A survey of 9,388 software engineers in December 2023: ~90% believe getting a job now is harder than pre-pandemic and 60%+ believe AI will lead to less hiring
Maxwell Strachan / VICE :
Context & Ripple Effects
The survey arrived after evidence of a premium for AI and ML specialists, including higher pay for senior AI and ML engineers. It captures the other side of that shift: a broad sense among engineers that general software hiring had become materially less accessible.
Later coverage made the concern more concrete, with software-development postings falling more than 30% from February 2020 and evidence of weaker employment for AI-exposed entry-level workers. The survey is therefore useful as an early measure of how the labor market was being interpreted by its participants, not proof that AI had already displaced them.
First-order effects
- The results document a sharp deterioration in software engineers' confidence in the job market: roughly nine in 10 respondents saw job seeking as harder than before the pandemic.
- More than 60% expected AI to reduce hiring, giving employers and recruiters a workforce that increasingly views automation as a constraint on openings rather than solely a productivity tool.
Second-order effects
- Competition for roles can shift toward demonstrable AI and ML skills, reinforcing the earlier pay advantage for senior AI and ML specialists while making broad-based software roles feel less secure.
- A weak hiring outlook can particularly burden new entrants: later research found employment fell for entry-level workers in AI-exposed fields, although this survey alone cannot establish AI as the cause.
Third-order effects
- If this pattern persists, software employment may become more bifurcated: smaller pools of specialized workers retain pricing power while entry-level pathways and generalist hiring narrow.
- AI's role in staffing decisions may remain difficult to measure because employers can frame freezes or layoffs around AI even when replacement is limited; a later hiring-manager survey found AI was often emphasized in workforce explanations despite few reporting full role replacement.
The trend: This is one early signal of an AI-era software labor market in which demand concentrates around specialized capabilities while the entry-level and generalist pipeline faces greater uncertainty.