With all the talk about job displacement of entry-level positions, could artificial intelligence (AI) be an equally big threat to software engineers?
Chatter in the industry and actions by its leaders increasingly seem to point in that direction. Advances in technology from the likes of Workday Inc., Salesforce Inc., and Opkey to automate basic business functions, as well as a massive slowdown in job listings and hiring, could augur tumultuous times for a profession generally considered layoff-proof.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff this week echoed what some companies are quietly contemplating: He boldly said his company won’t be hiring any more engineers in 2025 because of AI’s capabilities and efficiency.
“We definitely have seen a lot of efficiency with engineering and with some of the new… high-performance coding tools,” Benioff said after Salesforce announced ho-hum quarterly results on Thursday. “It’s pretty awesome. And we’re not going to hire any new engineers this year. We’re seeing 30% productivity increase on engineering, and we’re going to really continue to ride that up.”
AI agents are already automating repetitive tasks like code generation and bug fixing, allowing engineers to focus on higher-level design and strategic decision-making. They’re also force multipliers, helping engineers tackle complex challenges, build more efficiently and innovate faster, said Aaron Tainter, director of accelerator programs at Innovation Works.
While Alphabet Inc.’s Google integrates AI into coding processes, other bold-faced Big Tech leaders are openly embracing the concept of less reliance on humans for coding.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told Joe Rogan that AI will replace mid-level engineers to perform coding tasks this year, opening up time for human engineers to focus on higher-level problem solving. “My view on this is like [in the] future people are just going to be so much more creative and are going to be freed up to do kinda crazy things,” Zuckerberg said.
A former Apple Inc. engineer confided in a recent conversation with Techstrong.ai that some of his former colleagues expect to be replaced by AI agents in several years as reasoning models grow faster and smarter.
“AI coding agents are already redefining software development. Developers will use agents to build much better software for everyone, which ultimately means companies need less [developers] to achieve the same output — or they’ll get way more software with the same team,” Sourcegraph CEO Quinn Slack said in an email. “Some will scale up their ambitions, while others will cut costs. This isn’t new. This is what developers have been doing to everyone else’s jobs for the last 50 years and we can all see the improvements in the world that it’s brought, and the [developers] I speak with generally embrace this current shift.”
To be fair, there are several factors behind a rapid decline in software engineering job openings over the past five years, based on information from Indeed. Two salient data points: Openings are down 8% from a year ago, and there are 3.5 times fewer vacancies than the mid-2022 peak of Covid’s record-setting hiring binge.
Of course, in 2023, widespread layoffs followed over-staffing and hiring remains sluggish today because companies still feel they have enough excess hires from 2022.
Unquestionably, there is a shift in perception à la AI that engineering is no longer a bottleneck and some companies have bought into the concept that smaller teams are more efficient. Startup founders, for example, are using AI agents to run leaner teams, move faster, and do more with fewer resources.
“We know first-hand that coding is an area in which Large Language Models (LLMs) are really helpful. Indeed, would it be so surprising if coding goes on to become the single best area of all that LLMs thrive in? The discipline looks tailor-made for it,” Gergely Orosz, publisher of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter, recently wrote. Could tech companies be hiring less thanks to anticipating productivity boost that GenAI tools could bring for existing engineers? I don’t really buy this logic: but I can see how several companies could do a ‘wait and see’ approach, slowing down hiring or even pausing it while they gather more data.”
“AI agents are not meant to replace engineers, but to augment their capabilities by helping to complete tasks and solve problems faster so that engineers can do more, whether that is automating more business workflows, building better tools for employees, or improving the product for customers,” counters Peter White, senior vice president product of enterprise AI and automation at Automation Anywhere.
Meanwhile, engineers and executives have aligned on a definition for innovation. More than half of each group (56% of engineers, 64% of executives) now see innovation as an iteration or improvement vs. total transformation, according to a global survey by TE Connectivity of more than 1,000 C-suite executives and tech workers and engineers.
“The human mind offers an irreplaceable level of creativity, which is critical in solving problems and thinking outside of the box, so it’s unlikely that AI agents will replace engineers in the near future,” Hao Yang, head of AI at Splunk Inc., said in an email. “For AI to truly drive value across organizations, it must enhance human intelligence, not replace it.”
“AI agents aren’t replacing engineers, but those who don’t adapt to them may be replaced by those who do,” Tainter said. “AI is transforming how engineers work, not eliminating their jobs. Developers who integrate AI agents into their workflow will stay ahead, leveraging them to enhance creativity, productivity, and problem-solving.”
“Focus on AI advancements that are most relevant to work happening in phases of the SDLC rather than just the headline-capturing LLM and faster GPU announcements,” Mitch Ashley, VP and practice lead of DevOps at The Futurum Group, wrote in a report.
