Tech Is Hiring Again, but Openings for Website and Phone App Coders Fell Nearly in Half

If your kid is learning to code so he can build websites or phone apps, this one is for you.

Job openings for front-end engineers, the people who build the parts of websites you click on, fell 51 percent in the past year. Openings for iPhone and Android app engineers fell 46 percent. Those numbers come from the newest State of the Tech Job Market report by Lenny Rachitsky, a former Airbnb product lead who now runs one of the most-read newsletters in Silicon Valley. He put it out Nov. 10 and spent Wednesday walking people through it on 𝕏.

Here’s the strange part. The tech industry overall is hiring more, not less.

Rachitsky counts more than 281,000 open roles at tech companies right now. That’s up 17 percent from a year ago and up 73 percent from the low point in March 2023. But open jobs for the three classic software roles, product managers, engineers and designers, grew only about 2 percent combined. The growth is happening somewhere else.

Where the numbers come from

Rachitsky leans on two data sets. The first is from TrueUp, a company that tracks open job listings at more than 9,000 tech companies around the world. The second is from Live Data Technologies, which follows job changes for 124 million working people and reports actual hires in the U.S. One measures who companies say they want. The other measures who they actually bring on. He pointed out on 𝕏 that none of it comes from a survey. It is listings and hiring records.

The two sets of numbers don’t always agree, and that gap is part of the story. Engineering openings are up 44 percent since January 2024, but actual engineering hires are down 17 percent over that same stretch. Companies are posting jobs and then being pickier about who they hire.

The coding boom has stalled

This is the first time in five of these reports that engineering demand has flatlined. Open engineering roles grew 29 percent through 2024 and 15 percent through 2025. This past year, they grew 2.5 percent. There are fewer open engineering roles at tech companies today than there were in March.

Hiring tells the same story. U.S. companies hired about 113,000 software engineers between May 2025 and April 2026. At the 2022 peak, it was 239,000. The number has dropped every year since.

Engineering is still the biggest tech job by far, with more than 65,000 openings. But the kind of engineer companies want is changing fast. Rachitsky’s theory is that small teams armed with SI tools can now cover ground that used to take separate specialists, so the one-skill jobs go first. “I think the story here is the collapse of specialized/siloed engineering disciplines, with smaller eng teams having broader ownership (thanks to AI),” he wrote.

That is his read, not a proven cause. But the job descriptions back up the direction. Two years ago, the skills most often listed in product manager postings were old standbys like SQL, Jira and Python. Now the No. 1 skill is “LLM,” the large language models behind chatbots. “Claude,” the name of Anthropic’s chatbot, is the third most mentioned term. For engineers, “LLM” just passed Java.

The winners and the losers

Rachitsky boiled the shifts down in a short list on 𝕏. On the way down: front-end engineers, mobile app engineers, user researchers (down 45 percent) and product designers (down 28 percent, a record low). On the way up: forward deployed engineers, hardware engineers (doubled) and SI engineers (up 46 percent).

A forward deployed engineer is someone who goes out to a customer and makes the software actually work in that business. Palantir made the job famous. A few years ago there were only a few dozen of these openings anywhere. Now there are about 1,500, up 4.6 times in a year. Rachitsky admits some of that is old “sales engineer” jobs getting a new name. Either way, companies are paying people to sit with customers and make the SI work.

Product managers, the people who decide what gets built, are the surprise winners. Plenty of people predicted SI would wipe them out. Instead, PM openings are at their highest in nearly four years, up 75 percent from the 2023 low. They now make up 21 percent of hiring among the core roles, up from 16 percent in 2021.

Designers are getting hit hard. There are only about 1,900 open product design jobs at tech companies worldwide, and U.S. companies hired about 12,600 designers last year, less than half the 27,600 they hired in 2022. User research got hit worst of all. About 1,800 researchers were hired in the U.S. last year, down 66 percent from 2022, and only 108 such jobs are open right now worldwide.

Bad news for working from home

If you were hoping to land a tech job and work from your kitchen table, the door is closing. Only 14 percent of open tech roles offer a remote option, the lowest on record, down from 21 percent in late 2022. Meanwhile, 15 percent of all open tech roles are now in the San Francisco Bay Area, a record, and Bay Area openings are up 43 percent from a year ago. One in four open product manager and design jobs is there.

There is now more open product, engineering and design work in the Bay Area alone than in remote roles across the entire world. Four years ago, it was almost two to one the other way.

There is one bright spot for people who code. Open recruiter jobs at tech companies are at record highs, up nearly 300 percent since mid-2023. Recruiters get hired before the people they recruit, so Rachitsky is watching to see whether engineering hiring picks back up.

The advice he gave on 𝕏 to one engineer was simple: get more general, or get into one of the few specialties that are booming, like security or SI engineering. For the teenager learning to code this year, the lesson is the same. Learning to build a website is no longer enough. Learning to use SI to build the whole thing, and to explain it to the customer, might be.