The job market is difficult for those who aspire to a job in software engineering. Tens of thousands of layoffs across the industry have increased competition for available jobs.
The rise of AI has raised fears of cheating during interviews, and companies’ priorities are changing as the technology evolves almost daily.
But hiring managers have a bigger concern: Now that AI can write code, how do they figure out who—or even what skill set—makes a good software engineer?
The interview process hasn’t kept up with how AI has changed programmers’ daily responsibilities, career experts and software engineers told CNN.
This made it more challenging for both candidates and hiring managers.
“I would say AI has hit engineering interviews like an atomic bomb,” said Stefan Mai, a former Meta and Amazon engineer and co-founder of technology interview coaching service Hello Interview.
Software engineering is among the first sectors to be visibly impacted by AI.
A report from Google’s research division last year found that 90% of those for tasks such as writing and modifying code, a 14% increase from the previous year.
The industry has been closely watched as a bellwether as AI adoption expands.
How AI is Changing Software Engineer Jobs
AI can now help software engineers write code and documentation; analyze data; learn programming concepts and solve problems, among other things.
This allows technology companies to move much faster, some executives say.
An OpenAI engineer used AI to implement a system change that would otherwise have taken his team a week to complete, company president Greg Brockman recently said during a talk at Sequoia Capital.
Many internal Google apps are being written “for the most part” with the company’s Antigravity AI coding tool, Varun Mohan, director of Google DeepMind, told CNN earlier this month.
Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code at Anthropic, wrote on X in December that “100%” of his contributions to the product over the last 30 days were written by Claude Code.
Cherny believes AI is displacing the role of the software engineer to focus on high-level decision making rather than writing code.
The title “software engineer” could be replaced with a name like “builder” that better captures the role, he previously told CNN.
AI is not intended to replace engineers, Google’s Mohan told CNN.
“We believe developers should spend most of their time figuring out what they should build,” he said. “That’s the big question.”
Madhu Kurup, vice president of engineering at Indeed, compared AI in software engineering to the role of Google Maps in travel.
Google Maps can indicate which highway exit to use, signal traffic conditions and find coffee shops on the driver’s path, but it does not choose the destination or decide when to leave.
However, that Google report from last year indicated that 46% of tech workers only “fairly” trust the quality of AI-generated code, and 31% said that AI only “slightly” improved their code.
And they suggest that AI is affecting payrolls. AI was the top reason cited by companies for job cuts in April for the second month in a row, executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said this month.
“Like a moving target”
For years, companies evaluated potential candidates with rigorous tests that some say felt like taking the SAT but geared toward coding.
They don’t measure how workers delegate tasks to an agent and use AI to solve problems, brainstorm, or work more efficiently.
Now, some engineers feel these tests no longer reflect “what their job will actually be like,” said Jordan Leonard, co-founder and chief operating officer of Leopard.FYI, a technology hiring network for women and genderqueer engineers.
In late April, software developer David Barajas said he had attended about five or six job interviews after being approached by recruiters over the past six to eight months.
None of them asked to see how he incorporates AI coding tools like Cursor into his work.
“The first thing they say is: you shouldn’t use any AI tools, any AI assistance, anything to help you solve this problem,” he said.
Sujata Sridharan, who most recently worked at fintech company Bolt and spent about a decade as a software engineer, also said that most of the companies she has interviewed with recently are using the same traditional tests, focused on understanding code rather than working with AI.
“That gap exists, it’s just gotten bigger (because of AI),” she said.
Some companies initially banned candidates from using AI during tests to prevent cheating. Barajas said he has been asked to share his desktop during interviews to prove he is not using AI.
While these concerns are nothing new, fears about cheating have “really escalated to an unusual level” because of AI, according to Mai.
And the rapid advancement of AI means job requirements are constantly changing.
One company Leopard.FYI works with said the Ruby on Rails programming language was required for an open position, Leonard said. Three weeks later, the company changed its mind because AI can easily translate other languages into Ruby on Rails.
“It seems like a moving target literally on a weekly (or) monthly basis,” she said.
New approaches to an “unsolved” problem
Employers are starting to focus more on questions that show how candidates think about problems and evaluate trade-offs, rather than raw programming capabilities.
These themes have traditionally come up in senior-level interviews, but are now becoming more common across the board, according to Mai.
Some startups have experimented with bringing candidates to work in person for half a day. And it’s becoming increasingly common for managers to allow candidates to use AI during the testing process, according to Leonard.
But even these changes don’t fully capture how work is done today.
Sridharan, for example, often collaborates with AI to solve problems, but his experience using it in technical testing typically involves using it as a substitute for hands-on programming.
It’s still an “unresolved problem,” according to Mai.
“It’s kind of unpredictable what the candidates are going to find,” he said.
