What engineering managers need to know for 2025

Estimated reading time: 17 minutes

After the turmoil of 2023, many of you will be forgiven for feeling that 2024 was … stable?

As hiring plateaued, many of you will have been asked to “do more with less” by refocusing on what really matters, prioritizing ruthlessly, and regaining some semblance of stability for teams rocked by a relentless wave of layoffs and the rapid rise of generative AI.

Now, what can engineering managers expect to face in 2025?

A year of uncertainty

There’s no guarantee that this year’s relative sense of stability will carry through to 2025. “In the tech industry and beyond, we are already in the midst of an “era of uncertainty,” and we will have to figure our way through the best we can,” KellyAnn Fitzpatrick of the software analyst firm Redmonk wrote.

As a leader, it’s important to slow down in the face of uncertainty and focus on what matters. You could automate some repetitive tasks to free up time for creative work or think about reprioritizing as you start the new year.

A weird hiring landscape

While there are signs of life for software engineers looking for a new role, this general sense of ambiguity will likely carry over into the hiring landscape for engineers in 2025.

There is a whole host of hiring trends to look out for this year, from conscious unbossing and the great flattening to ghost jobs and the rise of the PIP, many of which leave hiring managers to focus on quality, not quantity, of hires in 2025.

As Amazon has seen, there could also be further resistance to return-to-office mandates into 2025. “My prediction is overall levels of working from home will remain flat at a macro level in 2025. But, below the stable aggregate figures, local battles will rage over hybrid policies, employees will quit, and CEOs will continue to debate this policy,” Nicholas Bloom, William Eberle professor of Economics at Stanford University, told Charter for their 2025 predictions.

AI hype cycle

The relentless rise of generative AI finally hit the brakes in 2024, as the most vocal critics of the technology asked if the industry at large had fallen for another dead-end hype cycle, like blockchain and the metaverse before it. Just with bigger financial and environmental impacts. That being said, business spending on generative AI was up 500% in 2024, hitting $13.8 billion, according to data from Menlo Ventures.

“2025 looks firmly set to be another year for AI to embed itself in how we work,” said Gary Stevens, Engineering Director at Trainline. “I think 2025 will see an increase in tools that support the software development lifecycle, and not just in tools like [GitHub] Copilot, but throughout our engineering stack and supporting everything from debugging, quality assurance, and incident management and resolution.”

Then there is the latest iteration of the AI hype train: Agentic AI. These autonomous assistants look to fulfill the utopian promise of generative AI by performing multiple interlinked tasks without repeated prompting.

“2025 will be the year of ‘memory-aware agents’ – a fundamental shift in how AI systems maintain and learn from conversations,” predicts Jesal Gadhia, Head of Engineering at Thoughtful AI.

He added, “Development teams will adopt new tools specifically designed for managing long-term agent memory and learning, moving beyond current vector databases to temporal knowledge graphs that capture the evolution of agent-user dynamics. This shift will transform how businesses connect with customers, creating AI systems that don’t just respond intelligently, but truly remember, learn, and grow through every interaction.”

Hot technology areas and skills

Developers are also expected to have a significantly different skill mix in 2025 and beyond, largely as a result of AI developments. 

“While these advancements will empower developers to focus on creative problem-solving and architectural innovation, they’ll also introduce complexity. AI’s role won’t simplify projects – it’ll demand new skills in orchestration, integration, and decision-making,” said Maxime Najim, Distinguished Engineer at Target.

“The key to thriving in this AI-driven landscape will be adaptability and communication. Staff+ engineers must champion transparent, cross-disciplinary collaboration and help their teams embrace AI while addressing its challenges. The future of software development isn’t just faster – it’s smarter, and it demands we level up as technologists and leaders.”

AI-aside, there are also some quickly rising technologies to keep an eye on in 2025:

Rust

Adoption of the versatile programming language Rust has been trending upward for a decade now. Even the White House is a fan of memory-safe programming languages. “Rust will enter the top 10 of the TIOBE Index while C and C++ drop in rank,” predicted Christopher Condo, Principal Analyst at Forrester. “This year, we believe (or perhaps, really hope) that organizations will finally factor risk into their choice of programming language.”

SQLIte

The open-source database management system SQlite continues to rise as a viable alternative to MySQL. Kent Dodds argues that you could probably just use SQLite in production today. And so does Stephen Margheim at the Ruby Conf.

WASM

Ever since it emerged as a way to run complex applications within a browser sandbox, WebAssembly has been waiting for its breakout moment. Will 2025 be the year? “All the little things that seem to be clicking now,” Ken Mugrage, a principal technologist in Thoughtworks’ Office of the CTO, told LeadDev in October, as the consultancy is seeing increased interest in the technology amongst its clients.

A growing generational disconnect

As Gen Z continues to enter the workforce – albeit facing more hurdles than ever before to do so – we expect to see a growing divide between generations of developers in 2025.

While this trend could easily be disregarded as normal intergenerational quibbling, a growing reliance on frameworks and coding assistants – as well as less desire to follow traditional career paths – could create an interesting generational divide for engineering leaders to navigate in years to come. “It seems that picking up new languages and frameworks “on the go” is second nature to GenZ,” Gergely Orosz observed in his Pragmatic Engineer newsletter back in June.

Take the developer Rakhim’s recent observations in the web dev space. “I feel a growing disconnect between my notion of programming and the younger web developers’ notion of it,” he wrote. “Someone would grumpily bash “stupid JS frameworks” and “bootcamp devs” while religiously proclaiming how everybody should just use bash and vim, or something. It’s all pretty fascinating.”

The great measurement debate

One topic that doesn’t show any signs of going away in 2025 is how to effectively measure engineering team performance. Just recently, DX came into some criticism after it revealed its own DX Core 4 framework for measuring developer productivity.

“Someday we’ll look back upon this era of trying to find a universal set of metrics that capture “developer productivity” regardless of business context and wonder how the heck we ever thought it would ever make sense,” advisor and CTO Krishna Kumar wrote on LinkedIn.

“The reality is engineering leaders cannot avoid the question of how to measure developer productivity, today,” Gergely Orosz and Kent Beck wrote in their well-measured response to McKinsey’s ill-fated work on this topic back in 2023. “If they try to, they risk the CEO or CFO turning instead to McKinsey, who will bring their custom framework, deploy it – even as the CTO protests – and start reporting on custom McKinsey metrics.”

For 2025, Jen Riggins laid out some areas for engineering leaders to focus on here, by asking the right questions, focusing on developer experience, and not making AI investments in the wrong places.

A rethink on meetings

As teams got smaller and developers got busier, we saw an increasing disdain for meetings amongst developers in 2024. Now, there is an opportunity for a drastic rethink of the rituals associated with engineering work, and the number of meetings we are expected to attend.

“I expect 2025 to be the year in which team meetings will be reimagined. Distributed teams that work from anywhere (WFA) will continue experiments that maximize the value of company and team retreats,” Prithwiraj Choudhury, Lumry Family associate professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School also told Charter. In other words: plan in person, execute remotely.

AI could have an impact here also. “In 2025, AI-enabled teams will be more connected and collaborative than ever,” Annie Dean, global head of Team Anywhere at Atlassian told Charter.

“With a greater ability to execute creative ideas faster, we’ll also experience a complete evolution of meetings. Meetings will no longer serve as a traditional, 30-minute ‘stand and deliver,’ but a time for collaboration, creativity, and complex problem-solving. This could result in an increase in meetings, but this time will be more focused, efficient, and creative – contributing to the deepened connections within teams as they move forward the most impactful work.”

A rapidly changing social media landscape

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter (now X), there has been a rush of competitors to the market: Meta’s Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky. Then, in November, Bluesky started to gain some real momentum, notably in engineering circles.

“The online world has become so hostile to users that Bluesky’s pitch of ‘here is a straightforward feed of text-based user-generated posts that we promise not to mess with’ is revelatory,” Brian Merchant wrote in his Substack newsletter, Blood in the Machine. “Its scaling model and raison d’être are a very rejection of the platforms that have colonized the rest of our digital lives, and relentlessly commodified them. No wonder everyone seems to be rooting for its success, even if there are, pointedly, no guarantees those ideals will remain in place.”

Take the groundswell of interest in moving CNCF projects from X to Bluesky in November and the pushback it received in response as a microcosm for the heated social media landscape we live in. Add the impending ban of TikTok in the United States to the mix, and you have a rapidly changing social media landscape in 2025.

DEI challenges

We wrote about this last year, but with a Trump presidency on the horizon, effective efforts to make organizations more diverse, equitable, and inclusive will only become more challenging in 2025, as the practice has taken on a debilitating amount of political baggage. 

The turning point came with a landmark US Supreme Court decision to roll back affirmative action in June 2024, and the subsequent wave of legal challenges to corporate DEI programs. The immediate effect of this sustained backlash will likely be a regression in the diversity of the hiring pool for engineers, which is notoriously already lacking in diversity. 

Passionate engineering managers can still do good work here though. Start by auditing current DEI initiatives to assess what is working best and focus attention there. Design a comprehensive strategy tied to metrics and engagement survey results. Once you’re able to measure the business incentives of inclusion, and the numeric costs of exclusion, it becomes much easier to secure buy-in. Finally, you may need to consider reframing – or even rebranding – DEI initiatives to sidestep its cultural baggage and focus on these more tangible outcomes.

Final thoughts

I also want to take this opportunity to thank you for reading LeadDev this year. We really appreciate your support and don’t take it for granted. Expect more great content from us in 2025 and we hope to see you at one of our live events.

Scott Carey, Editor in Chief, LeadDev

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