The AI job market in 2026(ilinmaks.com) |
The AI job market in 2026(ilinmaks.com) |
As a 42 years old web developper, this situation gives me headaches. I feel both with new superpowers and dangerously threatened. I feel we will need much less developpers and yet I can imagine some years where a developper will be able to handle much larger projects.
In some ways, having a superpower is not all that great because then you are forced by the prisoner's dilemma to use it. And if you think about it, it comes at a cost: a higher mental strain over a long period of time.
To use a physical analogy: a workout machine at the gym is very likely to assist you in targeting specific muscles compared to just lifting stuff you need to lift, but it also allows you to push that specific muscle group harder and thus increase the chances of injury to that muscle group precisely because it's so targeted. I think AI is like that with the brain.
(I'll add that it's perfectly possible to work out safely at the gym with lots of equipment. But I've spent years at the gym and I've seen a ton of injuries because the temptation to push a specific muscle group hard is there. And, AI is much worse because with AI, there is an economic incentive to push harder, whereas at the gym it's in your best interest to dial back...only sometimes people like to show off to their gym buddies.)
Aside (shower thought):
A little of a tangent, but I have always felt that the weight belt is kind of odd in that it has become completely accepted to use one for the deadlift and squat. Like, why did we decide that this one form of brace is acceptable but others enhancements are not "real" weightlifting? Why not an incline plane? Why not a pulley?
I'm not at all arguing for or against the usage of the weight belt. I just find it odd that it has become so accepted; seems curious how we decided to draw the line here and not there.
That, and I miss coding... but... this new thing is its own puzzle, and I still do lots of pseudo-code and such, to talk to the AI, which kind of scratches the itch.
Not too far after it will be coders controlling agents who control agents who do the work.
We're in for a very tumultuous few years
I'd say decades, not years.
How can I bet a shit load of money against this?
secondly, using llms well still requires you to be a great programmer. Y'all are losing the plot.
Also, just because its easier to do doesnt mean everyone is suddenly going to want to do it. There's still always going to be only a small percentage of thr world that likes to build things.
Have you seen the code these things produce? Just because it compiles/ runs/ loads does not mean its durable. Its wild you people have these opinions, and it leads me to belive you have no idea what you're talking about.
There is mass dunning kruger due to llms, and people are speaking with way too much authority about things they do not understand. I hate this website.
I remember getting primarily tech lead or other high-senior position listings when doing job searches since at least a couple years
> AI Engineer. Number one on LinkedIn Jobs on the Rise in the US two years running, number one at Robert Half. About 1,550 new US postings a week, median 176,000 dollars. This is the engineer who puts LLMs into products: RAG, agents, fine-tuning, evaluation.
I'm doing all those things. The RAG work was interesting, but putting it on my resume has done nothing. Nobody is hiring. I have recent multi-year FAANG experience too. Before 2023 I could blast out 10 resumes and get at least 8 or so hits with multiple offers. Now I can send out 100 resumes and lucky if I get a single rejection letter. I am seeing the same thing reported by other white-collar working people like HR reps and project managers in all industries. There is definitely a stealth recession/depression scenario playing out right now and has been for at least the last two years.
This is exactly right.
I’m making good side money from building and integrating “AI” with small business tools.
Custom CRMs and tracking solutions so they don’t have to buy salesforce etc…
Notably this doesn’t reliably work for juniors, which supports the article.
You need to already have experience making enterprise scale software, otherwise you’re going to miss some massive authentication or data exposure problem.
I anticipate the return of the software consulting company like initech, but instead of having Tom and Milton and Samir and Peter etc…, you only have Lumburgh and Michael Bolton.
My current issue is that solo learning and bootstrapping is hella expensive money wise and my current job doesn't pay that much either.
I'm pretty sure people suddenly had BS like "Blockchain engineer" in their linkedin headline in 2022.
Edit: https://openai.com/careers/search/?q=Engineer Most jobs involving engineering don't even have AI included in their title at OpenAI, though they do have Applied AI engineers and AI support engineers. I highly doubt these other companies suddenly have a huge growth of AI engineering jobs available.
Irl theres a short list of companies that actually build / apply ai at scale. for people trying to break in its usually not expected to have experience with it, just don't lie about it
The numbers are stuck at 2018 levels. Accumulated inflation since then is over 20%. This bubble is not glamorous at all.
Interested to hear from European HNers: does this sound accurate? I know EU pay bands are lower than US but a 50% cut even after adjusting for currency feels brutal. Also curious why the Swiss number is so much higher?
Switzerland basically still has a middle class, that's why their wages are where they're.
While my wage has significant improved over the last years, statistics show that wages have been stagnating for 20 years and inequality keeps rising.
Obviously a lot less pronounced then in the USA, but still significantly more then in eg Switzerland.
The difference is even bigger if you look at current valuation of chf, it's almost $140k or 120k€
Though you should keep in mind that Germany has a pretty strong social security system. Not a benefit if you're a working adult, but it explains some of the difference
That is Claude vibe. I thought it was an ok article when I was about half way through it, then hit this. And overall it seems like it could have been more focused, it listed various AI roles a bit carelessly.
> Here is the short version, with numbers and links.
> The one-paragraph summary:
Software is all shit anyway, it just helps me get a job done. How would artisanal software even distinguish itself. Leave the visual appearance aside. I mean the functionality.
I can’t say if this will change of course, and I only speak for a small gaming startup.
most eng roles at frontier companies don't require prior experience specifically with AI, there's a ton of regular engineering work required to train / serve models
This stuff has only existed for 3 years. Everyone is faking it and no one really knows what's right or wrong yet. You're more than qualified.
They are delusional or know nothing about how development works. I can promise you there's not a single major game studio left out there not leveraging AI in significant parts of their workflows at this point.
Personally seeing an "AI engineer" job posting I would not even apply, despite having many years experience in general, and experimenting/running models on my own hardware and being responsible at work for several skills, mcp and so on, it just feels that that kind of job is looking for some ex-openai/anthropic/ai-lab kind of skillset, which is not something a lot of people have; if this is what you are looking for of course it is what it is.
I think these days being "AI conversant" should be expected for senior/staff positions, it can also be listed a requirement, but not sure putting it as a job title, it feels more like having "IDE staff software engineer" which is not something anybody outside of jetbrains/vs.code would do.
sounds fun, I had fun fine-tuning some open weights models for local use, and I run a free public inference engine here: https://stateofutopia.com/services/ai/ it's fun.
where are you planning to run your models?
artisanal software is software that has a bound on the complexity. A human has to reason about it.
Germany has so many billionaires that literally every minor region has their own local billionaire and locals feel proudly represented by him/her. Yet the "strong social security system" is almost fully financed by employed people paying over 40% cut from their monthly payslip.
If you add the Mehrwertsteuer you'll pay on all bought goods you're paying significantly over 50%. And if you're unmarried over 60%, because clearly fuck them as far as German society is concerned.
And that's on top of what I was referencing: eg a lot of the social security payments are split across employees and employer. The employer part is essentially hidden in the wage, but the employer is still required to pay them - and for the employer, it obviously doesn't matter whom he needs to pay this to...
It's almost if the government wanted to hide just how much they're actually taking from the payslip, because if you add THAT as well, you end up significantly over 60%, approaching the 70%.
And all that to never actually get anything back from the system, at least if you're millennial or younger. But we've clearly gone off track here ༎ຶ ‿ ༎ຶ
I'm sure there is still a pot for really high quality stuff but it's a tradeoff a lot of companies don't care. But the interfaces - they aren't ugly, they're very usable and complete, which is the main reason I think web dev is in trouble. It'd take me 10x the time to do it myself.
AI helps the most with boilerplate work: Those 3 hours of boring, follow-the-design coding can now be implemented in 5-10 minutes. I then jump into the more interesting work and cleanup.
Other things are easier. For example, saying "Refactor this class to use XYZ serialization library" and having it done in 5 minutes instead of 90 minutes frees me to do the more intellectually stimulating work.
Likewise, when it comes to AI and design, what I can do is type in ideas in a stream-of-conscious way into a prompt, and then it looks at code and comes out with sane text that I can go edit.
BUT: There's interesting things you can do with AI that are harder to do by hand. I ran an experiment where I asked AI to rewrite a method to not use an ORM, which is useful if you need to optimize some DB code. Shopify is having AI write two native versions of their mobile app instead of maintaining a React Native codebase. Lean on the tool to do interesting things that otherwise are too labor intense to do by hand.
---
Don't be like the guy who rejects an IDE, or the guy who only works in assembly.
I didn't say LLMs are not useful. It makes some of the boring parts easy and less time consuming. But it does not add it to what makes building something rewarding, on its own.
Imagine building LEGO using a robot? Where is the fun in that?
Depends on what you're building!
You're just staring at a screen pushing pixels all day. Whether I do that with Claude or without doesn't matter to me.
Can you explain what you mean by this? Do you evaluate the design without reviewing the generated code?
We have a LOT of legos; I could easily see it being more fun to have a robot that we could prompt to find the "needle in a haystack" lego; or when building something big, to follow a pattern.
I'm not even sure what you're talking about when you say "web apps", because the kind of "web apps" that have kept SWEs employed are created by large organizations that have large requirements. You sound like you don't know what you're talking about. Companies also aren't going to just stop growing, iterating and improving, which requires expertise. Im worth more than ever with AI, my value as a SWE has only been increasing.
You people seriously need to stop using LLMs because your brains are devolving like taxi cabs drivers who had parts of their brains responsible for navigation atrophy after the advent of GPS.
I'd say the first part is right but the second part is statistically incorrect. I would even expand from "web-apps" to just about any kind of software, especially "business software" -- very little of it was ever too difficult.
Now the following will clearly not be true for all cases, and the boundaries are very fuzzy, but generally a huge part of software development has always been the relatively straightforward translation of high-level requirements into code. Crafting the high-level requirements was typically the challenging part, but that typically was done by the more senior devs / architects, whereas the actual implementation was done by more junior / mid-level engineers. And there were typically multiple junior / mid-level devs for every senior dev, say 3:1 or more. As such, it is correct to say that the simpler aspects of software development were what kept most SWEs employed.
Now AI has completely usurped the lower-level coding work. You as an expert dev are definitely getting worth more than ever with AI, but that's because you single-handedly can now do what an entire team used to do. You may even get paid much more, but that is eventually going to be at the expense of a bunch of other people who are not required anymore.
This is why people are seeing "jobs apocalypse" written on the wall.
For the record, I hardly use these models. I've simply seen that they can replace existing web apps. That hurts the market for web devs, most orgs aren't building out large apps they are building out smallish ones and generative models do that today.
Don't go around telling people their careers are in peril when you clearly have no clue what you're talking about. What do you expect?
I work in an environment where we can vibecode 4/5 of our web apps because they are either small enough or the perf doesn't matter. Or, I've looked under the hood and these are writing endpoints that would take me 3x the amount of time it would take it to use the same libraries. You say it's divorced from reality, I'm saying it's just what I've directly observed.
I'm glad it doesn't affect you, but you don't have any kind of statistical measurement (nor do I) to know how much of the market this impacts. I do know for a lot of the web dev I did pereviously, I could do it viea these models today.