IT companies pay up to $200,000 «strategic» premium for AI experience — even to newcomers, to the detriment of experienced engineers

With the advent of AI, tech giants have launched a «war for talent» and, judging by recent reports, are ready to «strategically» overpay specialists with experience in machine learning.

The consulting firm J. Thelander Consulting (via Business Insider) analyzed the level of compensation for various positions in 153 US tech companies and found that data scientists and analysts with machine learning skills tend to receive a higher bonus than experienced software engineers without such knowledge. In some cases, the bonuses are as high as $200,000.

Such high payments are a heavy burden, especially for startups. Almost 50% of the surveyed companies that pay bonuses for employees with AI skills had no income last year. Obviously, they are losing out to tech giants in this regard. Think of the ubiquitous Meta, which has been actively luring specialists from OpenAI, which created ChatGPT (although recent reports have shown that employees have not yet received the promised «$100,000 transition bonus).

Last year’s survey showed that about 76% of IT professionals have already used or plan to use use AI tools in development processes.

Earlier, the Anthropic boss said that artificial intelligence will write 90% of the code in six months and in a year — will take over everything. Similar predictions were made by Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram and chief product officer at Anthropic, who noted that in the future, software engineers will spend more time reviewing code than creating it, and will take on «more abstract» work that AI cannot yet handle. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also claimed that «the best coder in the world» by the end of 2025 will be artificial intelligence, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai has already announced that more than a quarter of new code in the company is created by AI.

There’s another side to this whole AI nativity scene: companies that have begun to actively replace human roles with artificial intelligence are now rehiring employees to fix the mistakes that the technology makes. Similar experiences in in a recent interview with the BBC shared Sarah Skidd, Product Marketing Manager, who now gets paid for «fixing problems caused by AI».