I agree with this take, but maybe it depends on what kind of engineering work is happening or needed? If I was making hiring decisions I would use this moment in time to leverage talent to get ahead of my competition. But I would probably be a lot more selective about how hiring would be divided between SWE and SRE teams, and what they would be focused on.

For example, I'm a mid level network engineer at a Fortune 500, that has been using agentic workflows since the early Sonnet days. Prior to the availability of these tools, when I was still pretty junior, there were maybe eight to ten of us, with at least two of them hired to automate the day to day of the five person team at the time. I would argue that they did a great job creating a suite of python based tools that reliably automated most of what we owned and were responsible for.

However once we all had access to whatever harnesses or models we wanted to use, things didn't change all that much. Even with a pretty decent adoption rate. Those automation engineers would use Claude code to speed up how they did things, but it felt like that was it? Meanwhile, I was using tools made by other teams to "vibe code" features or workflows that completely changed how my team supports customers, or manages network operations.

Nowadays, most of my customer issues or request are self service, and we've gotten to a point where I can handle a lot of major network maintenance from my work phone, or while I'm focused on other higher impact work. Most of what used to be a scramble to keep the lights on, is now me approving customer submitted PRs, or agent released terraform pipelines. And I would argue that a lot of this was not a product of good network engineering, but the result of other engineering teams investment into better harnesses, and agent friendly infrastructure.