It Is 2026
And the change did not look like a collapse.
There was no announcement.
No dramatic email.
No official moment.
What happened instead was quieter.
Teams got smaller.
Backfills were delayed.
Hiring plans were rewritten and never restored.
When people left, many roles simply vanished.
That is how most tech jobs disappeared.
The Roles That Stopped Coming Back
Entry-Level Developers With Narrow Scope
There used to be roles focused almost entirely on:
- Wiring forms
- Connecting APIs
- Moving data between systems
By 2026, that work is rarely a full job.
Internal tools are scaffolded quickly.
Senior engineers review the output.
The work ships.
Junior engineers still exist.
But the expectation changed.
Ownership starts earlier now.
System awareness matters sooner.
The buffer roles are gone.
Manual QA as a Standalone Role
There was a time when regression testing meant clicking through the same flows every release.
That era ended quietly.
Most teams rely on automated pipelines that generate and adapt tests continuously.
Manual testing still happens.
But it is focused.
Strategic.
Often owned by senior QA or engineers.
Purely manual testing roles stopped being rehired.
SEO-Driven Content Roles
Content did not disappear.
Discovery did.
Search engines now summarize aggressively.
Direct answers replace long lists of links.
Roles built entirely around keyword tuning faded out.
Writing still matters.
Authority still matters.
Trust still matters.
Gaming search mechanics does not.
Tier-One IT Support
Password resets.
Access requests.
Environment setup.
Basic troubleshooting.
Most of this is now automated or self-service.
Human IT support still exists for complex issues.
But the large entry-level support layer is much smaller than it used to be.
Most companies never rebuilt it.
The Roles That Never Really Left
Engineers Who Understand Systems
People who understand failure remain essential.
Infrastructure engineers.
Platform engineers.
Reliability-focused engineers.
AI can generate code.
It does not reason about:
- Cascading failures
- Tradeoffs under pressure
- Long-term operational risk
When systems break at scale, humans are still called.
Security Roles
Security did not shrink.
It expanded.
More automation created more surface area.
More integration increased risk.
Faster releases made mistakes expensive.
Threat modeling, incident response, and adversarial thinking remain human-heavy work.
Engineers Who Think in Product Terms
Smaller teams leave less room for waste.
Engineers who understand users, impact, and unintended consequences gained influence.
In 2026:
Writing code is expected.
Knowing when not to ship matters just as much.
Data Roles Focused on Meaning
Models are everywhere now.
Interpretation is not.
People who can explain uncertainty, bias, and tradeoffs remain trusted voices.
Charts do not make decisions.
People do.
Roles Centered on Clarity
Technical writers.
Developer advocates.
UX researchers.
Accessibility specialists.
As systems grew more complex, confusion became expensive.
Clear explanations still save time, money, and trust.
The Pattern Became Obvious
The roles that faded shared the same traits:
- Repetitive
- Predictable
- Far removed from consequences
The roles that survived stayed close to:
- Decisions
- Risk
- Accountability
That pattern is clear in 2026.
What This Year Made Clear
Job titles did not protect anyone.
Proximity to impact did.
The closer your work is to outcomes and responsibility, the harder it is to remove.
That lesson did not arrive as a headline.
It arrived as silence on the job boards.
Top comments (10)
A very good article and resonates well. Few thoughts below-
Tier-One IT Support - I have been seeing this since 2017, front line IT support got reduced :-(
More integration increased risk. - this has always been the case, even in pre-2000s when CORBA or COM were used or RPC or disconnected like file transfers (note APIs/web services were not prevalent, only SOAP largely was there with some use).. but surely stakes are higher now
Faster releases made mistakes expensive. - yes, velocity has been often being used as an incorrect metric (under the umbrella of DORA), and it comes down to the engineers to push back on unnecessary frequency, frankly. Just because big tech does it, does not mean it is suitable for everyone else, there is no one one size fits all solution - and this aligns with another of your point on 'Knowing when not to ship matters just as much.' :)
That pattern is clear in 2026. - actually I am seeing this pattern since quite some time, it has only got accelerated and gained visibility due to social media, more forums and increased internet user base
(I talk about pattern in my article here, in case interested - dev.to/shitij_bhatnagar_b6d1be72/d...)
Thanks for writing.
This is a thoughtful way to talk about job shifts without blaming technology or workers.
This resonates with what many teams experienced but never formally acknowledged.
This really captures the quiet way tech changed instead of the dramatic collapse people expected.
The focus on outcomes over output really stands out here.
Overall this feels constructive, realistic, and encouraging at the same time.
It’s painful to watch opportunities narrow for the junior generation, yet there’s a quiet sense of relief for those who endured the uncertainty of the early years and came out the other side.
agree with your thoughts, thanks for sharing, though I believe junior generation needs to do a few things differently now, I tried to share in my article here (in case interested to read) - dev.to/shitij_bhatnagar_b6d1be72/d...
I appreciate how this focuses on responsibility and impact rather than fear about AI.
The point about roles disappearing through silence feels very real and well explained.