For five years, we have been hearing the same prediction. Programming assistants will arrive and gut the profession. But the latest hiring data does not confirm this feared "code apocalypse" at all. When we look at whom technology companies actually hired in 2025, programmers emerge as the most resilient profession of all.
This follows from a new State of Talent report by investment firm SignalFire, which tracked the careers of millions of employees across more than eighty million companies. And its conclusions run counter to the prevailing headlines.
Why hiring says more than layoffs
SignalFire's researchers deliberately chose not to rely on layoff figures. They have a good reason for this. After being dismissed, people often leave their old employment record on their profile for several months, so layoff data lags behind reality. Hiring, by contrast, shows what is happening in the market right now. "AI keeps being cited as the reason for layoffs, specifically AI and coding. They say that one engineer can handle work that previously required several people," says Asher Bantock, head of research at SignalFire. "What we are seeing in practice somewhat contradicts that claim."
And the numbers prove him right. Overall hiring at large technology companies fell by a quarter compared with 2019. But engineering roles declined by only eleven percent. Programmers now account for the majority of all new hires, specifically 55 percent across the twelve companies that SignalFire classifies as the so-called Tech Majors. These include Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Nvidia, Tesla, Uber, Airbnb, Block, and Stripe. In 2019, engineers accounted for just 46 percent of hires.
The smaller the company, the more pronounced the difference. Early-stage startups hired seven percent more engineers in 2025 than in 2019. If AI were truly replacing programmers, as the doomsday scenarios claim, engineering hiring would have been the first to collapse. Instead, it is growing faster than in most other professions in the industry.
Other roles, however, have been hit hard. Designers and marketers. Among the Tech Majors, hiring of designers fell by 48 percent and marketing hiring by 36 percent. It is these support roles that have suffered the fate originally predicted for engineers.
What company executives say
Interestingly, the theory that engineers will be replaced has also been challenged by people you might not expect. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned last year that AI could wipe out up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment to as high as twenty percent within five years. But in March, Anthropic's chief economist Peter McCrory admitted to TechCrunch that he had not yet seen any significant impact of AI on the labor market. McCrory said at the time that there was no substantial difference in unemployment rates between people who use Claude for the most important part of their work, such as technical writers or programmers, and people in professions requiring physical labor and interaction with the real world.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang flatly rejected the theory that programming jobs will disappear. "Someone said that AI will destroy all software engineering jobs," he said in April at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, before immediately arguing the exact opposite. Now that all engineers at Nvidia use agentic AI, he says they are "busier than ever." Agents write code almost instantly, constantly pushing engineers to come up with more and more ideas.
It is a fine example of the so-called Jevons paradox. Greater efficiency does not reduce demand for a given resource; on the contrary, it increases it because the work expands to fill the newly created capacity. "Suddenly, they are much more productive, and the work is endless for them," Bantock summarizes.
Europe confirms the same trend
European data complements and largely confirms the picture from the United States. In June 2026, the Linux Foundation released its first-ever State of Tech Talent Europe report, and its findings are similar. In the European IT sector, AI is more of a driver of job creation than a cause of mass layoffs. Companies expect AI to have a positive net impact on hiring of 27 percent in 2026 and 17 percent in 2027. Only the largest organizations report a negative figure.
Europe's weak spot lies elsewhere, however. As in the United States, the entry point for beginners is narrowing. The net impact on entry-level technical roles was slightly negative, at minus three percent, which could lead to a shortage of mid-level and senior professionals in the future.
Compensation is also rising. According to the European Transparent IT Job Market report by GermanTechJobs, average base salaries for software engineers rose by twelve percent year over year to around 68,000 euros. Demand for roles directly related to artificial intelligence increased by 28 percent, and AI specialists earn an average of 18 percent more than colleagues in comparable non-AI roles.
And note one thing that also concerns us. According to the same report, Poland, Czechia, and Romania combine competitive salaries with a high concentration of experienced developers, making Central and Eastern Europe an increasingly attractive place to recruit engineers.
Experienced professionals are scarce, and nobody wants beginners
One thing unites both sides of the Atlantic. There is strong demand for experienced engineers, but not for newcomers. European companies report that senior software engineers are the hardest to find, and this problem is only deepening year by year. Only seven percent of technology leaders say they have enough people to meet their priorities. Yet without experienced engineers, you cannot build an AI project or carry out a cloud migration.
Conversely, companies are pushing junior employees into the background. A report by Ravio describes a sharp decline in hiring for entry-level roles in the European technology sector as AI takes over routine and repetitive tasks. These were precisely the tasks that used to make up the work of junior developers.
This makes the whole situation quite paradoxical. Companies want experienced programmers, who are in short supply, while limiting the hiring of juniors who are supposed to become experienced in the first place. So where will the future generation of engineers gain their first experience?
