출산과 육아로 인해 잠시 자리를 비둔 사이, 소프트웨어 개발 분야는 AI가 코드를 작성하는 방식으로 급격히 변화했습니다. 복직하는 신생아 엄마들은 이전의 개발 방식이 사라진 현실에 적응해야 하는 부담감과 함께, 뒤처질 경우 해고될 수 있다는 불안감을 동시에 겪고 있습니다. 그러나 일부 개발자들은 AI 도구가 산후 피로와 집중력 저하를 극복하고 업무 속도를 맞추는 데 큰 도움이 된다고 평가하며 기술의 양면성을 보여줍니다.
번역된 본문
대니엘(Danielle)이 새내기 엄마로서의 삶에 적응해 가는 동안, 그녀의 직업은 극적으로 재편되고 있었습니다. 향후 직장 생활에 지장을 줄까 우려해 이름을 공개하지 않기로 한 대니엘은 오리건주 포틀랜드의 한 자동차 회사에서 소프트웨어 개발자로 일하고 있었습니다. 2024년 중반에 직장을 떠나기 전만 해도 AI를 이용해 코드를 작성하는 사람은 거의 없었지만, 1년 뒤 복직할 준비를 갖출 무렵에는 그것이 당연한 기대 사항이 되어 있었습니다. 한때 그녀는 직업 안정성을 얻기 위해 코딩을 선택했지만, 이제 AI가 그 안정성을 뒤흔들 위협이 되었습니다. 대니엘은 "내가 배웠던 기술, 즉 기계적인 개발 기술들은 이제 AI에게 맡기는 것이 당연하게 여겨진다"고 말했습니다.
세계 최대 AI 기업들은 앞으로 거의 모든 것이 '바이브 코딩(vibe-coded)'될 것으로 예상하고 있습니다. 4월, 마크 저커버그는 향후 18개월 내에 AI가 메타(Meta) 코드의 대부분을 작성할 것이라고 예측했습니다. 오픈AI(OpenAI)의 샘 알트만(Sam Altman) 최고경영자(CEO)는 최근 WIRED와의 인터뷰에서 AI 코딩 시장이 "희귀한 수조 달러 규모의 시장 중 하나가 될 것"이라고 밝혔습니다. 이런 어지러운 변화의 속도는 업계 전반의 소프트웨어 엔지니어들에게 영향을 미치고 있습니다. 하지만 격변이 일어나는 시기에 우연히도 자리를 비웠던 새내기 엄마들에게 그 영향은 특히 더 크게 다가옵니다. 대니엘은 "내가 예전에 하던 방식 그대로의 업무를 다시 하고 싶고, 내가 그 일에 능했다고 생각한다. 하지만 그 직업은 두 번 다시 존재하지 않을 것이라는 걸 알고 있다"고 말했습니다.
최대 AI 연구소들을 이끄는 경영진들은 법무, 금융, 컨설팅, 영업에 이르기까지 화이트칼라 일자리가 기술에 의해 사라질 수 있다고 경고해 왔습니다. 하지만 소프트웨어 개발만큼 철저하게 뜯어고쳐진 산업도 드뭅니다. 2025년 5월 안스로픽(Anthropic)과 오픈AI가 코드 자동화 도구를 출시하면서, 이 분야는 직접 코드를 구성하는 작업보다는 AI를 관리하고 감독하는 쪽으로 무게 중심이 이동했습니다. 이러한 새로운 업무 방식을 배우는 것이 그 자체로 지나치게 복잡한 것은 아니지만, 새내기 엄마들은 이미 새로운 기술을 먼저 적용해 본 동료들에 비해 뒤처질 수밖에 없는 상황에 직면하게 됩니다. 현재 육아휴직 중인 영국의 한 프로젝트 매니저는 WIRED에 휴직 기간 중 AI 공부를 해두라는 상사의 제안을 받았다고 전했습니다. 소속 개발 에이전시의 보복이 두려워 익명을 요청한 이 여성은 "그 말이 나를 매우 무방비한 상태로 만들었다"고 말했습니다. 그녀가 휴직을 떠나기 전만 해도 직원들은 주로 사람이 작성한 코드를 자동 완성하는 등의 작은 단위 작업에 산발적으로 AI를 사용했습니다. 하지만 그녀에 따르면 회사는 AI가 더 큰 역할을 하기를 갈망하고 있습니다. 그녀는 "정부 지원 산후 수당을 들여 AI 강좌를 들을 가능성은 거의 없다"며 "이런 식으로 내 육아휴직을 보내야 하는 것은 아니다"라고 지적했습니다. 하지만 그녀는 동시에 뒤처지는 것이 정리해고의 표적이 될 수 있다는 두려움을 안고 있습니다.
미국의 한 헬스케어 테크 기업에서 일하는 데이터 엔지니어 메리 맥크리어리(Mary McCreary)는 복직 시 회사가 새로운 AI 도구에 적응하도록 적극 도와주었다고 말합니다. 처음에는 AI를 회의하던 맥크리어리는 동료 코드의 기능을 설명해 주는 AI의 능력을 높이 평가하게 되었습니다. 그녀는 "엔지니어로서 가장 싫어하는 것이 다른 사람의 코드를 리뷰하는 일"이라고 밝혔습니다. 그럼에도 불구하고 기술은 본질적으로 업무의 성격을 바꿔놓았습니다. 맥크리어리는 "단점은 뇌를 크게 혹사하지 않아도 되는 단조로운 작업을 처리할 시간이 전혀 없다는 것"이라며 "지루한 일은 모두 AI에 넘겨버렸기 때문에 항상 어려운 문제만 바라보고 있다"고 설명했습니다.
반면 미네소타에 거주하며 마케팅 소프트웨어 회사에서 일하는 또 다른 소프트웨어 엔지니어는 AI 코딩 도구가 산후 피로와 여러 후유증 속에서도 동료들과 업무 속도를 맞추는 데 큰 도움이 되었다고 전했습니다. 회사의 AI 사용 내역에 대해 솔직하게 말하기 위해 익명을 요청한 이 엔지니어는 "나는 복직할 준비가 전혀 되어 있지 않았다"고 털어놓았습니다. 그녀는 "몸은 호르몬으로 가득 차 있고 뇌는 오직 그 아이에게만 집중하도록 변해버린다"고 덧붙였습니다. 코드 디버깅처럼 깊고 지속적인 집중력이 필요한 작업을 AI에 맡길 수 있었던 능력은 그녀에게 "믿을 수 없을 정도로 큰 도움"이었습니다. 그녀가 처음 육아휴직에서 복직했을 무렵, 작년 9월에...
Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story As Danielle settled into the rhythms of new motherhood, her profession underwent a drastic reinvention. Danielle, who asked to use her first name to avoid damaging her job prospects, worked as a software developer at a car company in Portland, Oregon. Before she left the workforce in mid-2024, barely anybody used AI to write code; by the time she was ready to return, a year later, it had become the expectation. Once upon a time, she had been drawn to coding for the job security it offered, but AI was threatening to upend that. “The skills that I had learned—rote development skills—we are now expected to outsource to AI,” Danielle says. The world’s largest AI companies anticipate a future where pretty much everything is “ vibe-coded .” In April, Mark Zuckerberg predicted that AI will write most of Meta’s code within the next 18 months. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently told WIRED he expects AI coding to become “one of these rare multitrillion-dollar markets.” The dizzying pace of change has touched software engineers across the industry. But the effects are particularly acute for new mothers who, by a fluke of timing, happened to be away from their desks when the shift was taking place. “The kind of work I was doing before, I would like to do again. I think I was good at it,” says Danielle. “But I recognize that job will never exist again.” The executives in charge of the largest AI labs have warned that the technology could wipe out white-collar jobs, from law to finance to consulting to sales. But few industries have been carved up in the same way as software development. With the release of coding automation tools by Anthropic and OpenAI in May 2025, the field became less about composition and more about babysitting. Learning this new way of working isn’t overly complicated, but new mothers face falling behind colleagues who have benefited from a headstart. A UK project manager currently on maternity leave tells WIRED her manager suggested that she brush up on AI while she’s out. “It made me feel very vulnerable,” says the woman, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation by her employer, a development agency. Before she left, staff used AI on an ad hoc basis, typically for small tasks like auto-completing lines of human-written code. But the agency is eager for AI to play a larger role, she says. “The likelihood of me spending my statutory maternity pay on an AI course … is slim to none,” she says. “This is not something I should be spending my maternity leave doing.” But she worries that falling behind might make her a target for layoffs. Mary McCreary, a data engineer working at a US-based health tech company, says her employer helped her acclimate to new AI tools when she returned to work. Initially skeptical of AI, McCreary came to appreciate its ability to explain the function of her coworkers’ code. “The thing that I hate most about being an engineer is having to review other people’s code,” she says. But the technology has nonetheless changed the nature of the work. “The downside is that I don’t get any time to do tedious tasks that would be not a lot of effort for my brain,” says McCreary. “I’m always looking at hard problems, because I’ve offloaded all of the tedium.” Another software engineer, who lives in Minnesota and works at a marketing software company, tells WIRED that AI coding tools helped her to keep pace with colleagues in the face of fatigue and other postpartum symptoms. “I definitely was not ready to return,” says the engineer, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about her company’s use of AI. “Your body is filled with all these hormones and your brain changes to the point that all you can fixate on is that child.” The ability to offload tasks that require deep and sustained concentration—like debugging code—to AI “was incredibly helpful,” she says. When she initially returned from maternity leave, in September 2024, her company was mostly using AI tools as a sort of glorified version of the code troubleshooting forum Stack Overflow. But a year later, all code changes were being fed through AI models to check for errors. Then AI began to take up the bulk of the coding work; the company started to keep a leaderboard that ranked engineers by how much they used it. “It’s like, instead of being a software engineer, I’m more like a puppet master,” she says. By November 2025—with the release of Claude Opus 4.5, a recent iteration of Anthropic’s flagship AI model—coding tools had advanced even further. “Opus was, like, holy shit,” she says. “I did a quarter’s worth of work [for a team of developers] just by myself. It was quick and dirty, but it got the job done.” She began to worry that her role could soon be automated out of existence. Software engineers looking for a new job, meanwhile, are finding that AI has reconfigured the job market. Three months before she gave birth to her daughter, Danielle was laid off. When she began to apply for new software roles last year, she found that most postings required candidates to have some degree of AI knowledge, but rarely specified how they would be expected to use it. “The ambiguity was nerve-wracking,” she says. “I didn’t know how to investigate what skill I was missing.” Women looking for a new job after an extended maternity can come up against an unwillingness among employers to accommodate caring responsibilities, misconceptions about their commitment to their jobs, and other structural issues, experts say. “The system treats it as an exit, not a pause. It’s a design failure,” says Daniela Gulie, who leads the German arm of the nonprofit Bring Women Back to Work. But in software, AI has compounded those problems, creating an AI-literacy gap between mothers and their colleagues, and warping the labor market to their detriment. “It’s yet another way in which women are being screwed over,” says Rachel Grocott, CEO at UK-based think tank Pregnant Then Screwed. “You’re layering disadvantage on inequality.” Danielle hasn’t come close to finding a new job; only one of the 40 applications she sent out progressed to an interview. Others shared similar impressions of a cutthroat job market, in which a glut of overqualified candidates are competing for junior and mid-level software engineering jobs. “There’s this huge, huge pool of incredibly smart and talented people that you don’t want to be a part of,” says the Minnesota engineer. To try to bring herself up to speed, Danielle plans to start coding up small hobby projects alongside AI. But the rate of change has left her wondering whether it’s worth investing in learning the technology. “Every day, I am getting even further removed,” she says. “It’s really a terrifying moment to feel like I don’t understand the future of this industry.” The perceived risk of being left behind during a maternity absence, or being displaced by AI, is also coloring career and family planning decisions. The Minnesota engineer says she is torn between a desire to fight to keep her hard-won career and the pull of motherhood. “I’m trying to figure out, do I want to be a mother to a second child?” she says. “I want to be a present parent and actually be there for my child. But I’m scared to have one. It’s very complicated.” Initially attracted to the software industry for its job security, some women are considering looking for a different career entirely—one less immediately vulnerable to automation. Danielle wonders what it might be like to spend less time behind a computer; she is considering pursuing a qualification in landscape architecture. “I don’t derive meaning from training artificial intelligence, or just fixing code generated by artificial intelligence,” she says. “If that is the future of this industry, is that a job I want?”