Tech job openings rebound to 280,000—but coders get only 2%

Open roles at tech companies are back above 281,000, up 17% from a year ago and 73% above the March 2023 low. That’s according to the fifth tech jobs market report Lenny Rachitsky published in November, with data from TrueUp (which tracks global open roles at more than 9,000 tech companies) and Live Data Technologies (which tracks hiring, attrition, and promotions across 124 million professionals, with a U.S. sample).

The same report contains another number: open roles in the three core categories—PM, engineering, and design—rose only 2% over the past year. Design fell 28%, and UX research fell 45%.

Where did the growth go? Hardware engineering open roles doubled, supply chain rose 63%, and business ops added about 4,200 roles. Data center technicians, installers, and field service engineers—roles that require being on-site and hands-on with machines—are the fastest-growing segment.

PM Openings Are Rising, but Hiring Isn’t

There has been plenty of discussion over the past two years about AI replacing product managers. The report’s data points in the opposite direction: open PM roles are at a four-year high, up 75% from the March 2023 low and up 56% since early 2023, versus 43% for engineering over the same period. Among the five core role categories, PM is the only one whose share of hiring has risen, from 16% in 2021 to 21%.

But when you look at open roles alongside actual hiring, the story changes. Actual PM hiring has been flat or even slightly down in recent years—it has simply held up better than other core roles. Lenny’s interpretation: demand for PMs is rising, and it’s getting harder to hire good ones.

One commenter wrote that PMs have won in the AI era—a bet Lenny wasn't making.

FDE Roles Up 4.6x in a Year

For the first time in this report, engineering open roles have stalled. They rose 29% in 2024 and 15% in 2025, but only 2.5% over the past year—lower than in March of this year. The U.S. hired about 113,000 software engineers in the past 12 months, versus a 2022 peak of 239,000—less than half—and hiring has declined every year since 2022.

Within engineering, there are two bright spots. Open roles for technical recruiters are up nearly 300% from mid-2023, potentially signaling a recovery in engineering hiring. The other is FDEs (forward deployed engineers), up 4.6x in a year, with about 1,500 open roles globally. Lenny also cautions that some of this growth comes from roles like sales engineers being renamed.

Demand for mobile and front-end engineers has nearly halved over the past year. Security engineering is one of the fastest-growing specialties, ranking behind FDE. Lenny’s take: specialized, siloed engineering roles are shrinking, as AI lets small teams take on a broader scope.

Design Hits an All-Time Low

Tech companies worldwide now have about 1,900 open product design roles, down 28% year over year and the lowest since tracking began. The U.S. hired about 12,600 product designers in the past 12 months, versus 27,600 in 2022.

A more intuitive ratio: there are now 3.8 open PM roles for every open design role. Earlier this year it was 2.6, and in early 2023 it was 1.9.

UX research has fallen even harder. The U.S. hired about 1,800 user researchers in the past year, versus 5,300 in 2022—a 66% drop, the largest decline of any role. Globally, there are now only 108 open UXR roles. In 2025, Meta and Google alone accounted for about one-eighth of all U.S. user research hiring.

Lenny’s explanation is that product development cycles have sped up, compressing the time available for traditional design and research processes, and teams would rather ship earlier and iterate after launch. In addition, tools like Listen Labs and Simile let people who aren’t dedicated researchers run research themselves. He asks whether UXR is disappearing as a standalone function.

The Words in Job Descriptions Have Changed

Two years ago, the most common skills in PM job descriptions were SQL, Jira, AWS, and Python. Now LLM ranks first, Claude ranks third, and Cursor, OpenAI, and MCP are all in the top eight. SQL is still there, but it’s trending down.

On the engineering side, Python remains No. 1, and LLM has overtaken Java in job descriptions. On the design side, Claude has become the second most common skill term, ahead of CSS.

The Bay Area Is Back, Remote Is Retreating

15% of open tech roles are in the Bay Area, up 43% from a year ago. One-quarter of PM and design roles are in the Bay Area, along with one-fifth of engineering roles—all three are at record highs.

Remote roles have fallen to 14%, down from 21% at the end of 2022. Engineering is at 14%, down from 25% at the end of 2022; design is at 19%, down from 34%; PM is holding steady around 21%. At some point last year, the number of Bay Area PM, engineering, and design roles surpassed global remote roles—four years earlier, it was the opposite, with remote leading by nearly 2 to 1.

Money Flows to the Data Center, and Jobs Follow

Put it all together, and the conclusion is uncomfortable: AI really is creating jobs—in chips, data centers, power, and field service. Writing code has gotten cheaper; making machines run has not.

One comment put it more bluntly: among those 281,000 open roles, there are almost none of the jobs people spend four years training for. The market is hiring people who can stand next to the customer and get things running—the titles just haven’t caught up.

The original report is in Lenny's Newsletter, behind a paywall.