“AI is not going to take your job. The person who uses AI is going to take your job.”
This is an idea that has become a refrain for, among others, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has publicly made the prediction several times since October 2023. Meanwhile, other AI developers and stalwarts say the technology will eliminate countless entry-level jobs. These predictions have come at the same time as reports of layoffs at companies including IBM and Amazon, causing anxiety for tech workers—especially those starting their careers, whose responsibilities are often more easily automated.
Early reports have borne out some of these anxieties in employment data. For example, entry-level hiring at the 15 biggest tech firms fell 25 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to a report from SignalFire last May. Still, it’s unclear what the long-term effects will be, or whether hiring cuts are actually a result of AI. For instance, while Meta laid off 600 employees from its AI division in October (and continued hiring other AI researchers), OpenAI began hiring junior software engineers.
In 2026, all new graduates may face a tougher job market in the United States. Employers’ rating of the job market for college graduates is now at its most pessimistic since 2020, according to data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) Job Outlook 2026 survey. However, 49 percent of respondents still consider the job market “good” or “very good.”
So, what does the rise of generative AI mean for early-career engineers?
“This is a tectonic shift,” says Hugo Malan, president of the science, engineering, technology and telecom reporting unit within the staffing agency Kelly Services. AI agents aren’t poised to replace workers one-to-one, though. Instead, there will be a realignment of which jobs are needed, and what those roles look like.
How Jobs Are Changing
When publicly available AI tools first arrived, Malan says the expectation was that jobs like call-center roles would be most vulnerable. “But what nobody predicted was that the biggest impact by far would be on programmers,” a trend he attributes to the relatively solitary and highly structured nature of the work. He notes that, while other economic conditions also factor into the job market, the pace of programmer employment decline has accelerated since generative AI came on the scene. In the United States, overall programmer employment fell a dramatic 27.5 percent between 2023 and 2025, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics. But employment for software developers—a distinct, more design-oriented position in the government data—only fell 0.3 percent in the same period.
At the same time, some positions, such as information security analyst and AI engineer are actually growing, Malan says. “There’s been this pretty dramatic readjustment of the job landscape, even with as narrow a field as IT. Within IT, some jobs have exploded, like InfoSec analysts have grown in double digits, whereas programmers declined double digits” over the past few years, he says. (Eventually, Malan says he expects generative AI to affect all intellectual work.)
Job responsibilities also appear to be changing. For recent graduates pursuing roles labeled as software-engineering jobs, “they’re not necessarily just coding,” says Jamie Grant, senior associate director for the engineering team at the University of Pennsylvania’s career services. “There tends to be so much higher-order thinking and knowledge of the software-development life cycle,” as well as a need to work with other parties, such as understanding user and client demands, she says.
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