• Job openings for software engineers on Indeed are at their lowest level in five years.
• Marc Benioff said Salesforce might not hire software engineers in 2025 because of gains from AI.
• Despite AI’s impact, demand for skilled tech workers is expected to grow significantly by 2033.

If you’re a coder, you already know: There just aren’t as many jobs as there used to be.

Openings for software engineers in the US on Indeed are down by more than one-third from five years ago.

For many engineers, the drop-off likely feels even steeper. Job postings are well off levels seen during the pandemic, when the industry was awash in openings.

In early to mid-2022, there were three times as many software engineering roles listed on Indeed.

Artificial intelligence is surely one cause. The same technology that can make coders more productive appears to be undercutting hiring demand.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff recently said the tech giant might not hire any engineers in 2025 because AI tools allowed Salesforce engineers to do so much more.

“We have seen such incredible productivity gains because of the agents that work side by side with our engineers,” Benioff said on “The Logan Bartlett Show” in January.

‘Am I going to lose my job?’

Productivity gains are great news for coders with jobs, but the AI boost can be worrisome for job seekers.

A year ago, the startup Cognition Labs released what it said was the first AI software engineer. The company, backed by Peter Thiel’s venture capital fund, caused a stir with its announcement.

“There was a lot of panic,” Jesal Gadhia, the head of engineering at Thoughtful AI, which creates AI tools for healthcare providers, previously told Business Insider. “I had a lot of friends of mine who messaged me and said, ‘Hey, am I going to lose my job?'”

He worried that even though coders are still needed in many areas, AI could step into roles that have long served as training grounds for junior engineers.

“Junior engineers,” Gadhia said, “have a little bit of a target behind their back.”

Demand is likely to grow

It’s not all bad news for those with strong technical chops. In late August, the Bureau of Labor Statistics forecast that demand for software developers, quality-assurance analysts, and testers would grow by 17% from 2023 to 2033. The agency noted that that’d be far faster than growth in the overall job market.

Lighthouse Labs, a Canadian company offering coding boot camps, argued in January that global demand for skilled workers in data analytics, cybersecurity, and cloud computing was outstripping supply. Unsurprisingly, some of the biggest gains involve AI. Lighthouse Labs said that was partly because there’s demand well beyond the tech industry for people with skills in areas like machine learning.

AI to do more of the work

Regardless of industry, demands on coders’ time will likely continue to evolve because of AI. GitLab has said developers spend only about a quarter of their time coding.

Madars Biss, a tech writer and front-end developer, previously told BI that he expected developers to spend less time generating code and more time managing AI-generated code.

AI tools, Biss said, could “handle much of the routine and repetitive tasks of the developer,” while “humans focus on managing, double-checking, and creativity.”

As with Salesforce, that could change how companies hire software engineers.

In June, Amazon Web Services’ chief, Matt Garman, predicted that AI would handle a good deal of coders’ work.

“If you go forward 24 months from now, or some amount of time — I can’t exactly predict where it is — it’s possible that most developers are not coding,” Garman said.