Job openings for software engineers are at their lowest level in five years, Indeed data show | Marc Benioff said Salesforce might not hire software engineers in 2025 because of gains from AI
https://www.businessinsider.com/jobs-software-engineers-coders-bad-market-ai-2025-3
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“In early to mid-2022, there were three times as many software engineering roles listed on job boards, data from Indeed [show](https://archive.is/o/bSes9/https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE).
Artificial intelligence is surely one cause. The same technology that can make coders more productive appears to be undercutting hiring demand.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently said the tech giant might not hire any engineers in 2025 because AI tools allow Salesforce engineers to do so much more. “We have seen such incredible productivity gains because of the agents that work side by side with our engineers.”
Author posits “surely AI is one cause”, but as usual with these posts, the only evidence is a CEO who wants to juice stock price.
Even prior to LLM software tools, there was a contraction of the software developer space, as as correction to the over hiring of a few years prior.
As much as CTOs would love to replace all their engineers, this remains an imaginary shift in software engineering.
The only long term solution to these type of issues is to have less stringent patent laws for AI made discoveries. Plus strong anti-trust laws to punish rent seeking monopolies and oligopolies.
Only small, locally focused businesses will be able to swallow the incoming swath of unemployed people.
Suspect it’s also because they see a deep recession on the horizon. Ultimately Salesforce only thrives when other enterprises are thriving.
Pretty sure the market will rebound for programmers as companies find their optimism over ai is overdone. Plus, at the moment Trump policies are putting a damper on ALL economic activity; and that includes software development.
There is also massive amounts of offshoring to Europe for coding jobs.
Cyber security contractors are salivating.
AI makes a lot of errors, and people review its code less thoroughly than they should. It’s a combination of putting junior people on reviewing critical code path changes, thinking AI can fix logic bugs (it can’t, it actually creates more of them), and the “LGTM effect” of reviewing large and complicated code blocks.
Look for some big showstopper hacks this year.
I think this graph is more helpful since it shows data for 15+ years.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/200003/number-of-job-openings-in-the-us-information-sector/
Basically, things seem dire now because we are coming off crazy peaks in the early 2020s. But compared to 10 yrs ago, the numbers seem fairly close.
The problem, though, is that all the college students flooded into comp sci majors in the early 2020s (understandably-it looked like a good career track then) so there is an oversupply.
AI advancements are significantly impacting job markets, especially in tech. How do you think this will shape the future of software engineering careers?
its not because everyone is asking for bachelor’s? lol
I sometimes wonder if AI is more of a threat to large corporations than anything else.
If the key benefit of AI is a much higher level of productivity and open source products like DeepSeek continue to improve; the flexibility of small, nimble companies coupled with high productivity would be a huge threat to more established companies that can’t adapt to change as quickly.
Might as well just speed run the correction and dump them all now so AI can fuck up every online business and force the CEOs to hire them back
I think AI has had much less of an impact than the rise in interest rates.
With the cheap money gone, many companies are looking to cut costs, not grow.
AI engineers are getting packages of 80L -1Cr+.
Good talent is never out of demand. This news is concerning for freshers, or sub par engineers.
Don’t worry about it. Build your skills and you’ll get a great job.
https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-features/generative-ai-jobs-in-india-can-fetch-you-up-to-rs-1-crore/
Oh folks gonna be crying hardware yah morons not just software
Tech is still figuring out what they can use AI for and that uncertainty means hiring will be low. It doesn’t help that we are headed for a recession. If we don’t we’ll see more hiring as there will be more products/services built around AI and be AI enhanced kind of like the iot.
I am pretty sure if you cannot program in the future you won’t be able to get a traditional office
job at all so I am not worried.
AI is a tool. And trying to replace too many people with AI is going to cause many bugs, and lots of lost money. Any company that tries, the remaining devs (especially the crutial ones) should strike.