Why Companies Are Quietly Rehiring Software Engineers

What AI will never be able to replace is work ethic, honesty, dedication, passion, hard work, communication skills, humor… the list goes on.

Turns out those are human traits only, turns out that’s what they hire us for anyway. Turns out that’s irreplaceable. If you have those traits, nothing to worry about, the world would always pay for that.

Don’t even give it back to these greedy bastards.

I see the same quality control issues on the side of content generation and documentation. A lot of AI slop gets thrown my way and then I have to do the detective work of turning myself into an ad-hoc subject matter expert so I can fix the mess - before another LLM picks up the misinformation and churns it into more falsehoods.

Companies not paying attention to this will be in deep sh*t in a few years. Their knowledge bases will be contaminated and not enough human experts will be left to tell fact from fiction.

F

The fact saying AI can take care of everything is overstatement. Its like you read the dictionary and say you can speak the language very well! Its way more than that.

Yes, AI can write codes but YOU have to have the knowledge HOW to design the codes effectively.

They’ll be outsourced anyways

ah the copium comes right on time, as usual

Enterprise developer here. This is highly accurate.

As an expert programmer I can concur. 9/10 we are correcting and honestly it is less motivating. 4/10 times I have could have done it faster myself but with better code. Were AI is useful is the repetitive tasks and understanding code. The latter is important because we can't remember the full code base, so with AI you can ask about certain parts that haven't been touched for a long time and reading its assessment help you remember faster. So it is a handy tool to become faster and better but you need software people. And most important writing code is 30% of my work.

0:23 that graph is crazy misleading, it has different units for each line. Normal hiring went from 120% of baseline to 105% of baseline, while software engineering job went from 73% of baseline hiring to 71% of baseline with a low of 62%. While it is a sharp recovery from the low, it's not anywhere close to where it was at in the 2010's

Companies took the opportunity to layoff their low performers, and now they are selectively hiring higher performing replacements at the same salary (perhaps even lower salaries). Jobs are scarce. Companies know it and are taking advantage of workers to further increase executive level pay.

You really have to wonder where does this license to psychopathy come from.. I thought these are supposed to be smart people.. so what are they thinking??? People and their jobs and their livelihoods matter way less than their whimsical experiments? Even the fact that they were making the predictions of how humans wouldn't be needed and kind of like not worried about it but even giddy excited is completely psychopathic. Out in the open! Not even trying to hide it. We're going to get you all, we're going to take away your jobs buh hahahahahaha.

Goodbye quality. As if we had much to begin with after the 'agile' revolution.. 😂

Look. It generates working code. For a non seasoned engineer it would be magic. But for engineers who’ve seen a lot of this before, the outputs are sometimes questionable and more lines of code doesn’t necessarily mean quality

The problem is the hiring will be offshore 😢

If developers were smart we would unionize this time. Companies shouldn't get away with playing with our livelihoods like this where it's so easy for them to lay us off because of fads like the latest AI hype

This report is outdated, sourced from October 2025 surveys. There was a MASSIVE improvement in AI coding agents in December 2025.

And what happens when the now senior devs retire?
Where we will find new seniors if no jr are being hired?

There has to be a skilled developer in the loop when working with agents, otherwise you won't catch the moment where the AI goes slightly off the path you intend, and you end up with a solution that is hard to maintain, or contains bugs or vulnerabilities, it is not appropriate for the problem at hand.

Sure agents can be a productivity booster if done correctly, but it doesn't totally replace software engineers all together, and you still have to be good at managing context, tell it the right intentions, and catch it if it's doing a bad job.
Also if you start using AI to your advantage in your company, you might have a slight advantage over other companies who's not currently using AI. But when the other companies start using AI as well your company doesn't have an advantage any longer, and then you need more software engineers to keep up, cause the "software engineers with AI" is the new normal.
There's been countless of tools introduced throughout time. Computers, internet, Microsoft Teams, Excel, Word, Outlook. They all change how we work. And people work more efficient, but all these things is the new normal now, and every worker is using them. I think the same thing will happen with AI.
People were also afraid that computers would replace them back when they were introduced, but you still need the person operating the computer.

My advice as a mid-to-high level software engineer, is to try to not be stressed about AI. It's a relatively new technology. Tools are evolving crazy fast, it's hard to keep up with the newest developments. But EVERYONE feels the same way: "Oh sh*t, is everyone besides me doing AI right now!? Am I going extinct?! What about all my skills and education?!"

Don't worry. Keep an eye on AI. Try it out, see if it can do just one repetitive task you used to do, or help you in some way. Then you learn how to use it, you see more ways to use it gradually. And tools will only become better and easy to work with as time passes.

AI is not perfect. It's like a wild horse that you need to steer and keep on the path of intentions. If you let it run free, you'll end up in the forrest, and you'll have to spend a lot of time getting back to the path. But if you can steer it left or right and keep it on the path, you might be slightly faster than the seasoned runner, who does things efficiently and manually himself.
We're used to running, and doing things efficiently by ourselves, but now we need to learn to ride horses, and we don't learn that in 1 day. But eventually everyone's gonna ride horses, and it'll be easy, and the new normal. But don't stress about not knowing how to ride horses yet - don't stress about not knowing how to use agents efficiently yet. But try tinker with it, and keep an eye on it. And learn from your coworkers.

Why is everyone shouting from every corner that junior developers are no longer needed? Why are people so stupid that they can't even imagine what will happen in 10 years with this approach?
Let's imagine that juniors have disappeared. Just as the smart (no doubt!) managers dreamed. Ten years have passed. The old seniors have retired or died. You need new ones. But where are you going to get them? And suddenly – they're gone, completely gone. Nowhere. After all, they grow out of middles, who grow out of juniors, and we don't have juniors, because we're smart managers, so we got rid of them and made sure they don't exist!
These idiots should have played at least one strategy game like Settlers to understand that juniors are needed because you need seniors. But these smart (no doubt!) managers didn't play strategy games...

where can i cross check the proofs you are taking about?? If it is going on or i will gonna happen. There should be some similar news in the market. But There are a lot of unstable and multi-opinionated news are circulated in the market. Can not decide what to believe and what not?

As a tech professional I can say the issue is not AI rather the business folks who doesn't have any clue how software development works and quickly says AI can do everything. Now you pay the price and it's costly. If anything cut the business pipeline and we do not need the ladder

AI coding = less typos + more logic bugs

In reality, no company fired anyway "because of AI productivity", it was just the excuse that they used to sounds good with the market.

Now, the CEOs will do it again with "we are re-hiring because our business grew so much that we need more people"

Hope ai dies soon like old tech

Fire and re hire for lower pay

Developers should ask for a min of 50% pay rise if the same company want's them back!!!!

5 years later, the hell where are our new senior staffs ? 😂😂😂 Stupid 😂😂
We are still looking for a boomerang layoff wave 😂😂

Les modèles probabilistes sont des usines à problèmes, erreurs à répétition..les entreprises qui misent tout sur l'IA se planteront en beauté

such a repetitive video

Lol software engineering pay will still decline by 90%

use AI or lose IT

I so enjoyed this video. It's good news for software developers!

They hire them just to layoff them later once their problem has been solved.

Reminds me of all the STEM shortages. There is no shortage of juniors, just a shortage of genius level seniors who want to work for peanuts

Who let using of AI to replace humans?

This video is pure bate, this trend is not happening - at least not yet