State of the software engineering job market in 2026, part 2(newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com)

Glad this was done and they shared real numbers! After 20 years in tech, I don’t think the story is simply "AI is taking jobs". The people who will do best are not necessarily the ones who know one tool or one stack perfectly. It’s the ones who can keep adapting, understand the problem, use AI well, talk to customers, and still make good judgment calls when things are messy.

Cut my PM team from 7 to 3 last quarter after we moved spec writing into a Claude/Linear loop that drafts tickets, acceptance criteria, and QA notes from a recorded stakeholder call. The remaining three of us spend maybe 40% of the week on prioritization arguments instead of doc cleanup, which is the part I actually got hired for.

entry-level reqs at my company quietly went from 0 to 2 years