The Amazon layoffs hit SDEs the hardest, with one-quarter of the cuts in Washington state being software development engineering roles. This is happening right as companies push AI coding tools like Kiro.
Is this a temporary “efficiency gain” to please the board, or the first real structural shift where GenAI is fundamentally reducing the required number of mid-level engineers?
If a senior engineer with a Copilot license can do the work of two mid-levels, what does a clear, defensible career path look like for a new college grad in 2026?
Always a cycle. They over-hired, now they over-correct. AI just gives them a buzzword to justify the cost-cutting. Once the quarterly reports pass, they’ll realize they actually need people to stitch those generated snippets together
I’ve seen this before (outsourcing, cloud, etc.). The work doesn’t disappear; it shifts. AI eats boilerplate, which means the value of deep domain expertise, the stuff an LLM can’t learn from a repo—just went up 10x. Survival means becoming a system architect, not a ticket grinder