The Pragmatic Engineer

The market where nobody finds each other, the hottest market for AI-related positions, tough for engineering leaders, and more. Based on details from 50+ hiring managers & job seekers

Job market

Industry trends

Career

Gergely Orosz

Tech jobs market in 2026, part 3: hiring managers & job seekers

What is the tech jobs market like for job seekers and hiring managers today? It’s a broad question for which one answer is that it’s a land of contrasts and confusion, and also some crossed wires. Experienced engineers and managers feel ghosted by employers and recruiters, who in turn have given up on inbound applications because their inboxes are full of AI slop, sometimes from bogus candidates. It’s rosier for those with

Kent Beck reflects on Agile, TDD, and why building trust—not just generating code—will define the future of software engineering in the AI era.

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extreme programming

How Kent Beck shapes the tech industry

Kent Beck reflects on Agile, TDD, and why building trust—not just generating code—will define the future of software engineering. And why humans > computers for a successful career in tech.

How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industry

A peek into where software engineering is headed from inside the sector’s leading AI labs. Agents running in the cloud are a major trend, while coding harnesses are spreading beyond the craft

Anthropic

Cursor

OpenAI

Impressions from visiting OpenAI, Anthropic, & Cursor

Scheduling note: this week, I’m in San Francisco at the AI Engineer’s World Fair, so there won’t be an edition of The Pulse on Thursday. However, tomorrow (Wednesday) there will be a special podcast episode – the lengthiest, most detailed one yet – with software engineering legend, Kent Beck.

NeetCode shares his journey from Amazon and Google to building a startup, and why deep expertise still matters in the age of AI.

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NeetCode

Interviewing

Tech interviews with NeetCode

An overview of what’s changed in engineering during the last six months, how various tech companies are changing how they work, and why slowing down could be a sensible strategy

Uber

Google

Slow down to speed up: so much has changed in 6 months’ time

Scheduling note: there will be no edition of The Pulse on Thursday as I’m in San Francisco for the next week and a half, visiting AI labs and startups, and attending the AI Engineer World Fair from next Monday. For the podcast and Tuesday articles, it’s business as usual.

Also: a follow-up on Meta destroying its own engineering culture, the SpaceX IPO, SpaceX buys Cursor, Cursor’s GitHub competitor, and more.

Microsoft

SpaceX

Gemini

VMware

DeepSeek

The Pulse: Big implications of US banning Anthropic’s new model, Fable

The Pulse is a series covering events, insights, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Notice an interesting event or trend? Hit reply and share it with me.

Robert Erez of Octopus Deploy joins me to discuss Kubernetes, GitOps, progressive delivery, AI in CI/CD, and the evolving practices behind modern software delivery.

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Kubernetes

CI/CD

CI/CD with Robert Erez

Leadership at the social media giant has been on an AI-fueled rampage through its engineering org. We report what’s happened

Why is Meta destroying its engineering organization?

Hi – this is Gergely with a free issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover challenges at Big Tech and startups through the lens of senior engineers and engineering leaders. Subscribe to get deepdives like this in your inbox, weekly:

Anthropic’s new model, Fable, has restrictions many users find unacceptable. Also: a new trend of smart model routing, Coinbase’s core service has no automatic cross-zone failover, and more.

GitHub

Outage

Fable

Opendoor

Codex

Bending Spoons

Coinbase

Did Anthropic’s new model just boost rival Codex’s market share?

The Pulse: Did Anthropic’s new model just boost rival Codex’s market share?

Deepdive into the tech jobs market with exclusive data revealing AI labs are more attractive than Big Tech, native mobile & frontend roles are declining, management’s “great flattening”, and more

Apple

NVIDIA

Big Tech

Jessica Salmon

State of the software engineering job market in 2026, part 2

What’s going on in today’s job market? We try to answer that big question in this second part of our deepdive into the tech employment market, following Part 1 on the tech jobs market in 2026, published two weeks ago.

Kelsey Hightower reflects on his journey from self-taught technician to Google Distinguished Engineer, sharing lessons on open source, Kubernetes, AI, and building technology that serves people.

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Kubernetes and retiring at the top with Kelsey Hightower

Devs are generating twice as much code (or more) than just 6 months ago, which is a problem for quality, reliability, and tech debt. A rational fix is available for these, but who’s acting rationally?

Ideas: slow down to speed up when working with AI agents

Scheduling update: this week, there will be a podcast episode on Wednesday and no The Pulse on Thursday.