Engineering Resilience in a Contracting Market

Despite widespread fears that AI would render software engineering obsolete, recent hiring data from SignalFire indicates that engineering is the most resilient job function in the current tech landscape. While total hiring across major tech companies has declined by 25% since 2019, engineering roles have seen a significantly smaller contraction of only 11%.

At the 12 companies classified as "Tech Majors" (including Alphabet, Meta, Apple, and Stripe), engineers accounted for 55% of all new hires in 2025, up from 46% in 2019. Furthermore, early-stage startups bucked the broader hiring trend entirely, increasing their engineering headcount by 7% compared to 2019 levels. This data suggests that companies are prioritizing technical talent even as they tighten budgets elsewhere.

The Jevons Paradox in Software Development

Industry leaders and researchers are observing a classic case of the Jevons paradox: as AI tools make coding more efficient, the demand for engineering output increases rather than decreases. Because AI allows engineers to generate code near-instantaneously, the bottleneck has shifted from writing syntax to ideation and architecture.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang notes that their engineers are "busier than ever" because agentic AI systems constantly push them to iterate on the next set of ideas. Rather than replacing the human, AI has expanded the capacity for what can be built, creating a cycle where increased productivity leads to an endless backlog of new, complex work. Consequently, there is no current evidence of a material difference in unemployment rates between AI-exposed roles like software engineering and roles with less AI exposure, suggesting that the "AI-driven displacement" narrative remains largely theoretical.