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Where does the IT job market really need people in 2026? Job analysis from Hacker News

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  • IT engineer surrounded by cloud, data network and AI visualizations
    The IT job market is undergoing one of the most interesting transformations of recent years. What matters today is not trendy technologies, but the ability to deploy to production and maintain a working application. Let's analyse the job offers from Hacker News February 2026 with the GPT5.2 language model.


    1. Highest demand: production engineers, not 'demo' engineers.

    * Senior Backend Engineer
    * Platform / Infrastructure Engineer
    * SRE / DevOps
    * Data Engineer
    * AI Engineer (production)

    Companies are massively looking for people who:

    can maintain a system 24/7,
    understand scale, reliability and cost,
    know what breaks in the real world, not just in tutorials.

    Conclusion: juniors are plentiful, but there is a shortage of people who have already broken something and know how to fix it.


    2. AI? Yes - but only practical implementations and not pretty 'demos'

    * LLM / AI Platform Engineers
    * ML Engineers implementing models into production
    * AI Ops / LLM Ops
    * Engineers for agents and process automation

    The biggest problem for companies today is not how to build a model, but:

    * how to monitor hallucinations,
    * how to test AI regressions,
    * how to maintain costs and stability.

    3. Infrastructure, infrastructure and infrastructure, preferably paid for

    * Kubernetes
    * Cloud + bare metal
    * GPU, networking, storage
    * Rust, Go, C++, Python (but systemic)
    * Observability, SLO, incident response

    Again, companies need people who understand what's going on underneath.
    This is the most difficult path, but with the highest stakes.

    4. Industries that recruit the fastest

    Highest demand:

    * LegalTech & GovTech (courts, compliance, regulation)
    * Healthcare & Insurance
    * FinTech (back-office, settlement, risk)
    * Logistics & supply chain
    * Industry, energy, materials, R&D

    5. Fullstack? But not as before.

    Today a fullstack is a person who:

    * understands the backend, database and frontend,
    * can independently prove the function to production,
    * thinks productively, not just technically.

    This includes:
    * data models,
    * migrations,
    * performance,
    * monitoring,
    * UX in the context of business.


    6. So where is it worth developing in 2026?
    * Backend: Go, Python, TypeScript, Java
    * Systems: Linux, networking, concurrency
    * Data: PostgreSQL (advanced), SQL, pipelines
    * AI: LLMs + evals + deployment
    * Infra: Kubernetes, Terraformes, observability
    * Soft skills: ownership, communication, systems thinking

    Forgetting:

    * frontend "UI only",
    * cloud certifications alone without practice,
    * learning AI without understanding data and systems.


    Companies are increasingly asking:
    "Will this person be able to independently prove the system, not just write code?"
    Therefore, the most valued engineers today are those who:
    * take responsibility,
    * understand the product,
    * are able to make technical decisions under uncertainty.


    The best chances are for people who:
    * go deeper than the tutorial or AI answers
    * learn systems, not just frameworks,
    * choose difficult but real production problems.

    Source, global job listings Hacker News February 2026
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46857488

    My comment:
    Generally to me the job market looks very tough. Incredibly high technology requirements and requiring 100 years of experience, basically having little to do with what was going on 5 years ago (simple programming or simple cloud solutions). It's as if someone has turned the job market maybe not 180 degrees, but at least 90. If you can't find a job in IT, don't worry, it's not your fault, it's the market that has turned. It's as if you have to learn most of it all over again, plus you have nothing to learn from, because most of the things companies require come from experience with production products preferably 'enterprise' style or infrastructure, how are you supposed to get that experience? This is where AI won't help, because it hasn't been trained on real business problems (which are often company secrets). At the same time, they will not hire you to get the required experience because they are looking for someone with a lot of experience. A vicious circle from which it is impossible to break out.

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    About Author
    gulson
    System Administrator  
    Offline 
    gulson wrote 29039 posts with rating 5918, helped 148 times. Live in city Kielce. Been with us since 2001 year.
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  • #2 21827984
    p.kaczmarek2
    Moderator Smart Home  
    I have very similar experiences. Bootcampers and juniors don't stand a chance. And this "requiring 100 years of experience" is not a silly invention - nowadays anyone can promote intermediate programs and tools, you don't need a junior to do it, only at a price is someone who can do more than the typical AI beginner. Of course, AI isn't the only culprit here, we've also had a return to normality after the Covidian hires, but I think undoubtedly AI has a part to play here too.
    Helpful post? Buy me a coffee.
  • #3 21827990
    gulson
    System Administrator  
    100 years' experience ok, just to let them get it. At the moment this is not likely to happen. AI is making society even more stratified. There will be infrastructure elites earning hundreds of thousands and the ordinary programmer will be on unemployment.

    It's well known that they've turned the tap on cheap money, but still, there are plenty of job offers, just completely incompatible with what we've been taught.

    A doctor, once he learns the structure of the human body, has peace of mind.

    Added after 12 [minutes]:

    By the way:
    "India gives 20 years of tax breaks. They want to attract tech giants"
    We will end up working in India, they will move everything there, currently all of Kraków is being moved to India.
    In our country, meanwhile, a digital tax is coming soon.
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  • #4 21828001
    p.kaczmarek2
    Moderator Smart Home  
    And now you've raised a separate problem - if there's no work for juniors, there's no way to educate future seniors, that's a fact. But in my opinion, it's even worse - the process is already broken at the early learning stage, vibe-coding is pushed everywhere by force, especially as it gives much better and faster results in the short run - a bigger dose of dopamine - so the young programmers being educated can't even program or there debug without AI. And I'm not talking about the language itself or the tools - they don't know the methodology of thinking and acting in general.
    Helpful post? Buy me a coffee.
  • #5 21828008
    gulson
    System Administrator  
    p.kaczmarek2 wrote:
    vibe-coding, especially since it gives much better and faster results in the short run - a bigger dose of dopamine - so the young programmers being educated can't even program or there debug without AI.

    OK this is the trend and it should not be fought. Hardly, it will get worse. Then what remains is understanding what is going on underneath, learning why the model behaved this way and not that way. Why it wrote the code that way and what it depended on. How to influence others to write the code. How the code would work in production. How to optimise code in production using AI. How to secure code on production using AI. How to run the code on infrastructure or the cloud at all. What the performance of the code depends on - again, what happens underneath. How to monitor written code using AI. How to debug code using AI.

    There is no point in currently learning to program or debug without AI.

    And so are the job offers above....
    I haven't noticed job offers for a regular programmer who takes care of e.g. a small plot and slowly pokes around and the front end and front end frameworks have totally died out.
    Momentarily in 2 years there are other job offers.
  • #6 21832496
    gulson
    System Administrator  
    Meanwhile, in parallel:
    US jobs in January are disappearing at the fastest rate since the Great Recession.

    It looks like it's not just the IT situation.
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  • #7 21832520
    p.kaczmarek2
    Moderator Smart Home  
    Hacker News juniors celebrate mourning?
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46926245
    I'm most curious about the people who started those 3 years ago studying AI. It must be an experience, seeing ChatGPT first come in and then watching AI get better and better as they progress through their studies.

    As for the earlier discussion - I didn't mean to suggest leaving AI at all, I'm more trying to point out that AI in beginners breeds bad habits and makes it difficult to develop correct thinking, because humans are inherently lazy and it's easier to pester AI to no effect with stupid "Fix this pls" prompts until it fixes the bug (while wasting a ton of time and making a mess in codebase) than to think once and head-debug and then give a targeted prompt which solves the problem.

    In my opinion, AI definitely destroys the value of juniors in the market, but at the same time it even increases the value of a person who has a lot of experience and knows the whole development process - anyway, just like in the first post.

    PS: I have already seen such "IT horror stories" on the internet, to put it jokingly, that a junior normally works in a company, but when there is a code review and someone asks him e.g. why AI checks if any value is null, he can't answer and basically doesn't even know what is going on there in the system. This is hardly the way to a reliable product, and at the same time it shows why the value of juniors is declining.
    Helpful post? Buy me a coffee.
  • #8 21833218
    gulson
    System Administrator  
    The worst off are young people who, for example, have just finished learning 'programming' and here is a complete change.
    Probably the best are people from: infrastructure, DevOps, embedded programmers also not replaceable for now.
    In general, everyone who can deploy to production, monitor, fix problems in applications, optimise.
    The whole of security is also doing quite well, as AI has caused a lot of threats.
  • #9 21834173
    clubber84
    Level 38  
    Hello,
    gulson wrote:
    The worst off are the young, who for example have just finished learning "programming" and here is a complete change.
    People from: infrastructure, DevOps, embedded programmers are probably the best to come out of it for now too.

    and this is where the cyber security industry falls all over the place - anyone who didn't sleep through lectures and exercises on discrete mathematics and network architecture at university now has their hands full (and pretty much empty bank accounts).

    Regards
  • #11 21835367
    dekoder1980
    Level 11  
    After all, coding and programming can be learned on one's own, and requiring people to have a university degree, where in Western European countries, it is enough to have skills and no one requires any industry-specific certificates or permits worth anything.
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  • #12 21835454
    clubber84
    Level 38  
    Hello,
    dekoder1980 wrote:
    where in Western European countries it is enough to have skills

    if such a colleague is wise, please show here some job offers for specialist positions in IT from Western Europe, where only "skills" are enough?
    Because here only specialists are referred to, not "Mr IT Peter", in the position of admin for everything and nothing, employed in an office in the municipality of Pipidówa Wielka.

    Greetings
  • #13 21835791
    gulson
    System Administrator  
    There is no point in learning to program at the moment, in the sense of writing code from scratch.
    In general, Musk has just written that the next stage will be AI creating binaries for itself.
    Basically, as if to think, why would AI need natural language processing, just to talk to creatures like humans?
  • #14 21835804
    OPservator
    Level 39  
    gulson wrote:
    Basically, as if to think, why would AI process natural language, just to talk to creatures like humans?

    It is worth knowing the language of the enemy, they learn from our history ;)

    Added after 7 [minutes]:

    p.kaczmarek2 wrote:
    if there are no jobs for juniors, then there is no way to educate future seniors

    Yes, but no. By the time juniors become seniors, AI will already be at senior level.
    A colleague is a FullStack, and even he says that the number of jobs has dropped terribly for him, and that when something does come in, it's usually much more complicated than usual - the effect is that he's working the same amount but for fewer clients, and the cash is similar or minimally less - but he himself points out that he probably needs to start learning the woodwork, because if AI continues to grow like this, he's going to lose his livelihood before long.
    gulson wrote:
    I haven't noticed any job offers for a regular programmer, who takes care of e.g. a small plot and slowly pokes around, and the front end and front end frameworks have totally died out.

    GameDev are still putting a hard foot down, but I think they will bow out too - Rockstar have announced that no generative AI was used on GTA 6 - well, because you know, vehicle movement, NPCs etc are still AI in a sense ;)
  • #15 21835821
    p.kaczmarek2
    Moderator Smart Home  
    OPservator wrote:

    GameDev are still putting up a hard fight, but I think they'll give in too - Rockstar announced that no generative AI was used on GTA 6 - well, you know, vehicle movement, NPCs etc are still AI in a sense ;)

    And Project Genie? Shares of gamedev companies fell again after the latest presentation
    Helpful post? Buy me a coffee.
  • #16 21835825
    OPservator
    Level 39  
    p.kaczmarek2 wrote:
    project Genie

    And who is the developer? The GameDev studio, or the mega-corporation Google? :D
    I prefer a buggy game made by people with heart, rather than quick patches from AI - this is beautifully evident with the storylines of some games - Kingdom Come Deliverance, for example - which was supposed to be a kickstarter hobby project, and nearly won GOTY in 2025 - and let me remind you that this is a small Czech studio, not a moloch like Techland (acquired by Tencent) or CD Project RED.
  • #17 21837224
    dekoder1980
    Level 11  
    It is no coincidence that since 1989, 90 per cent of post-secondary schools in electrical and electronic engineering, as well as vocational schools and technical schools, have been closed down, and the Aeronautical Engineering Research Establishments at the Communication Equipment Works (WUT), which is the base for medium-sized maintenance staff, have no idea what IT is.
  • #18 21837328
    p.kaczmarek2
    Moderator Smart Home  
    OPservator wrote:

    And who is the developer? The GameDev studio, or the mega-corporation Google? :D

    But rather than the vast majority of gamers looking at this? Are you suggesting the rise of "kraft games", in the sense, handmade? My fear is that the market will decide what pays off, and as the development of artificial intelligence progresses, however, fully handcrafted digital products will cease to pay off.

    By the way, here I also see a large scope for abuse, some entity may declare that something was created without AI, when in fact AI was used. Already this problem is with artists.... there are even subreddits in the style of "is this ai" where you can ask, for example, about graphics
    Helpful post? Buy me a coffee.
  • #19 21837355
    OPservator
    Level 39  
    p.kaczmarek2 wrote:
    But not likely to be looked at by the vast majority of players?

    Children? Probably not. Adult gamers? Oh you'd be surprised how much of a rebuke there is among us against any AI interference in games.... But yes, the final giants will succumb to AI pretty quickly.
  • #21 21845177
    Mocny Amper
    Level 11  
    I have exactly the same thoughts as the founder of this thread. I've had 19 years behind the keyboard, and in all that time I've felt like I've only had 3 years of experience at most - it's all got so fucked up that going back further than 3 years didn't make sense - the older stuff was already useless, it didn't count. Every day I find out that a programmer is like an athlete, he finishes his career by 40, and either goes into management, or takes up chicken farming, or is dead.
  • #22 21845426
    kjoxa
    Level 23  
    Mocny Amper wrote:
    I have exactly the same thoughts as the founder of this thread. I've had 19 years behind the keyboard, and in all that time I've felt like I've only had 3 years experience at most - it's all got so fucked up that going back further than 3 years didn't make sense - the older stuff was already useless, it didn't count. Every day I convince myself that a programmer is like an athlete, he finishes his career by 40, and either goes into management, or takes up chicken farming, or he's dead.


    If you don't have a DevOps background to be a programmer, then it is indeed as you say, but partially.

    Legacy code and its maintenance, upgrades (e.g. from ASP.NET MVC to .NET Core) of technologies, are also part of a developer's job and here experience is valuable.

    These days are such change-saturated times that it's worth doing what you can do as well as you can (kowtowing to half the day) and then being physically active - walking, cycling, pool, gym - who has/who likes what. This will keep your mind and body in good shape, ready for the challenges in our dynamic reality.
  • #23 21845501
    gulson
    System Administrator  
    kjoxa wrote:
    Legacy code and its maintenance, upgrades (e.g. from ASP.NET MVC to .NET Core) of technologies, is also part of a programmer's job and here experience is valuable.

    Now even Legacy code and especially Upgrade will do a language model with agents.
    In fact Upgrade is the ones they like best because they already have one code to rewrite for another, they read the old code like documentation and recreate it.
    Yesterday claude code security came out for scanning code and applications for security.
    Aaaa... all this nonsense. I'm so old >40 now that I can't learn that fast.
    I thought I'd make it to 60 like this.
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