Software engineering job openings just hit a three-year high — over 67,000 open positions across thousands of companies. And yet, if you scroll through your feed, you’d think AI was about to make every engineer obsolete by Tuesday.
It’s not. And the data backs this up.
If you’ve recently been laid off or are struggling to find work, I empathize, and I don’t want to minimize your experience. Job loss is real and painful regardless of the reason. This post is for the millions of people paralyzed by fear of what AI might do to their careers—and I want to offer a different lens.
Here’s what’s actually happening: the tech job market is splitting into two tiers. Senior engineers and AI specialists are in extraordinary demand, commanding premium pay and fielding multiple offers. At the same time, entry-level and some mid-career professionals are facing stiffer competition. Unemployment among recent CS graduates has hit nearly 6%.
That’s not an “AI is replacing everyone” story. That’s a skills story.
In my 30+ years in big tech, I’ve seen this pattern before. New technology arrives, headlines scream about the end of work, then the dust settles, and we realize the jobs didn’t disappear, they shifted. The people who adapted thrived. The ones who waited for the old world to come back didn’t.
What’s fascinating about this moment is how AI is being used as a convenient scapegoat. Marc Andreessen recently called it a “silver-bullet excuse” — and he’s not wrong. A Duke University survey of 750 CFOs found AI’s actual impact on employment in 2025 was “negligible.” Many of these layoffs stem from pandemic-era overhiring, not from a robot writing better code than you.
Heck, CoPilot’s terms of use reads that it is ‘for entertainment purposes only’ under it’s important disclosures and warnings section. Tell me, if you, as a business leader, are thinking of replacing domain-knowledgeable, skilful people with something like that, are you really choosing what’s best for your business???
I wrote about this exact dynamic with the Block layoffs a few weeks ago. The headlines screamed “AI efficiency cuts” but the actual announcement was about flattening bloated management hierarchies. It wasn’t AI replacing the rowers — it was the company finally admitting they had too many people steering and not enough people rowing.
This new data tells the same story. Over 52,000 tech job cuts happened this quarter, yes. But simultaneously, companies are hiring like mad for roles that require deeper skills. Tools like GitHub Copilot aren’t replacing engineers — they’re enabling them to take on more ambitious work. The bar is just moving higher.
So what’s the takeaway?
The same advice I’ve been giving: be a rower. Focus on building skills that deliver direct value. Don’t just learn the theory of AI — build things with it. Ship code. Solve real problems. The market is rewarding people who can do that, and it’s going to keep rewarding them.
The fear narrative makes for great engagement. But the reality is much more nuanced, and much more hopeful, than the headlines suggest.
Stop fearing AI. Start learning it.