Is AI leading to reduced jobs? What it means for software engineers
The latest company to join this trend is Salesforce, which now says its internal use of AI tools has enabled it to hire fewer employees, particularly engineers and customer service workers. This appears to be becoming the norm among large tech firms, offering a clearer indication of the impact AI could have on jobs for software developers, coders, and engineers.
Chief Financial and Operations Officer Robin Washington told Bloomberg in an interview that the company is hiring fewer software engineers due to productivity gains from artificial intelligence. 'We view these as assistants, but they are going to allow us to hire fewer people and, hopefully, make our existing team more productive,' she said.
As millions of students around the world, particularly in India, prepare to become software engineers—and many even consider studying abroad for their master's degrees—their chances of landing a job at the world's biggest tech companies are beginning to look slimmer, all thanks to AI.
Initially, AI tools from companies like OpenAI, Google, and Salesforce, which have been rolled out over the past few months, were seen as a way to boost productivity and improve efficiency. But now, it seems that those in the tech industry may be among the most vulnerable to displacement by AI.
'Now it is our office workers who are staring down the same kind of technological and economic disruption,' LinkedIn's chief economic opportunity officer, Aneesh Raman, wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed. 'Breaking first is the bottom rung of the career ladder.'
Hiring hasn't come to a complete halt, but there's growing chatter that getting a first job in tech—especially fresh out of college—is becoming increasingly difficult. Leaders at tech companies all indicated in recent months that AI is indeed taking over jobs. With Salesforce now openly admitting that its hiring has been reduced due to AI, it's becoming clear that more tech companies are beginning to rely on artificial intelligence over human labor for certain tasks.
At Microsoft, engineers are using AI to write 20% to 30% of code for company projects, CEO Satya Nadella said last month at Meta's LlamaCon conference. In a conversation with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Nadella noted that the exact percentage of AI-generated code varies by programming language. He said AI writes 'fantastic' Python code, though its C++ capabilities are 'not that great.' Nadella also shared that Microsoft is increasingly relying on more advanced AI agents—software programs that perform complex tasks without human assistance—to review code.
As for Meta, Zuckerberg said he isn't sure exactly how much code AI is currently writing, but the company plans to use AI for half of its software development within the next year. 'That will just kind of increase from there,' he said.
On a podcast with Joe Rogan in January, Zuckerberg stated that Meta is developing AI that can write code at the level of a mid-level engineer. He added that the company plans to have 'a lot' of its code 'built by AI engineers instead of people engineers' this year.
At Google, CEO Sundar Pichai said on an earnings call last month that the company was using AI to write 'well over 30%' of new code—up from 25% in October. He also noted that employees are increasingly accepting AI-suggested code. 'I still see it as early days, and there's going to be a lot more to do,' Pichai said.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also acknowledged that AI is already writing code. In just 12 months, 'we may be in a world where AI is writing essentially all of the code,' he said during a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations earlier this year. In fact, Amodei predicted that in just three to six months, AI could be writing 90% of all new code.
Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn is another executive embracing the shift, noting that the company will replace many of its human contract workers with AI.
AI chatbots like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot were initially seen as tools for basic tasks such as rephrasing sentences or fixing grammar. But as these LLMs grow more powerful, they are increasingly being used to write full code. OpenAI recently released Codex, an AI coding engine within ChatGPT, powered by its codex-1 model—an optimized version of its o3 AI reasoning model designed specifically for software engineering tasks.
Similarly, Google has introduced Gemini Code Assist, a code-review agent that automatically identifies bugs and offers suggestions within GitHub. Code Assist allows developers to interact with a Google AI model in natural language to access and edit their codebase—much like GitHub's popular Copilot tool.
The impact of AI is real—particularly on entry-level tech jobs. SignalFire, a venture capital firm that analyses job movements across over 650 million employees and 80 million companies on LinkedIn, reported last week that major tech companies—including Meta, Microsoft, and Google—recruited fewer recent graduates in 2024 compared to previous years. New graduates accounted for just 7% of new hires in 2024, down 25% from 2023 and over 50% from pre-pandemic levels in 2019. At startups, the rate of new graduate hiring dropped from 30% in 2019 to under 6% in 2024.
While big tech companies are spending billions of dollars to build AI infrastructure, layoffs continue. So far this year, more than 62,114 tech workers have been laid off from both large and small tech firms, according to the independent tracker Layoffs.fyi.
Anuj Bhatia is a personal technology writer at indianexpress.com who has been covering smartphones, personal computers, gaming, apps, and lifestyle tech actively since 2011. He specialises in writing longer-form feature articles and explainers on trending tech topics. His unique interests encompass delving into vintage tech, retro gaming and composing in-depth narratives on the intersection of history, technology, and popular culture. He covers major international tech conferences and product launches from the world's biggest and most valuable tech brands including Apple, Google and others. At the same time, he also extensively covers indie, home-grown tech startups. Prior to joining The Indian Express in late 2016, he served as a senior tech writer at My Mobile magazine and previously held roles as a reviewer and tech writer at Gizbot. Anuj holds a postgraduate degree from Banaras Hindu University. You can find Anuj on Linkedin.
Email: anuj.bhatia@indianexpress.com ... Read More
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