Enroll now
Batch status
← All posts

What Got Developers Hired in 2020 vs 2026

In 2020, knowing the framework and closing your tickets on time got you hired. In 2026, product companies hire for the parts AI can’t own: knowing why a system is slow, owning the decisions in it, defending a system you built, and reviewing the code AI writes for you.

Here’s how I put it in my letter to developers:

Five years ago, the industry paid people to write code. If you knew the framework and closed your tickets on time, you had a career. AI writes that code now, so it’s getting cheaper every year.

Companies don’t pay a premium for something that keeps getting cheaper, so they pay for what’s still scarce. For a developer with 2 to 8 years at a service company, that shows up as four shifts.

From knowing the framework to knowing why it’s slow

In 2020 a résumé that said Spring Boot, Angular and Hibernate told a recruiter you could build things. Today any AI assistant knows those frameworks well enough to write the controller, the repository and the tests in a minute.

It can’t look at your production service, with your data and your traffic, and tell you why the orders API slows down at month-end. That takes someone who knows what an index does, what an N+1 looks like in the logs and what the service’s p95 latency is.

If you can’t tell 50 µs from 5 minutes, start with The Latency Game. It takes three minutes and shows you where your instincts are.

From closing tickets on time to owning the decision

Here’s a line from the résumé on my homepage:

Resolved 2,000+ tickets across 3 client projects

Two thousand tickets is a lot of work. It also tells an interviewer that someone else decided what each of those tickets should say, and well-specified work is exactly what AI does best. I wrote about that in Will AI Take My Job? A 2-Minute Test for Developers.

Here’s the same line, rewritten in red pen:

Designed the orders schema and indexes for 1M users

It’s a single decision you made and can explain, and it tells an interviewer more than the two thousand tickets did.

From years on the résumé to systems you can defend

Five years of experience used to be a strong signal on its own. Today the question that matters is the one I wrote in red pen on that same résumé: “Which system did you design?”

Your years count for what you can walk an interviewer through. “Maintained legacy Java modules for the payments team” says you were there. “Shipped API v2 without breaking a single client” says you made something hard happen, and that’s the line the interviewer will ask you about.

If you’ve been at a service company for a long time, I wrote about what your years are worth in Is It Too Late to Switch to a Product Company at 8 Years?

From writing the code to reviewing the code AI writes

In 2020 your output was the code you wrote. In 2026 an AI suggests a lot of the code in your pull request, and your job is to decide which of it is safe to ship. That means spotting the missing index, the email sent inside the request and the query that runs once per row, in code you didn’t write. Try the Accept simulator on my homepage to see how easy they are to miss.

Whoever approves that code owns it when it breaks. I wrote a short note about that: Who Owns AI-Written Code When It Breaks?

Which year is your résumé from?

Ask yourself one question for each shift:

  1. Can you explain why the slowest endpoint in your service is slow?
  2. Can you name one design decision you made yourself in the last year?
  3. Is there one system you could walk an interviewer through for twenty minutes?
  4. When you accepted AI code last week, did you read every line?

Every “no” is a part of your résumé that still reads like 2020. If your project doesn’t give you the problems to change that, I wrote about where to find them in No Learning in a Service Company? Where to Find Hard Problems.

The quickest place to start is the 1 Million Row Challenge: a slow Postgres query in your browser and five minutes to fix it. If you want the whole path, with a backend for a million users and my red pen on every submission, that’s Vyson.

Become the engineer who decides what gets accepted.