ACM CareerNews for Tuesday, December 16, 2025
ACM CareerNews is intended as an objective career news digest for busy IT professionals. Views expressed are not necessarily those of ACM. To send comments, please write to [email protected]
Volume 21, Issue 24, December 16, 2025
Best Places to Work in IT 2026
Computerworld, December 9
Computerworld’s 2026 Best Places to Work in IT survey highlights the top 100 tech employers that are going above and beyond to hire and then retain members of their IT workforce. In a survey of large, midsize, and small organizations, these companies stood out as the most desirable places to work. Amidst the upheaval caused by AI, these organizations are prioritizing a people-first approach. Although there are clear signs of contraction in terms of overall IT hiring, the companies ranked most highly in the survey emphasize community, culture, and talent development to keep IT professionals engaged in the workplace.
The good news is that IT hiring remains up, and organizations are moving ahead with annual raises and promotions. Most companies are investing heavily in training initiatives for IT staff, much of it centered on AI. Instead of using AI and automation as a reason to replace IT workers, firms are building processes that keep humans in the loop for oversight and problem-solving while actively retooling IT skill sets for the new paradigm. At the same time, companies are recruiting and nurturing highly specialized talent and resources to fill in-demand skill gaps in areas such as AI, cybersecurity, and systems architecture.
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Demand for AI Expertise Grows as IT Job Postings Fall
Dice Insights, December 2
While overall IT hiring may be down, demand for AI skills continues to drive the tech hiring market. New labor data shows employers are pulling back on broad tech hiring while concentrating heavily on candidates with AI expertise. This shift is redefining which roles get approved and which stay unfilled. Tech job listings requiring AI capabilities have climbed sharply and now appear in more than half of all U.S. tech openings.Hiring for dedicated AI job titles is on the rise in major IT job markets, including Silicon Valley and New York City.
At the top end, companies are hiring aggressively for talent that can move the AI needle. One emerging view in tech is that AI is helping to increase the quality of what must be done. For example, this includes junior developers tackling more complex tasks. Organizations are continuing to push the productivity frontier with technology, and AI will help to do that. What is happening here is not a contradiction. It is a restructuring. Many businesses are starting to realize that they need fewer people in general information technology roles and are focusing more on the support side of things. The additional personnel are being applied to the more specialized work involving AI and automation. Companies must begin to optimize the conventional staff they employ and heavily invest in AI personnel to be competitive in the new technologies being developed.
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Hiring Managers Name the Top Hard Skills and Soft Skills for 2026
HR Dive, December 8
Hiring managers say both hard skills and soft skills will be key factors when hiring in 2026. In particular, 62% said hard skills and soft skills are equally valuable, while 24% said soft skills matter more and 14% said hard skills do. Soft skills tend to be underrated, but they are often the most valuable throughout a long career. Communication is especially critical. Employees need it to articulate ideas, show their value to decision-makers, and work effectively with their team. Software tools topped the list of hard skills desired in 2026.
In addition to hiring workers with software expertise, employers said they are prioritizing workers with technical skills in data analysis, cybersecurity, project management, quality assurance and testing, automation and workflow optimization, product management, technical writing and documentation, data visualization and artificial intelligence tools. While AI matters, it still does not outweigh the technical skills required to actually perform a job. In addition, hiring managers pointed to communication as the top soft skill for 2026, followed by professionalism, time management, accountability, resilience, problem solving, critical thinking, attention to detail, collaboration and adaptability.
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2026 Promises Generous Pay for IT Pros But You Need to Know AI
Spiceworks, December 8
While IT professionals that possess the top in-demand skills can expect to be handsomely rewarded in 2026, the same can not be said for those who have let their skills portfolio lag. The biggest game changers will be experience working with artificial intelligence, automation and advanced analytics. AI is radically reinventing the IT workforce, and organizations now expect the majority of IT pros to have at least foundational AI skills. Due to the impact AI can have on the business, those with AI experience can expect to be paid accordingly.
The IT hiring market has steadily strengthened throughout 2025. While it has not returned to the record highs of 2021 and 2022, demand for tech talent continues to rise. As we head into 2026, that momentum is expected to continue, with particularly strong hiring activity around specialized and high-impact technical skills. Key trends are expected to continue to shape IT hiring and skill demand as we move into 2026. AI remains the top driver, with expertise in machine learning and related technologies expected to stay in exceptionally high demand. This surge in AI adoption is also accelerating growth in cloud computing and cybersecurity, as organizations scale and secure their digital infrastructure. The main driver is the shift from experimenting with AI to operationalizing it, which increases demand for IT talent who can integrate AI tools, secure them, and maintain data pipelines.
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Why Job Hugging Can Be Worse Than Quitting
Fast Company, December 4
Many IT workers will be job hugging and sitting tight in their roles through 2026. In short, employees are going to feel stuck where they are for the foreseeable future. In many cases, that means staying in unsatisfying jobs. According to a March 2025 study of 1,000 U.S. workers, nearly half (44%) of employees reported feeling workplace angst, despite often showing intent to stay. Unfortunately, job hugging is often an act of desperation, driven by much lower workplace engagement and greater overall economic uncertainty.
Being a job hugger means you are feeling anxious and insecure. While you may be more likely to stay, you are also more likely to want to leave. There is often a self-protective response. The worker is convinced that he or she is doing a good job, and that there is no reason to leave. This performative behavior can be psychologically damaging, especially in a culture of layoffs. If workers are scared of losing their job, they might try everything to keep it: complimenting their boss, staying late, going to optional meetings, and being a good organizational citizen. When people are not loving their jobs but are still going above and beyond, that is a one-way trip to burnout.
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AI Buzzwords Are Making the Job Hunt Harder for Everyone
ZDNet.com, December 2
Job hunters may be padding their resumes with AI skills, but employers are also padding their job descriptions with AI buzzwords. In a trend known as AI language inflation, employers are using buzzwords to appear more cutting-edge, but are highlighting capabilities that may not be essential skills for the roles. The result of this inflation is a vicious cycle, with job hunters dropping AI buzzwords into their resumes, without fully recognizing the different types of artificial intelligence or machine learning.
Employers need to be clear about job requirements that may not necessarily focus on AI. Some of the roles seen in job descriptions are just branded with AI buzzwords to attract talent or to signal innovation without actually requiring real AI expertise. Conversely, there are some roles where you actually need AI literacy, but employers are failing to clarify what that actually means. And so it is creating a bit of confusion for candidates and misalignment in hiring. AI is used very loosely and almost like a buzzword. Employers are looking for appropriate use of the word AI within a business context.
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Do You Have the Skills for a Career in the Evolving Sci-Tech Space?
Silicon Republic, December 12
To ensure that you maximize your potential opportunities in a sci-tech career, it helps to have a wide range of hard and soft skills at your disposal. Chief among these is coding. More and more employers in sci-tech appreciate someone with more than one programming language on their resume. And while vibe coding is becoming increasingly popular, there will always be a need for professionals with the skills to work with or without access to AI tools and technologies.
Not every sci-tech role will involve a stint in a laboratory, but quite a few do and you may be required to commit some time to lab work, even if your long-term objectives are not likely to be in a lab. Handy skills to ensure a seamless experience include an understanding of regulation and compliance policy, as well as general know-how in regards to equipment, microscopy, biology, chemistry and sterilization techniques.
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The Strange Reality of Hiring Right Now
Hackernoon, December 13
Within the IT job market, stability no longer exists. A role can look solid today and disappear tomorrow. Clients change direction instantly. Recruiters often do not have answers. Candidates are left guessing. And it is not just one cause. The market is influenced by many factors at the same time, including uncertain budgets. internal reorganizations, hiring freezes, and greater risk avoidance. But there is something deeper happening, too, that helps to explain why some IT jobs seem to disappear overnight.
One theory is that companies are quietly testing the market. They are testing how low candidates are willing to go. They are testing how much instability people can tolerate. They are testing how desperate the talent pool really is. When candidates panic, they compromise more. When everyone compromises, the benchmark shifts and companies take notice. This would explain why even relatively low-salary roles still get frozen. It is not about the money. It is about uncertainty and hesitation spreading across the entire hiring ecosystem.
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AI Should Make Work Feel Better
Blog@CACM, December 8
AI should not only make organizations faster. It should also improve clarity, reduce cognitive load, and create calmer, more meaningful workflows for the people using the systems. When AI is applied as a friction-removal layer rather than a replacement layer, organizations see higher trust, stronger adoption, and better outcomes. The problem is that most approaches to AI-driven automation often produce systems that make the human experience of work more fragmented or stressful. The key is to identify how AI can help us in our work life, and ultimately make work feel better.
When planning AI initiatives, companies often map processes as a sequence of steps. But people experience work in moments, not as a sequence of steps. The emotional moments of frustration, waiting, uncertainty, and constant context switching often correspond to deeper system-level issues. These problems include scattered data sources, unclear sources of truth, poorly designed handoffs, or information retrieval overhead. As a result, organizations should map human value journeys. These include customer journeys, employee journeys, and decision-making journeys. Friction points along these journeys often reveal more value than any workflow diagram because they point to both human and technical bottlenecks.
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The Process: From Start to Finish
Communications of the ACM, November 24
The scientific process describes how scientists and engineers get their daily work done. While the scientific method gives IT workers a way to evaluate a hypothesis, a scientific process allows IT workers to organize their minds to form these hypotheses, lay out a piece of code, organize a project, or debug a program. It is how scientists, engineers, and software developers get to the point of focusing enough to solve the incredibly challenging problems they have set for themselves. While the code-factory approach to software development remains a reality, it is neither the best nor most effective approach to getting things done.
The core of any scientific process is simple to describe. You should be able to quiet your mind so you can imagine a problem worth solving, or solve a problem that is already right in front of you. Surround yourself with an environment that makes work pleasant and possible. Keep a small number of mental and physical tools at hand that aid in the process. Also, know when to work and when to rest. This means it is important to limit distractions. Developing software is scientific work and that requires focus, which is the opposite of distraction. So, before you even start your process, you need to figure out a way to create a chunk of time that is free of distractions. Unfortunately, most workplaces make this quite difficult.
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