So if you’ve been scrolling through tech news lately, you’ve probably seen the headlines. Block cut 40% of its people. Atlassian let go 1,600. Meta’s reportedly planning to cut 20% of its workforce. All in the name of AI.
It’s a lot. I get it.
If you’re a software engineer right now, it’s hard not to feel that knot in your stomach. The thing you spent years learning, the career you built - suddenly everyone’s talking about how AI can do it too.
But what’s the truth here? AI won’t replace all of us. That’s not actually what’s happening.
What AI did is change the shape of the software industry - the business model, the margins, the way companies think about profit. And that shift landed right on top of everything else: inflation, global uncertainty, tighter capital. Companies aren’t cutting people because a robot can do your job. They’re cutting people because the entire financial landscape shifted, and AI gave them both the pressure and the excuse to restructure.
So the layoffs are real. But the reason behind them isn’t “AI replaced engineers.” It’s traditional businesses trying to navigate a tighter financial world, where AI changed what investors expect, what margins look like, and how companies justify their headcount.
Here’s what I actually think about where this goes.
This isn’t the end of software engineering. It’s a reshape. And honestly? Think about it - how many languages, technologies, frameworks, and workflows have you changed and adopted throughout your whole career? We’ve always been adapting. That’s the job.
What’s different this time is the speed. AI moves fast. But so do engineers - that’s literally what we’re trained to do. Solve problems. Learn new things. Build stuff that didn’t exist yesterday.
The engineers who’ll thrive aren’t the ones who memorize syntax or grind leetcode. They’re the ones who understand systems, who can think clearly about what to build and why. AI can write code. But it still can’t sit in a room and figure out what the actual problem is. It can’t navigate ambiguity. It can’t make the tradeoff calls that come from experience and taste.
AI is creating entirely new categories of work. Someone needs to build the AI products. Someone needs to make them reliable. Someone needs to figure out how to integrate them into real businesses without breaking everything. That someone is still an engineer.
So yeah, some roles will disappear. That’s real and I’m not going to sugarcoat it. But new ones are already showing up. The pie is changing shape, not shrinking.
My honest advice? Stay curious. Like the time you graduated, got your first job - it’s exciting, it’s fearful. But you made it through. And you’ll make it through this too.
The world is changing. But you’ve been changing with it your whole career. This is just the next chapter.