AI Threat: Developers Emerge as the Most Stable Profession in Tech

While debates rage over the disappearance of many professions with the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), a new study has revealed unexpected results. Developers, often predicted to be among the first replaced by AI, actually remain the most stable and high-demand group of specialists in the technology industry. This is according to extensive analysis data from the venture firm SignalFire. This is reported by Ixbt.com news says.

Against the backdrop of mass layoffs in the industry, the staffing agency Challenger, Gray & Christmas noted that reductions reached their highest point in recent years in May 2024. In this process, AI was cited for the first time as one of the primary reasons for job losses. However, SignalFire analysts focused not only on layoffs but also on the hiring dynamics of millions of employees and over 80 million companies.

Staffing changes in big tech companies

According to the research results, while overall hiring at giant companies such as Alphabet, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, NVIDIA, Tesla, and Uber decreased by 25% compared to 2019, vacancies for engineers shrank by only 11%. This indicates that the need for developers is decreasing much more slowly than in other sectors.

Notably, by 2025, developers accounted for 55% of new hires in large corporations. For comparison, this figure was 46% in 2019. In the startup segment, the situation is even more positive: newly formed tech companies hired 7% more engineers compared to 2019.

Asher Bentok, head of SignalFire's research department, noted that if AI were truly replacing developers, demand for these professionals should have dropped sharply. In practice, AI tools that generate programming code are not displacing specialists but are instead increasing their productivity.

Views of NVIDIA and Anthropic leaders

There are varying opinions among industry leaders. For example, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that AI could eliminate half of office jobs within the next 5 years, while the company's chief economist Peter McCrory stated that he has not yet observed rising unemployment among developers.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang holds an even firmer position. In his view, the introduction of AI agents will not reduce the number of engineers; on the contrary, it will make them more valuable. According to Huang, after AI tools were implemented within NVIDIA, developers began working more intensively because the automation of coding allows them to devote more time to creating new ideas and products.

Experts explain this situation with the "Jevons Paradox" in economics. According to it, an increase in the efficiency of resource use leads not to a decrease in demand for it, but rather to an increase. In programming, as AI makes writing code cheaper, the scope of tasks companies need to solve expands, maintaining the need for qualified engineers.