 3am whether to roll back or forward, and setting an architecture that either scales or gets rewritten in two years — decisions where you are named in the postmortem and the cost is measured in revenue or breached records.

Confidence: high · reviewed 2026-08-11 · how scoring works · 20 deployment reports on file

Tasks already automatable

What survives

Active moats: judgment

How to future-proof this job

Who is actually doing this

The score above is about what the work exposes. This is reporting about real deployments in this occupation — the difference between "could be automated" and "somebody automated it."

Meta · Amazon · Block · Oracle · Monday.com · Life360 · Salesforce · UBS · Coinbase · Cisco; Block

21 more in the dispatch

Field report — do you do this job?

Has AI actually changed your work?

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

From people who do this job

Nobody has filed one yet. If you do this work, you know things the rubric can't see.

What has actually changed in your work?

Concrete beats general: a tool that arrived, a task that moved, a headcount decision you watched happen. Don't include anything that identifies you or your employer if that would put you at risk.