Dive Brief:
- The on-ramp for technology talent is shrinking as large technology companies increase their hiring preferences for more senior professionals, according to a SignalFire report published earlier this week. The venture capital firm drew on insights from Beacon AI, a proprietary platform used to identify startup and hiring trends, for the report.
- Hiring of workers with less than one year of experience among a dozen major technology companies — such as Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon — shrunk by 65% from its 2019 baseline, according to the report. The dip far outpaces overall hiring contraction of 25% among these companies in the same timeframe.
- The downshift has accelerated since 2022 as the adoption of AI tools points businesses toward flatter operating structures, especially in engineering, according to the report. Engineering managers at the group of large tech firms now have 12 engineers reporting to them, up from 10 in 2019.
Dive Insight:
Amid increased automation in baseline tech tasks — such as writing code — leaders are looking at ways to redesign operations and retool hiring strategies.
In the process, a shift toward hiring more mature professionals that began prior to the rise of tools like ChatGPT has accelerated further, according to Asher Bantock, head of research at SignalFire.
“If you look at what skills are complementary with this generation of AI tools, there's a big premium on having a lot of business contacts, having good judgment, having good taste and being able to review the outputs of an AI system,” Bantock told CIO Dive. “These are skills that typically come from experience, they're not things that you graduate college with.”
But the shift toward more tenured tech workers can introduce long-term risks for businesses honing their IT strategies and betting on innovation, according to Tawni Cranz, operating partner at SignalFire.
“We don’t want to damage the future supply,” Cranz said in an interview with CIO Dive. “If we don’t invest in the skill development of those early career folks, we’re going to end up with a short supply of the next staff engineers, principal engineers, leaders and founders. I think it’s time to reinvent what an entry-level job looks like.”
The push toward flatter structures at big tech companies aligns with large-scale layoffs unveiled by companies such as Oracle and Meta. Challenger, Gray & Christmas found tech businesses cut more than 123,000 roles during the first five months of the year, up 66% from the same period in 2025.
CIOs aiming to guide their companies as they respond to broader change should work to spot opportunities for growth as management structures compress, according to Cranz.
“Having fewer layers of management and still being able to operate at speed frees up more budget and more room for more senior technical leaders, perhaps some more entry-level folks that we can incorporate to build a better way to build in an organization,” Cranz said. “AI doesn't eliminate accountability, it just pushes accountability closer to the people who are making decisions and doing the work.”
