Software engineering roles aren’t going away anytime soon, but they are being consolidated.
At least that’s the case at Big Four, EY, according to Dan Diasio, global leader in consulting AI. Diasio said software engineers can accomplish and build more, faster. than before.
This change has forced the consulting giant to move beyond the traditional software engineering lifecycle and into a product development lifecycle. This means training engineers to act like end-to-end product builders rather than pure programmers.
Diasio told Business Insider that roles that were once divided into data engineering, software engineering, and AI engineering now overlap.
These were once three “very different professions,” said Diasio, who is also EY’s Americas Consulting CTO.
The roles still exist as separate titles, but the work is converging, he said. Diasio said that in addition to skill sets being more overlapped than before, the company is also changing its expectations for hiring engineers to work across data, software, and AI.
“The role title will catch up,” Diasio added in an email. “We have already started moving our training and development towards this product-first perspective.”
Part of the change is due to AI speeding up product lifecycles. he said. Rather than starting with an AI-generated requirements document, passing it to an AI-generated design plan, and then handing it off to a team that builds and codes the software, the process is streamlined, Diasio said.
All of this is happening “much faster than before,” Diasio said.
Diasio describes the changes that have swept the software engineering industry since late 2025, when improvements in AI coding models such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex automated most coding tasks. Many engineers told Business Insider they haven’t touched the code directly since December.
Changes in technical talent recruitment
At a moment of transformation for the engineering industry, EY is reimagining its technology workforce recruitment strategy.
“We’re no longer just evaluating someone’s coding skills; the bar has gone up. Instead, we’re looking for people who are going to break through the roof,” Diasio added.
This means top engineers will ask more about intentions in interviews, AI leaders said. For example, EY engineers may ask candidates why they made a particular design decision, what outcome they were trying to solve, and how that work fits into the product.
Diasio said that “well-thought-out intent, architectural thinking, and scalability” now separate top talent. He emphasized the importance of involving top engineers in the hiring process.
“Talented people hire talented people,” Diasio said.
The move comes at a time when the consulting giant is broadly reevaluating its talent strategy, from onboarding to promotions.
EY’s A head of talent recently said that AI is making career paths more fluid. The company now requires all early career applicants to complete a skills-based assessment Ginny Currier, chief people and culture officer at EY Americas, previously told Business Insider that she looks for candidates who can evolve with technology.
Diasio said EY is also increasingly emphasizing management skills in hiring across the firm’s business and technology divisions. This is a departure from the previous model for professional services firms, where junior employees primarily performed their own jobs before taking on supervisory roles, he said.
Many new hires are now expected to delegate and manage workflows across AI tools. As AI becomes more integrated into daily work, employees need to think like managers early in their careers, Diasio said.
Diasio said the company is allocating more training to that area.
“We are preparing new hires to be day-one managers,” he wrote.