From Geek to Star #17 - Zoom in: The AI report 2025 by LeadDev

If you missed the previous episodes, you can access them online here.

🗓️ This Week – Chapter 17: a report to help guessing the future of our careers

In Episode 16, I mentioned a stat from LeadDev’s 2025 AI Impact Report about junior hiring. I went back to read more: beyond that headline, the report has helpful signals on where engineering orgs are actually investing and what leaders say is working (and not). If you want the full picture, you can download it from LeadDev

👩🏻‍💻 First, what is LeadDev?

I discovered LeadDev two weeks ago while researching AI impact on engineering jobs. It’s a community and events platform for engineering leadership (founded 2015, big conferences in the US/EU and a large online library). Their commercial page cites a 50k+ global audience of engineering leaders: 45% in USA and Canada, 40% in Europe, 10% Asia and the rest across the world. Quite Western-centric then but since it is community-driven, this may expand to the East if more people there join. 

📊 The LeadDev AI Impact Report (2025): highlights

Here are the key insights I found in this report - base of 883 respondents (mixed of tech leadership roles, geographically spread out as per the percentage above, size of companies from very small to large companies). 

• Perceived Productivity Increase? A significant majority of respondents reported feeling more productive using AI coding tools. Companies having fewer than five engineers are seeing the biggest gains (59% reported >10% increase).

• Where investment goes: 85% say their AI spend focuses on internal engineering work (dashboards, testing, code assistance) before customer-facing features and streamlining non-engineering processes like legal, marketing, or HR tasks.

• Challenge of Quantifying AI Impact: 85% of organizations cite the lack of metrics on AI impact as a key challenge. For the minority of organizations that do track impact, "development time per feature" is the most common metric, followed by "weekly time saved per engineer" and "time spent reviewing AI-suggested or generated code".

• Talent pipeline: 54% expect junior hiring to decrease in the long term as AI adoption rises (we dug into this in Episode 16)

• Most In-Demand Competencies: Critical thinking and architectural design are identified as the most in-demand competencies resulting from increased AI usage. Specifically, 43% of respondents believe critical thinking will be most in demand, followed by architectural design at 34% over the next three years. Other important skills include domain expertise (28%) and communication skills (27%). In terms of emerging AI-related skills for personal development, managing AI agents (60%) and prompt engineering (53%) are top priorities.

🌱 What to do with this (curiosity + network)

1. First, take the time to digest and think in your own situation, context, what this may mean for you. This is about nurturing your curiosity about this topic. What do you think of this, what do you want to activate on your side? 

2. Second, you may want to join a community like LeadDev - or any other tech community you are interested in. I don't have any personal interest in LeadDev but I find their purpose interesting and think I can learn and maybe contribute well. By joining such communities, this helps you to feel less alone, create bonds and grow or/and give back. This helps you to nurture your network in different ways such as described here https://leaddev.com/about-leaddev 

🙏 I’d love to hear from you: Which insight resonates or surprises you most? Hit reply; I read every note.

And don’t forget: follow me on LinkedIn for more reflections and “behind-the-scenes” thinking between newsletters. Don't hesitate to engage discussions there in the comments to also start showing and sharing your thoughts publicly. 

P.S. Referral Pilot 🚀

Forward this to one engineer friend who might benefit - “sharing is caring.” A warm forward isalso a great reason to (re)connect.

✨ May the Shift be with you!

From Geek to Star by Khang | The Way Forward