AI was going to eliminate all jobs, but… will it?

The developer market is recovering. But it will not recover to what it was. Some thoughts on seniors, AI-native generalists, and why the "measurers" should be more nervous than the coders.

About eighteen months of newspaper articles, podcasts and post like this one, telling us the developers were finished, and every other knowledge worker right behind them. So, we looked at what's actually happening in our market, and the real story is more interesting than the headline.

Hiring is picking up. Not everywhere, not for everyone, but our clients are searching for developers again. The Polish market published around 44% more IT job offers in 2025 than the year before, going by No Fluff Jobs' annual report, with demand for experienced people running high. In the US, tech job postings hit a three-year high by April 2026 after months of steady growth, and CompTIA expects net tech employment to rise this year after it slipped in 2025. The jobs didn't disappear, but they changed shape while we were arguing about whether they would exist.

Changing shape

A year ago a client would hand us a stack: React, Node, Postgres, AWS, five years minimum on each. Now the ask reads differently. A senior developer who can think, owns a problem end to end, and uses whatever AI tool to get the work done. Claude, Codex, GLM, take your pick. The specific stack slid down the list. They assume a strong engineer picks up the framework with AI in a (few) week(s), because that's now true.

The front-end / back-end / full-stack split is going the same way. In the Polish market the combined backend-frontend-fullstack category is down to roughly a third of postings, from more than half a few years back. Clients are hardly asking us for a "front-end developer", they're asking for a developer. And the ones they want most are often former back-end people, the ones who understand systems, business logic and what happens under load. They now cover the front end too because AI closed the gap that used to need a second specialist.

AI didn't replace the developer there (yet), but it quietly folded two roles into one.

Where we think it goes next

Our five cents, not facts. We expect to keep hiring seniors until that pool runs dry. There are only so many genuinely senior engineers, and everyone is chasing the same ones. When it does, we go back to hiring mediors, because a strong mid-level developer with good AI tooling and a senior reviewing the work is a perfectly good answer.

The juniors are the hard case. Not because they aren't talented. The numbers are just brutal: new-grad hiring at big tech is down more than half since 2019, and fresh grads are about 7% of hires. The bottleneck moved from writing code to reviewing and judging it, and a junior adds to the review pile instead of the output. Fix that and the door reopens. Right now it's mostly shut.

Builders, sellers, and measurers

The frame that stuck with me came from Matthew Prince, Cloudflare's CEO, in his WSJ op-ed. Cloudflare posted record revenue and then cut about 20% of staff, and Prince used the moment to sort every company into three kinds of work: builders who make the product, sellers who close the deals, and measurers who track and control it all. The vast majority of the people he let go were measurers, his word for middle management, finance, legal, internal audit, and revenue recognition.

Ok, he reached for Peter Drucker to dress it up, and that part doesn't quite seem to hold. Drucker wrote about measuring in 1954 as something a good manager does to develop people, not a class of workers to delete. The three-bucket split is Prince's, not Drucker's. But strip the borrowed authority away and the observation still lands.

Because AI is genuinely good at measuring. It watches everything, never sleeps, never plays politics. So the layer of people whose job was to count, check, and report up the chain is the layer under the most pressure. The builders and the sellers, the people who make the thing and the people who get someone to pay for it, are the ones he wants more of.

It maps almost exactly onto what we see in engineering. The developer who builds is in demand. The reporting layer around them is thinning out. If a good chunk of your job was producing status updates and oversight that an AI can now generate on its own, that's the job to worry about. Not the one writing the code. Anyone recently seen a Scrum Master, btw?

Your turn

I'm describing what we see from Krakow, placing senior Polish engineers into US and European teams. Your view from where you sit might be completely different, and I'd genuinely like to hear it.

So tell me:

• Are you also hiring seniors-only right now, or have you found a way to make juniors pay off again?
• In your shop, is the front-end / back-end / full-stack distinction dead, or alive and well?
• And Prince's bet: which roles do you think AI actually eats first, the measurers or someone else?

Drop it in the comments. Happy to read and respond!