Software Engineer

Also known as: Programmer, Software Developer, Coder, SWE

Salary data based on 2025 BLS, Glassdoor, and industry reports. Actual compensation varies by location, experience, and employer.

This career typically requires a bachelor's degree. Here are the top colleges for it:

1

MITComputer Science

2

StanfordComputer Engineering

3

UC BerkeleyComputer Engineering

4

CMUComputer Science

5

CaltechComputer Engineering

Explore all colleges →

Computer programming has the highest observed AI exposure of any occupation Anthropic has measured — 75% task coverage in their March 2026 Economic Index. The work AI does best (writing routine code, debugging, generating boilerplate, scaffolding tests) is exactly the work that used to fill a junior engineer's first two years. Stanford's Brynjolfsson team found employment for software developers aged 22-25 has fallen roughly 20% from 2024 levels, and entry-level hiring at the 15 largest tech firms dropped 25% from 2023 to 2024. The SF Standard captured the new shape of the job: senior engineers "overseeing swarms of AI-powered code-writing agents" instead of writing code line by line. The overall market is more complex than the entry-level data alone suggests. BLS still projects 15% growth through 2034 (much faster than average) and roughly 129,000 openings per year. Indeed listings for software engineer jobs were up 11% year-over-year as of April 2026 per Citadel Securities analysis. Anthropic's own labor-market study found "no systematic increase in unemployment for highly exposed workers since late 2022" — total headcount has held even as the front door has narrowed. A Gartner survey of 350 large companies found 80% did AI-pilot layoffs but got no measurable ROI gain, which may slow the cuts. The rubric weights entry-level impact heavily, and that's where this lands. AI does meaningful-to-most of the core work juniors used to be hired to learn on, and tech-sector layoffs accelerated through Q1 2026 (Meta cutting 8,000 in April, Microsoft and others adding 20,000+ that month; Challenger attributed 26% of April cuts to AI). It's not a 5 — software engineering as a profession isn't contracting, salaries are holding, and demand for AI-fluent senior engineers is rising fast. But the path in is genuinely harder than it was two years ago, and that uncertainty has wide error bars in a field changing this fast.

Ratings reflect a 10-year outlook based on 2025-2026 research, weighted toward entry-level impact. Individual outcomes will vary.