A Difficult Tech Job Market + 2026 Predictions
2025 really kicked us out the door from a tech job market perspective.
Between really quick advancements in AI, a very strange economy and tech companies doubling down on profits and AI Agents, being a tech worker kind of sucked for the last few months.
So where does that leave tech workers coming in to 2026?
Here are my predictions:
The tech market will bounce back, at least a little.
Companies doubled down hard on AI last year and used “AI” as a way to lay people off, but end of year lay offs have been happening in tech for many many years, AI was just the flavor of the quarter in 2025. And I should point out, I’m a big believer in AI, it’s changing a lot about how I work in some really cool ways, but I think lots of founders had big visions of how it would allow them to automate everything and that just didn’t happen, at least not last year.
So I think tech will hire more, but probably not as much as in previous years.
AI isn’t taking your job, but someone fluent with AI might take it
While I do think there will be more hiring in 2026, I think teams are trending towards flatter and leaner empowered by AI to do more. And I get it, as a product manager I can use AI to write code, query databases, research and more. It doesn’t solve all my problems right now, but it does allow me to operate faster across a wider breadth than ever before, so while I think companies will hire, I think AI is a requirement, in fact in every single interview I’ve had recently hiring managers and teams are asking me how I’m using AI in my work. Thankfully I have good answers, but I can imagine that if someone walked in and said they don’t like AI or aren’t on the hype train, that person might struggle to land a gig.
The product management career will have a serious change in scope
I can really only speak to the product and growth sides of things, but from what I can see, engineering and design are not the bottlenecks anymore, thanks to AI, good ideas and planning are. I think we’ll see a switch from 1 PM and 2-10 Eng per squad to 0.5 PMs to 1-2 Eng. I think there will need to be a change to a business focus, more of a general manager mentality. Products and features being built can happen in record time, so the thinking and ensuring user experience is the real bottleneck.
Engineering roles will change dramatically
Though I’m not an engineer, if I were a new or junior software engineer just getting into the game, I would start to feel nervous and would want to ramp up quick. AI is changing engineering in some serious ways that can’t be denied anymore. With Opus 4.5 I’m building fast a full web app that I plan to launch this year. Writing code isn’t the crucial skill anymore, but understanding how to architect systems and build for security are things that I still need. I imagine engineers will change their work to write less code, review a lot more AI written code and have to master a new abstraction layer that doesn’t require writing everything yourself, but requires understanding systems and integrations and security in a new deeper way.
What are your thoughts? What are your predictions for 2026? Is AI taking all our jobs? Or just a passing fad?