The Counterargument

Yesterday I talked about how AI is pushing every engineering role up the pyramid and compressing the number of available seats. But I want to be honest about the other side of this because the doom framing isn't the whole story.

The tech industry has always evolved this way. There was no such thing as a cloud engineer 15 years ago. Platform engineering, site reliability, DevOps roles didn't exist until the work that needed doing created them. Every major shift in how we build software has killed some roles and opened others that nobody saw coming.

So it isn't whether AI will eliminate engineering jobs. The question is whether AI-driven role compression creates new roles at the same rate it closes off entry points.

And right now, nobody knows.

What we do know is that the engineers who came out ahead in every previous shift were the ones who understood the underlying systems, not just the tools sitting on top of them.

Cloud engineers didn't emerge because people learned AWS. They emerged because people understood networking, infrastructure, and distributed systems well enough to apply that knowledge to a new paradigm.

That's the part I'd pay attention to. The tools will keep changing, the pricing will keep shifting, and the job titles will keep getting redefined, but the engineers who understand how things actually work underneath have always found their footing (even when the ground moves under them).

If you're a software or infrastructure engineer doing the work without the title to show for it, the instinct right now might be to panic about the market. I'd channel that energy into going deeper instead of wider. Understand the systems under the AI layer because when the dust settles, that knowledge is what's going to separate the people who adapted from the people who just adopted.

Do you think the pyramid gets narrower from here or do new roles fill the gap like they always have?

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