AI was supposed to kill engineering jobs, but data shows they’re most resilient

Whether artificial intelligence is already eliminating jobs remains a fiercely contested question. Tech layoffs in May reached their highest monthly peak in years, with AI cited as the primary cause, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

On paper, software engineering appears to be the profession most susceptible to automation, especially as AI-powered coding tools gain rapid traction. Yet researchers at venture firm SignalFire argue that hiring data paints a very different picture.

“The rationale given for lots of layoffs is consistently AI, and specifically they’ll say AI with respect to code; they’ll say one engineer could do the job of however many engineers in the past,” said Asher Bantock, SignalFire’s head of research. “What we’re seeing on the ground is a little inconsistent with that.”

SignalFire’s analysis tracked the careers of millions of employees across more than 80 million companies and found that engineering was the most resilient job function in 2025. Rather than focusing on layoffs,which are hard to track because people often delay updating their employment status,SignalFire examined hiring data as a more reliable indicator of real-time workforce trends.

While total hiring across large tech companies dropped 25% compared to 2019 levels, engineering roles saw a much smaller decline of just 11%, according to SignalFire’s latest “State of Talent Report.”

In fact, engineers made up 55% of all new hires in 2025 across the 12 companies SignalFire classifies as “Tech Majors”,Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, Tesla, Uber, Airbnb, Block, and Stripe. That is a significant jump from 2019, when engineers represented only 46% of new recruits, the report notes.

The sustained demand for engineers was even more pronounced at early-stage startups, which collectively hired 7% more engineers in 2025 than they did in 2019, SignalFire’s data shows.

If AI were truly replacing engineering talent, Bantock argued, engineering hiring would be the first to suffer during the current tech hiring slowdown. Instead, SignalFire’s data indicates that engineering headcount is growing faster than most other job functions in tech.

While Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned last year that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment as high as 20% within five years, the company’s own head of economics, Peter McCrory, told TechCrunch in March that he had not yet observed any significant AI-driven effects on the workforce.

McCrory said at the time: “There’s at least no larger material difference in unemployment rates” between workers who use Claude for the “most central task of their job in automated ways”,such as technical writers, data entry clerks, and software engineers,and workers in jobs less exposed to AI that require “physical interaction and dexterity with the real world.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went even further, outright dismissing the idea that AI will replace engineers. “Somebody said that AI is going to destroy all of the software engineering jobs,” Huang said in an interview at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in April. He then argued the opposite is true. Now that all engineers at Nvidia are using agentic AI, “software engineers are busier than ever,” he said.

Huang added that while agents write code near instantaneously, they constantly push engineers to generate “the next idea.”

For now at least, it seems that armed with AI, engineering has become a classic example of the Jevons paradox,the idea that greater efficiency doesn’t reduce demand for a resource; it increases it, because the work expands to fill the new capacity. As Bantock said of engineering talent in this moment: “They’re suddenly a lot more productive, and there’s endless work for them to do.”