Comprehensive.io: average salaries for senior engineers who specialize in AI and ML are 12% higher than for those who do not; AI-related salaries are up 4% YoY
That doesn't mean tech sn't a maturing sector, and that the halcyon days of $600k packages to 20-somethings aren't over, because they mostly are. … Tweets: Kyle Russell / @kylebrussell : AI related salaries only grew at the most recent annualized inflation rate? https://twitter.com/... Paul Kedrosky / @pkedrosky : This is all true, but the story and the reaction are now badly overdone. Within a year we will hear about the resugence of tech hiring. Count on it. Dully predictable. Layoffs and AI Are Changing Tech's Once-Invincible Job Market https://www.bloomberg.com/... [image] Ellen Huet / @ellenhuet : Silicon Valley in the booming 2010s: the era of nap pods and near-guaranteed tech employment. “The belief was, ‘There are infinity jobs, and there will be infinity more.’ You can fill the bucket up with as much water as you want, and it never overflows.” https://www.bloomberg.com/... [image] James Pethokoukis / @jimpethokoukis : “AI may be serving as a face-saving explanation for executives who want to avoid admitting that job cuts are a result of overhiring during the pandemic boom. There's no evidence that AI has already begun to displace significant numbers of technology jobs.” https://www.bloomberg.com/... Ellen Huet / @ellenhuet : In Silicon Valley, seemingly everyone is laying people off — and at the same time, they're thirsting after AI talent Salaries for senior software engineers with AI/ML skills are 12% higher on avg than those without that specialty, per @comprehensiveio https://www.bloomberg.com/... Ellen Huet / @ellenhuet : “It used to be if you had a pulse and could do basic coding exercises, you could get a six-figure offer from a bunch of companies.” Now, it's 200,000 layoffs. My latest feature @BW, about “whiplash” in the tech job market — and an RIP to lavish times https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This June 2023 snapshot lands between two eras of the tech labor market: the record 6.39M tech employment peak at the tail end of 2022's layoff wave, and the full-blown Big Tech AI talent wars with their million-dollar packages that followed. At this moment, the Comprehensive.io numbers read as an early signal — a 12% premium for AI/ML specialists and just 4% YoY growth, barely above inflation, prompting Kyle Russell to note the growth matched annualized inflation and Paul Kedrosky to call the story 'badly overdone' while predicting a hiring resurgence.
What makes the data point durable is how the market subsequently validated it: by January 2025, 36% of US IT job listings were AI-related, and the shortage of candidates had escalated into companies poaching entire teams — exactly the supply-demand squeeze these salary figures foreshadowed.
First-order effects
- Senior engineers with AI/ML specialization immediately command a measurable pricing advantage over non-specialist peers, giving individual engineers with adjacent skills an incentive to rebrand toward AI work.
- Companies setting 2023-24 comp bands face a widening internal gap: paying the 12% specialist premium without inflating general engineering payroll becomes a live budgeting problem.
Second-order effects
- The modest 4% YoY figure proved to be the calm before escalation — candidate shortages pushed tech companies into million-dollar packages and whole-team poaching, compressing margins on every AI headcount plan.
- The same salary gravity drains academic AI labs, where universities cannot match corporate packages, shifting frontier research capacity further into industry.
Third-order effects
- Tech compensation is structurally bifurcating into an AI-specialist tier priced like a scarce commodity and a generalist tier exposed to layoff cycles — with managers increasingly using AI adoption itself to justify cuts, as workers at Google, TikTok, Adobe, Dropbox, and CrowdStrike recount.
- If the pattern holds, the 'engineer' career path splits into two markets with different bargaining power, forcing employers to either fund reskilling pipelines or bid against each other for a fixed specialist pool.
The trend: Tech pay is bifurcating around AI specialization, converting a one-off skill premium into a persistent two-tier labor market that pulls talent from academia and non-AI engineering alike.