George Dover, a software engineer of six years in Portland, Oregon, was laid off in late 2024 and spent nearly two years, 400 applications and several interviews before landing a software engineering job oriented toward AI. That’s the neat little efficiency story the industry likes to tell. On the ground, it looks more like a labour market being reorganised around corporate control, with workers pushed to adapt, retrain and accept that the machine now gets first claim on their time.
Dover said he became a substitute kindergarten teacher while searching for work. He also said he used AI to generate code to build websites, then checked the output for errors, redundancies, unusual AI decisions, bugs and visual glitches. “The quality has to be rigorously tested,” he said. “Sometimes that tradeoff is a good one, other times it leads you down rabbit holes that take longer than coding it yourself.” The sentence does a lot of work. The promise is speed. The reality is more review, more correction, more unpaid mental labour to clean up what the tool spits out.
The New Assembly Line
Matt, a software engineer who did not want to use his actual name to protect his employment, said, “I am actively trying to keep my axe sharp.” He said that in the last six months his job had increasingly shifted away from coding, problem solving and software architecture toward reviewing code generated by artificial intelligence. “I am trying not to leverage AI where I can,” he said. He said he had been laid off last summer and had later received a warning from his current boss to use AI more. Before AI, Matt said he was a “leading voice” in a solution’s execution, but now “the line between what I am deciding and what AI provides has certainly blurred.”
That blur is the point. The worker still carries the responsibility, but the decision-making gets split, outsourced and diluted. The boss gets the productivity story. The engineer gets the review queue.
Software engineering was one of the best-paying professions in the US in 2022, with 1.5 million practitioners earning twice the national median salary, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Pay had risen amid escalating talent wars, during which companies offered bonuses of up to hundreds of thousands of dollars to snag and retain top programmers. Last year, nearly 50 million people worldwide worked as developers, according to market research firm SlashData. The market loved them when it needed them. It loves automation when it can squeeze them harder.
Since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022, more than 600,000 US tech workers have lost their jobs, according to tech layoff tracker Layoff.fyi. The unemployment rate for computer science graduates rose to 7% in 2024, up from 6.1% the previous year, and their underemployment rate was more than 19%, according to data from the New York Fed. US tech job postings on Indeed dropped 36% from 2020 to 2025. The numbers sketch the same picture from different angles: fewer openings, more insecurity, and a profession told to call it innovation.
Who Gets Replaced, Who Gets Rebranded
Bouke Klein Teeselink, assistant professor of economics at King’s College London, said: “It’s hard to say what exactly the profession will look like in two years, but it’s clear that the skill of writing code is over.” He added: “AI is hugely augmenting what it means to be a software engineer, and the reasonable yardstick” for success depends on how well engineers use the tech. Ethan Mollick, an associate professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and author of the upcoming book Co-Existence, said: “Now it’s not about who can write the most code.” He said the focus is on defining problems, designing systems and directing AI tools effectively. “It shifts the skills around, so suddenly that’s where the value is,” he said.
Shriram Krishnamurthi, professor of computer science at Brown University, said it was too early to make definitive declarations because AI only started generating good quality code last year. He said the growing need for code reviews would likely weed out some professionals. “Some software engineers trained well for this, and many did not,” he said. “Those who did will thrive; those who didn’t are going to have to re-tool.” David Malan, a Harvard University computer science professor, said human software engineers would still be needed if for no other reason than the cost of AI. He said OpenAI reportedly spent $8bn and Anthropic is expected to have burnt $3bn last year, according to Reuters. He said costs are widely expected to eventually pass on to customers, and that he expects to see a “healthier balance of software engineers being supported by AI.”
That’s the language of the boardroom dressed up as inevitability. The costs rise, the pressure moves downward, and customers are told to absorb it while workers are told to become better at supervising the tools that are eating their tasks.
The industry has spent years selling coding as a ladder out of precarity. In December 2013, President Barack Obama launched a $4bn initiative called Computer Science for All to teach computer science to all American students, calling it the “new basic” skill for economic opportunity. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates participated in coding tutorial videos for educational non-profit CodeAI the same year, and coding bootcamps exploded, producing more than 2,000 graduates, which rose more than 1000% by 2020, according to Course Report. “Learn to code” became a mantra for building a successful career. Now the same sector that sold the dream is trimming the workforce and calling it progress.
Los Angeles resident Sam, who asked for anonymity to protect his employment, pivoted to software engineering a decade ago after dropping out of school for a music degree, racking up $130,000 in student loans and taking a stab at odd jobs. He said that in his first five years on the job he went from feeling professionally stable to fearing he could lose it all. He said he hates that AI has taken over “the creative, fun part of the job” and reduced it to “reviewing code I didn’t write.” Sam said he worries that a layoff would end his career by forcing him to compete with displaced talent from Google, Amazon and Netflix. “I’m thinking as I sit in my office, ‘What if I opened a food truck? What if I got into forestry?,’” he said.
The Mutual Aid Response
Enrollment in computer and information science programs at four-year universities fell 8.1% and graduate enrollment dropped 14% in the 2025-2026 school year, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. The pipeline is shrinking while the industry tells workers to keep up. Some are answering with collective defence instead of individual hustle.
Kaitlin Cort quit and started a resource center for tech workers caught in the industry’s disruption. Cort said: “I’m not a very senior-level engineer. I can see that the pace at which AI was getting better was faster than the pace at which I was getting better. That definitely made me really anxious.” She said she originally became a software engineer to pay off student loan debt and also taught at coding bootcamps, where students from low-income backgrounds and domestic violence shelters showed her what coding could do for people’s lives.
In February, Cort started What We Will, which helps tech workers navigate layoffs and negotiations, access basic income in unemployment, upskill and organize unions. The center’s inaugural campaign, launched in its first month, aimed to help Amazon workers organize against rapid AI adoption and guide laid off workers through their benefits. Its second campaign targeted workers cut from Oracle, aiding them with severance negotiation and creating support groups. In May, it worked with Meta workers to discuss employee surveillance. Cort said worries about AI and mass layoffs are driving membership and interest in collective action. She said she receives at least 10 new applications each day, and “in the last few months, so many more people [are] specifically reaching out looking for unionization.” She said she has turned to Alphabet Workers Union and the Washington Post Tech Guild, among others, for guidance. “There’s a lot of need right now,” she said. “We just, as an industry, don’t have a guild – we don’t have regulations or standards that are really shared.”
That absence is not an accident. It’s the normal condition of a sector run for profit, where workers are told to adapt faster than the tools are changing and then expected to call that freedom. What We Will is trying to build something else: a place where layoffs, surveillance and AI-driven disruption are met with support, negotiation and unionisation instead of silence and private panic.