AI was supposed to eliminate engineering jobs, but new data suggests it is the most resilient

Whether AI actually replaces jobs is a topic of intense debate.

Tech layoffs reached their highest single-month total in years in May, with artificial intelligence the most cited reason, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

In theory, software engineering is the professional field most vulnerable to automation, given the rapid adoption of AI-powered programming tools. However, researchers at investment firm SignalFire say employment data tells a different story.

“The rationale for a lot of layoffs is constantly AI, and specifically they’ll say AI in terms of code; they’ll say one engineer could do the job of any number of engineers in the past,” said Asher Bantock, head of research at SignalFire. “What we see on the ground is somewhat inconsistent with that.”

SignalFire’s analysis, which tracked the careers of millions of employees across more than 80 million companies, indicates that engineering was the most resilient job in 2025. Instead of focusing on layoffs, which are difficult to track because people often delay updating their employment status after job cuts, SignalFire examined employment data as a more accurate indicator of real-time workforce trends.

While overall hiring across major tech companies is down 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 that SignalFire classifies as “tech majors” – Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, Tesla, Uber, Airbnb, Block, and Stripe. This is a big jump from 2019, when engineers represented only 46% of new hires, according to the report.

The continuing need for engineers was most evident in early-stage startups, which collectively brought on 7% more engineers in 2025 than in 2019, according to SignalFire data.

If AI is truly replacing engineering talent, engineering hiring will be the first to decline amid the current downturn in technology employment, Bantock said. Instead, SignalFire data shows that the number of engineering employees is growing faster than most other job functions in technology.

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

“At least there is no greater material difference in unemployment rates” between workers who use Cloud for “the most central task 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,” McCrory said at the time.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went further, completely rejecting the theory that AI will replace engineers. “Someone said AI will destroy all software engineering jobs,” Huang said in an interview at Stanford Graduate School of Business in April. Then he said that the opposite is true. Now that all of Nvidia’s engineers are using agentic AI, “software engineers are busier than ever,” he said.

While agents write code almost instantaneously, they are constantly pushing engineers to generate “the next idea,” Huang added.

For now at least, AI-armed engineering appears to have become a classic example of Jevons’ paradox – the idea that greater efficiency does not reduce demand for resources; It increases it, because the work expands to fill the new capacity. As Bantock said of the engineering talent of the moment: “They suddenly became more productive, and they had endless work to do.”