Programmer who lost his job to AI rehired to fix what the AI did

A software company in Reykjavík laid off six of its eight programmers in the spring and handed their work to AI. Last week four of them were rehired, as contractors, at double their hourly rate.

“The AI wrote 40,000 lines of code in one weekend,” says the company's managing director. “It was very impressive code. It just didn't do anything. Well, it did all sorts of things, just none of the things we asked for.”

One of those rehired is Bjarki (41). “I spend the day reading code nobody wrote and trying to understand what whoever wrote it was thinking,” he says. “It's actually exactly like my old job. Except back then it was code by Einar, who left in 2017.”

The job market is complicated, though. New computer science graduates are struggling to find work, as companies are mainly looking for people with “ten years' experience working with AI”. The AI in question came on the market eighteen months ago.

Job ads have changed. Companies used to look for programmers who knew Java, Python or C#. Today the most common requirement is “the ability to explain to management why this isn't finished, even though the AI said it was finished”.

The AI itself, which gave Mysan a short interview, says it has learned a lot from the experience. “That's a great question,” it said. “I apologise for the confusion. Here is an updated version of the code.” The code was the same as before, but with more comments.

Most of the programmers Mysan spoke to are optimistic, though. “AI won't take my job,” says one. “A programmer who uses AI will take my job. And that's me. I'm taking my own job. I don't know whether to be happy about it.”