IT & TECH
Salary Splits in IT due to AI – Higher Salaries or No Job?
In Sweden and Norway, the IT job market feels increasingly contradictory. Some professionals are in high demand and see strong salary growth, while others struggle to get traction despite solid experience.
The explanation isn’t effort or talent alone — it’s where different roles sit as software execution accelerates faster than decision-making due to AI and how you adapt.
A market that feels out of sync
On paper, Nordic IT salaries appear relatively stable. But for candidates navigating the market, reality often feels different. Some professionals report rising compensation and influence, while others face longer hiring processes and flatter progression — sometimes inside the same teams.
Worko’s Salary & Preference Report 2025, based on 2024 data from Sweden and Norway, reflects this divide. Salary growth is no longer evenly distributed across technical roles. Instead, it concentrates in specific kinds of work, even when job titles look identical.
To understand why, it helps to look at how technical work itself is changing.
When execution accelerates faster than decisions
Over the past few years, software execution has sped up dramatically. Mature frameworks, improved tooling, and AI-assisted development allow teams to ship more with fewer people. If your role mainly involves implementing clearly defined features, improving code quality, or moving tickets through a backlog, this acceleration is impossible to ignore. Output expectations rise, but demand for headcount does not grow at the same pace.
This helps explain why competition has increased in many execution-heavy roles. Hiring bars rise, mid-level supply grows, and salary progression becomes less predictable — even for experienced engineers.
What hasn’t accelerated in the same way is deciding what should be built, why, and how systems should evolve over time.
Where salary momentum holds – developers with product management skills
By contrast, IT professionals who are increasingly pulled into discussions about features and business values, coupled with system boundaries and technical trade-offs, experience a different market dynamic.
These conversations involve judgement and a new skill for many IT professionals rather than throughput. They require understanding constraints, business processes, weighing consequences, and taking responsibility for decisions that are hard to reverse.
Worko’s salary data shows that roles closer to these design decisions retain stronger salary momentum. Compensation is more resilient and demand steadier — not because the work is more visible, but because it hasn’t become easier to scale.
As execution gets cheaper and faster, the cost of poor decisions increases — and the market reflects that shift.
Andrew Ng’s observation — seen through Nordic salary data
This dynamic was described clearly by Andrew Ng at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026. He noted that while AI has dramatically accelerated software engineering, product decision-making has not kept pace.
As engineers became faster, teams encountered a bottleneck elsewhere: deciding what to build next. In some cases, product managers struggled to keep up with implementation speed. The implication wasn’t that engineers are becoming obsolete — but that engineers who only execute predefined instructions are becoming easier to replace.
What Andrew Ng described inside software teams is visible in the Nordic labour market. Worko’s salary data shows what happens when execution scales faster than judgement: compensation starts to follow those who help shape priorities, define constraints, and absorb the consequences of technical decisions.
Does everyone need to become a product manager now?
While the above partly explains why today’s salary differences in IT aren’t mainly about specific languages, frameworks, or tools it does not mean that is not important. Two professionals may both be called “software engineer” and work on the same product. One focuses primarily on implementation within fixed parameters. The other is able to get easier requirement directly from the business and bypass the product manager, meaning they will increase the speed of development.
However, for more complex feature design, the work of business process design is not there. This isn’t about moving into formal management or abandoning hands-on work — many of the strongest salary outcomes remain deeply technical. The difference lies in scope: whether a role expands toward supporting the product manager to not be a bottle neck, or not.
What this means for IT professionals
For candidates, this shift can feel uncomfortable — but it also offers clarity. Strong execution skills remain essential, but they no longer guarantee salary growth or job security on their own. The most resilient profiles tend to combine execution with broader responsibility.
Professionals who continue to see strong demand often:
Help translate business problems into technical choices
Participate in architectural or product-level discussions
Understand trade-offs beyond their immediate codebase
Are trusted when decisions carry long-term consequences
Those who remain narrowly focused on predefined tasks may still build excellent software — but face slower progression as execution continues to scale.
Looking ahead in IT
As AI and tooling continue to accelerate software execution, the split in the IT labour market is likely to deepen. For IT professionals in Sweden and Norway, the key question is no longer only what you can build — but how close you are to deciding what should be built in the first place. That distinction is where salary momentum increasingly lives.
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