Lenny's Newsletter: PM Openings Up 75% as Engineer Hiring Halves

"PMs seem to be winning in the AI era."

That is how Lenny Rachitsky opens his late-2026 state of the tech job market, posted November 10. Pulling from TrueUp and Live Data Technologies, which between them cover more than 9,000 companies and 124 million US professionals, the report lays out a hiring pattern that has quietly inverted.

"There are more open PM roles than at any point in nearly four years, up 75% from the March 2023 low," Rachitsky writes. PM hiring share rose from 16% in 2021 to 21% in 2026. The ratio of open PM roles to open design roles now sits at 3.8 to 1, up from 1.9 in early 2023.

Engineering is the mirror image. "For the first time in the history of this report, engineering job openings have stalled," Rachitsky writes, with growth of just 2.5% in the past year. US software-engineer hiring came in at roughly 113,000 between May 2025 and April 2026, less than half the 239,000 hired in 2022. Mobile and front-end specialist demand has halved year on year. Forward-deployed engineer postings, by contrast, are up 4.6x, with about 1,500 roles open globally.

Design and user research look worse. Open product design roles have fallen to roughly 1,900 globally, the lowest on record and down 28% year on year. US user researcher hires came in at 1,800 over the past year, against 5,300 in 2022. Open UXR jobs globally: 108.

One line from the skills breakdown does most of the work: "Today, 'LLM' is the most mentioned skill in product manager job descriptions." Claude ranks third on the PM list and second on the designer list, having surpassed CSS. Python remains the top engineering skill. The report's read on why PM openings are growing while hires are not: "there's growing demand for PMs, but that landing great PMs is getting harder." It is the latest in a steady run of jobs-market signals we've tracked this quarter pointing to AI reshaping the hiring mix.