AI and ML
AI's impact on tech business is complicated
If you listen to the AI industry, coders' days are numbered. Despite these concerns, software developers, at least those with experience, appear to be doing just fine at growing companies.Hiring biz Levels.fyi recently looked at how US compensation for software engineers (SWEs) is related to changes in headcount and found that salary level tends to be correlated with growth."Generally, the companies paying the most are also the ones still hiring the most," observed Hakeem Shibly, content marketing manager for Levels.fyi, in a LinkedIn post.
As an example, he pointed to companies like Anthropic and OpenAI where senior SWE offers are said to be around $810,000 and $605,000 annually.
Several large companies with major investments in AI infrastructure occupy a different statistical space – they're still paying well and generating healthy profits, but they're also cutting staff."Meta, Amazon, Google, and Coinbase all pay near the top of the market, and all four have cut staff in the last two years," said Shibly. In the least desirable quadrant, where eroding headcount meets lower relative compensation, we find companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce, where AI expenditures and AI liabilities appear to be taking a toll on hiring and compensation."At certain companies like Block, for example, they did announce in their layoffs that it was specifically because they're increasing their investment in AI and they're cutting people from their organization," Shibly told The Register. "But, at other companies, it's a little bit more ambiguous. They're not necessarily saying that in their layoff announcements. But there has been some correlation – companies that have been spending more money on their AI compute, their AI investment, have been cutting heads as well, even though they're increasing in revenue."
