Hiring Engineering Talent in the World of AI

I saw the following tweet from Ohio person Andrew Rea and had a strong reaction:

“Big cognitive dissonance between how much VCs and tech influencers talk about AI destroying software engineering and how desperately ambitious startups need more great engineers.” — Andrew Rea, Founder at Taxwire

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It appears that the current consensus – and I have heard this from a lot of people in tech – is that software engineering will go away. Will these SWE jobs be a thing of the past in 10 years? 5 years? 12 months? Who knows, but it’s just a matter of timing, at least, that’s what the current thinking is. I even had one VC tell me that he was encouraging his son, who was going to school to be a software engineer, to consider switching degrees.

However, when you talk to people actually building tech startups, they still are focused on hiring product talent first. For the average Seed company I talk to, ~70% of the budget is going towards coding / engineering talent (rough estimate). It is still difficult to build a product. Maybe, because of LLMs and AI tools, products are just now more sophisticated, thus requiring more engineering firepower. Or maybe the current workflows for building products haven’t caught up to the prowess of the current LLMs – they are changing pretty rapidly, after all.

Which begs the question, has AI changed HOW software engineering is done today? Absolutely. Take it from some research from some experts:

• Unleashing developer productivity with generative AI
• The future of coding is here: How AI is reshaping software development
• Perspectives on generative AI in software engineering and acquisition

And with new changes, come new problems:

• Cursor f*ck up 4 months of work
• I gave up on using Cursor and here’s why

AI is changing how software engineering is done, but is it changing hiring patterns? I think the following slide tells you a lot and a little at the same time:

2023 was the first year that software engineering has declined since the Dot Com Bubble. The debate could be had about whether this had more to do with the state of AI or the repercussions of the massive over-hiring that occurred in the 2021 ZIRP bubble. But frankly, I think it’s probably the latter – ZIRP over hiring was absolutely insane and big tech companies overspent like crazy. These institutions HAD to cut because money wasn’t free any more. There might have been a few who thought “Well, maybe I can replace some of these folks with AI”.

And then, in a rebound, 2024 saw hiring tick back up for software engineers. That doesn’t mean the pace met what we saw from hiring during the previous decade. Again, this might have more to do with the state of the tech funding market (money, as it turns out, still isn’t free). But there are definitely more folks in 2024 who were thinking “Well, maybe I can replace some of these folks with AI”. Did they have a meaningful plan to do so? More likely, however, this growth rate for engineers just mirrors that of the post-Dot Com Bubble hiring rates.

Maybe AI is coming for software engineering jobs. But it hasn’t happened just yet. Will software engineering as a profession change over the next 5-10 years? Definitely. Tech jobs always change, that is the nature of technology. I just don’t think we have a firm grasp on what that will look like exactly.

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