Whether AI is already replacing jobs is hotly debated.
The technical redundancies hit them highest single month total in years in May, and artificial intelligence was the most cited reason, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
Software engineering, in theory, is the professional field most vulnerable to automation given the rapid adoption of AI-powered coding tools. But researchers at venture capital firm SignalFire say hiring data tells a different story.
“The rationale given for a lot of layoffs is solid AI, and specifically they’ll say AI over code; they’ll say one engineer could do the job no matter how many engineers there are in the past,” said Asher Bantock, head of research at SignalFire. “What we’re seeing on the ground is a little inconsistent with that.”
SignalFire’s analysis, which tracked the careers of millions of workers at more than 80 million companies, suggests that engineering was the most resilient job for 2025. Instead of focusing on layoffs, which are hard to track because people often delay updating their employment status after job cuts, SignalFire looked at accurate data on real-time job trends.
While overall hiring at major tech companies fell 25% compared to 2019 levels, engineering roles saw a much smaller decline of just 11%, according to SignalFire’s latest release.State of Talent Report.”
In fact, engineers made up 55% of all new hires in 2025 at the 12 companies SignalFire classifies as “Tech Majors” — Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, Tesla, Uber, Airbnb, Block and Stripe. That’s a significant jump from 2019, when engineers accounted for just 46% of new hires, according to the report.
The continued need for engineers was even more evident among early-stage startups, which collectively brought on 7% more engineers in 2025 than in 2019, SignalFire data shows.
If AI were to truly replace engineering talent, Bantock argued, engineering hiring would be the first to fall amid the current shrinking of tech hiring. Instead, SignalFire data shows that the number of engineering workers is growing faster than most other job functions in technology.
While Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned last year that artificial intelligence could wipe half off of all key jobs and push unemployment up to 20% within five years, the company’s chief financial officer, Peter McCrory, told TechCrunch in March that he hadn’t yet seen significant effects on the workforce from AI.
McCrory said at the time: “There’s not at least a material difference in unemployment rates” between workers who use Claude for “the most central work of their jobs 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, flatly rejecting the theory that artificial intelligence will replace engineers. “Someone said that artificial intelligence is going to destroy all software engineering jobs,” Huang said in a interview 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 artificial intelligence, “software engineers are busier than ever,” he said.
Huang added that while agents write code almost instantaneously, they constantly push engineers to create “the next idea.”
For now at least, it seems that armed with artificial intelligence, engineering has become a classic example of the Jevons paradox — the idea that greater efficiency does not reduce demand for a resource. increases it, because work expands to accommodate the new capacity. As Bantock said of engineering talent right now: “They’re suddenly much more productive and there’s endless work for them to do.”
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