Something I’ve come to realize in the software industry is: if you have more smart engineers than the competition, you win.
If you don’t snatch up the smartest engineers before your competition does: you lose.
Therefore at a certain level of company, hiring is entirely dictated by what the competition is doing. If everyone is suddenly hiring, you better start doing it too. If no one is, you can relax, but you could also pull ahead if you decide to hire rapidly, but this will tip off competitors and they too will begin hiring.
Whether or not you have any use for those engineers is irrelevant. So AI will have little impact on hiring trends in this market. The downturn we’ve seen in the past few years is mostly driven by the interest rate environment, not because AI is suddenly replacing engineers. An engineer using AI gives more advantage than removing an engineer, and hiring an engineer who will use AI is more advantageous than not hiring one at all.
AI is just the new excuse for firing or not hiring people, previously it was RTO but that hype cycle has been squeezed for all it can be.
If you don’t snatch up the smartest engineers before your competition does: you lose.
Therefore at a certain level of company, hiring is entirely dictated by what the competition is doing. If everyone is suddenly hiring, you better start doing it too. If no one is, you can relax, but you could also pull ahead if you decide to hire rapidly, but this will tip off competitors and they too will begin hiring.
Whether or not you have any use for those engineers is irrelevant. So AI will have little impact on hiring trends in this market. The downturn we’ve seen in the past few years is mostly driven by the interest rate environment, not because AI is suddenly replacing engineers. An engineer using AI gives more advantage than removing an engineer, and hiring an engineer who will use AI is more advantageous than not hiring one at all.
AI is just the new excuse for firing or not hiring people, previously it was RTO but that hype cycle has been squeezed for all it can be.