Whether AI is already replacing jobs is a matter of fierce debate.
Skills layoffs hit the highest monthly layoffs in years in May, with AI being the most cited reason, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
In theory, software engineering is the profession most vulnerable to automation due to the rapid adoption of AI-based coding tools. But researchers at venture firm SignalFire say hiring data tells a different story.
“The rationale for a lot of the layoffs is consistently AI, especially when it comes to code. I will say that one engineer can do the work of no matter how many engineers in the past,” said Asher Bantock, head of research at SignalFire. “What we’re seeing on the ground is a little inconsistent with that.”
Engineering was the most resilient job function in 2025, according to an analysis by SignalFire, which tracks the careers of millions of employees at over 80 million companies. Rather than focusing on layoffs, which are difficult to track because people often delay updating their employment status after a layoff, SignalFire examined hiring data as a more accurate indicator of real-time workforce trends.
According to SignalFire’s latest “State of Talent Report,” total employment at large technology companies is down 25% compared to 2019 levels, but engineering roles have seen a much smaller decline of 11%.
In fact, engineers accounted for 55% of all new hires in 2025 at the 12 companies that SignalFire classifies as “tech majors”: Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, Tesla, Uber, Airbnb, Block, and Stripe. According to the report, this is a significant increase compared to 2019, when engineers made up only 46% of new hires.
Data from SignalFire shows that the continued need for engineers has become more evident among early-stage startups, leading to 7% more engineers being hired in 2025 than in 2019.
Bantock argued that if AI truly replaces engineering talent, engineering hiring will be the first to decline amid the current decline in technical hiring. Instead, data from SignalFire shows that the engineering workforce is growing faster than any other job function in technology.
While Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned last year that AI could eliminate half of all white-collar jobs and raise unemployment to 20% within five years, Anthropic’s head of economics Peter McCrory told TechCrunch in March that the company has yet to see a significant impact from AI on the workforce.
McCrory said at the time: “There is at least no material difference in unemployment rates,” he said, between workers who use Claude for “the most core tasks of their jobs in an automated way,” such as technical writers, data entry clerks and software engineers, and workers in occupations less exposed to AI that require “physical interaction with the real world and dexterity.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went further and completely rejected the theory that AI will replace engineers. “Someone said AI was going to destroy all software engineering jobs,” Huang said in an interview at Stanford Graduate School of Business last April. He then argued that the opposite was true. Now that every engineer at Nvidia is using Agent AI, “software engineers are busier than ever,” he said.
Huang added that while agents write code almost instantly, they’re constantly urging engineers to generate “the next idea.”
For now, at least, AI-armed engineering seems to have become a classic example of the Jevons paradox. In other words, the idea is that increasing efficiency does not reduce the demand for resources. Capacity increases because operations expand to fill the new capacity. Bantock said of the current engineering talent: “They are suddenly much more productive and there is no end to what they have to do.”
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