Whether AI is already replacing jobs is a topic of considerable debate.
Technical layoffs hit their highest single month in total in May, and AI was the most cited reason, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Grey & Christmas.
Due to the rapid adoption of AI-powered coding tools, software engineering is, in theory, the most vulnerable professional field to automation. However, researchers at venture firm Signalfire say hiring data shows a different picture.
Asher Bantock, head of research at Signalfire, said, “The argument given for many layoffs is consistently AI, and specifically they would say AI in relation to code; they might say one engineer can do the work of several engineers in the past.” “That’s a little inconsistent with what we’re seeing on the ground.”
Analysis from Signalfire suggests that engineering was the most flexible job in 2025, based on tracking the careers of millions of employees at over 80 million companies. Instead of focusing on layoffs, which are difficult to track because people often delay updating their employment status after a job cut, Signalfire examined hiring data as a more accurate indicator of real-time workforce trends.
According to the latest from Signalfire, overall hiring at big tech companies has declined by 25% compared to 2019 levels, with engineering roles seeing only a much smaller decline of 11%. talent status report”
In fact, in 2025 engineers comprised 55% of all new hires at the 12 companies classified by Signalfire as “Tech Majors” – Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, Tesla, Uber, Airbnb, Block, and Stripe. According to the report, this is a significant jump compared to 2019, when engineers represented only 46% of new hires.
Data from Signalfire shows that the continued need for engineers was even more pronounced among early-stage startups, which collectively brought on 7% more engineers in 2025 than in 2019.
Bantock argued that if AI were truly replacing engineering talent, engineering hiring would be the first to decline amid the current tech hiring contraction. Instead, data from Signalfire shows that the number of engineering employees is growing faster than most other job functions in the tech sector.
While Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned last year that AI would erase half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and that unemployment would rise to 20% within five years, the company’s head of economics, Peter McCrory, told TechCrunch in March that he had yet to see any significant AI-driven impact on the workforce.
McCrory said at the time: “There is at least no major difference in the unemployment rate” between workers who use the cloud to perform “the most central functions of their job in automated ways” – such as technical writers, data entry clerks and software engineers – and workers in jobs most exposed to AI that require “physical interaction and dexterity with the real world.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went even further, rejecting the theory that AI would replace engineers. “Someone said AI will destroy all software engineering jobs,” Huang said in an interview. The interview took place at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in April. He then argued that the opposite is true. Now that all of Nvidia’s engineers are using agentic AI, he said, “Software engineers are busier than ever.”
Huang said that while agents are writing code on the fly, they are also constantly pressuring engineers to come up with ‘the next idea.’
At least for now, it seems that AI-equipped engineering has become a classic example of the Jevons paradox – the idea that greater efficiency does not reduce demand for a resource; this effect increases it as work expands to fill the new capacity. As Bantock said of engineering talent in this moment: “They are suddenly much more productive, and they have countless jobs to do.”
