AI was supposed to replace engineers but hiring data tells a different story

The narrative has been clear for years: AI is coming for engineering jobs. Companies have blamed AI for mass layoffs, with tech cutting more positions in May than any month in recent history. Yet fresh data shows engineering roles are holding steady while other jobs disappear.

Research from SignalFire found that while overall hiring at big tech firms fell 25 percent compared to 2019, engineering jobs only dropped 11 percent. Even more striking, engineers made up 55 percent of all new hires in 2025 at companies like Google, Meta, and Amazon, up from 46 percent in 2019. Early-stage startups actually hired 7 percent more engineers than they did five years ago.

SignalFire’s head of research, Asher Bantock, puts it simply: if AI were replacing engineers, hiring would be the first to drop. Instead, demand for engineering talent is growing faster than most other roles. Even Anthropic’s own economists admit they haven’t seen AI meaningfully change unemployment rates for jobs like software engineering. Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang takes it further, saying AI hasn’t killed engineering jobs—it’s made engineers busier than ever.

Engineering has long been seen as the profession most at risk from automation. AI coding tools like GitHub Copilot and Claude can write and debug code in seconds, leading many to assume fewer engineers would be needed. This fear was amplified by warnings from AI leaders like Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, who predicted AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. But the reality on the ground, at least for now, is that engineers are more in demand than ever.

This matters because it challenges the assumption that AI will simply replace human workers. For engineers, AI seems to be acting like a productivity booster rather than a replacement. The more efficient they become with AI tools, the more work there is to do—a phenomenon known as the Jevons paradox. For now, companies are still hiring engineers at a strong clip, suggesting that AI is creating more work than it’s eliminating.

What happens next depends on whether this trend holds. If AI continues to make engineers more productive, demand for their skills could keep rising. But if AI tools become advanced enough to handle entire projects independently, the picture might change. For now, the data suggests that engineering is one of the safest bets in a tech job market still finding its footing in the AI era.

Is this just a temporary blip, or are engineers truly protected from AI disruption

If AI makes engineers more productive, will companies eventually need fewer of them

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Filed under: AI, Engineering, TechJobs, Hiring, SignalFire