Big Tech Hiring in the AI Era: Developer Bias Deepens Further as Design, Product Management, and Marketing Roles Decline

Big tech hiring is increasingly focused on engineers. According to a report by Business Insider, citing Signal Fire data, the proportion of software engineers among major tech companies' hires rose from 46% in 2019 to 55%, while total hiring remains below pre-pandemic levels. The shift reflects not AI replacing engineers directly, but rather a faster decline in other roles, leading to a more engineer-centric structure. Software engineer hiring decreased by 11% compared to 2019, while design roles dropped 48%, product management 39%, and marketing 36%. This trend highlights the growing concentration of big tech organizations around technical talent, with non-engineering support roles being cut more rapidly. The change underscores how companies are allocating limited hiring resources, indicating a direction in tech-driven organizational restructuring despite overall hiring not yet recovering.