ACM CareerNews for Tuesday, June 23, 2026
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 22, Issue 12, June 23, 2026
The 11 Hardest IT Roles to Fill in 2026
CIO.com, June 15
For many IT organizations, hiring a specialist is relatively easy. The job openings that stay open for six to nine months are hybrid roles, such as engineers fluent in AI who can go deep in code and also understand the underlying business. These hybrid candidates are the future of IT and are hard to find right now. Right now, AI is tied with cybersecurity as the hardest role to fill, with data science and analytics close behind. In the AI talent war, the search for LLM engineers and prompt specialists has given way to demand for people who can operationalize AI at scale, govern its risks, and wield it effectively without blindly trusting it.
Prompt engineering as a standalone job title was a short-lived fad, and is now a baseline skill. What most organizations are looking for now is different. They want to hire AI product engineers who can create agents, build testing frameworks, manage the cost-latency-quality triangle, and deploy AI at scale. They are also trying to fill governance and red-team roles that did not exist three years ago. The center of gravity moved from people who build models to people who wield them, and that requires a very different resume. The skills organizations need have evolved toward more AI agents and less prompt engineering. Organizations need people who understand workflows, process simplification, and can work with an agent platform to automate work and tasks.
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Which IT Jobs Are Paying Well and Are In Demand in 2026?
Spiceworks, May 26
According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, IT jobs are still paying well and very much in demand in 2026. That, despite ongoing concerns about IT automation and the rise of AI. For example, even the median salary for entry-level IT user support specialist jobs is 1.2x higher than the median for all occupations. At the top of the range, IT managers make 3.5x the median wage. Additionally, senior-level technical staff, including database architects, software developers, and network architects, fare well, all earning more than 2.5x the median wage.
To a large degree, IT wages have kept pace with inflation, at a time when many other jobs have not. In fact, salaries for six out of the top 13 IT occupations have outpaced inflation. These include: web and digital interface designers, information security analysts, computer user support specialists, network and computer systems administrators, computer network support specialists, and web developers. However, seven IT occupations did not keep up with inflation. These occupations all had median salaries above $100K, or more than 2x the median annual wage.
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AI is Changing This Job So Fast the Interview Process Can't Keep Up
CNN, May 28
Now that AI can write code, hiring managers are trying to figure out what type of candidate makes a good software engineer. The interview process has not kept up with the way AI has changed the daily responsibilities of software engineers. That has made the hiring process more challenging for both job seekers and hiring managers, especially when it comes to evaluating certain skillsets. Software engineering has been among the first industries to be noticeably impacted by AI. According to a recent report, 90% of tech workers use AI for tasks like writing and modifying code, up 14% from the previous year.
AI can now help software engineers write code and documentation, analyze data, learn coding concepts, and troubleshoot. That lets tech companies move much more quickly, but it also completely changes what the job requires. AI is shifting the role of a software engineer to focus on high-level decision-making rather than writing code. In the future, the title software engineer might be replaced with a name like software builder, in order to better capture the changing scope of the position. The important point is that AI is not meant to replace engineers. Instead, developers should spend most of their time trying to figure out what they should build, and let AI handle the heavy lifting. That being said, 46% of tech workers only somewhat trust the quality of AI-generated code, and 31% said AI only slightly improved code.
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AI Skills Command a Premium as Talent Shortage Deepens
Dice Insights, June 15
Employers are now seeking AI expertise in roughly three times as many job postings as they were just two years ago. At the same time, demand for generative AI skills has surged. The challenge for employers is that demand continues to outpace supply. AI skills are now the most sought-after enterprise capability, yet only about one-third of organizations consider themselves fully prepared to adopt AI-driven ways of working. Meanwhile, the competition for talent is only intensifying, as 72% of employers struggle to fill open positions.
According to a recent report, AI has become one of the most lucrative career tracks in technology, with the U.S. posting 35,445 open AI roles in the first quarter of 2025 alone, a 25.2% year-over-year increase. Compensation for top positions routinely exceeds $200,000, while some highly specialized roles can surpass $400,000 when bonuses and equity are included. Leadership positions such as Chief AI Officer, along with specialized roles in large language models, computer vision and AI research, command the highest salaries, reflecting both the scarcity of advanced AI expertise and the growing strategic importance of AI across the enterprise.
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How to Get AI to Love Your Resume
Mashable, June 15
More than half of jobseekers utilize AI to write their resumes and cover letters, according to a LinkedIn survey. At the same time, employers are even more keen on using AI to screen candidates, with nearly 90 percent using it to rank or filter resumes. This makes it imperative that jobseekers understand how to get their resumes noticed by AI and highly-ranked by algorithms. The good news is that making your resume and cover letter attractive to AI is much simpler than trying to slip in hidden words or prompts.
Because of the job market and how challenging it has become, HR and recruiters are using AI to filter through a very large applicant pool. Right now, AI is likely doing the first pass on resumes at many organizations. In part, this is because the job market is flooded with applicants. Some jobs are posted on LinkedIn, and within hours, they have hundreds of applicants. AI, if it is used by a company, is really just a first-round filter. It can help to analyze hundreds of applicants, which no HR employee or recruiter could go through on their own.
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Remote Work May Be a Bigger Threat to New Grads Than AI
BuiltIn.com, June 17
The decline in entry-level job opportunities has generally been attributed to the emergence of new generative AI tools that can handle tasks ordinarily performed by junior employees. However, two new studies suggest that artificial intelligence may not be the entry-level job killer it is commonly assumed to be. Instead, remote work could be causing the entry-level job shortage.
Based on an analysis of resume and job board data, researchers found a sharp shift in hiring patterns. Comparing 2017-2019 and 2023-2025, entry-level hiring dropped 29 percent and junior-level hiring dropped nearly 26 percent, while hiring for senior-level roles increased more than 5 percent. Notably, the decline in entry- and junior-level hiring began in 2022, just before the launch of ChatGPT and the subsequent generative AI boom. The reality is that AI and remote work are two seismic shifts that affected the same types of workers during roughly the same time period. After all, many of the careers that are most exposed to AI (software developers, technical writers, and management consultants ) are also among the most likely to work from home. When evaluating the impact of AI and remote work separately, the study found both factors predicted a decline in junior-level new hires and job ads requiring limited experience. But when the two factors were analyzed together and controlled against each other, remote work continued to cause junior-level hiring declines, while the impact of AI was much less certain.
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AI Is Disrupting Everything, So Where Do Entry-Level Tech Jobs Go Now?
The New Stack, June 11
The impact AI is making on the workforce is being felt across every industry, but perhaps nowhere more acutely than in software development and the broader technology sector. Companies in Silicon Valley and other tech hotspots are already redefining what senior technical roles look like. Elsewhere, AI-generated code is creating review bottlenecks that are changing what engineering teams must do day-to-day. As a result, entry-level programming jobs are looking increasingly precarious.
The Linux Foundation surveyed nearly 400 hiring and training managers across Europe and other major markets and found that AI is driving a 27 percent net increase in tech hiring across Europe. However, European organizations also reported a 3 percent contraction in entry-level hiring for technical roles, even as the rest of the world sees that category grow by 14 percent. The report offers no definitive explanation for why Europe might be diverging from the rest of the world on junior hiring, but it does note that Europe lags on several broader AI readiness measures. These include lower deployment of core AI infrastructure, more acute understaffing in cybersecurity, and slower adoption across the technology stack that underpins production AI. Overall, AI models continue to grow in their abilities, and thus, their impact on the tech talent market needs to be properly assessed.
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What Does the Class of 2026 Want From Their Post-Grad Jobs?
HR Dive, June 15
When applying and interviewing for jobs, recent college graduates are increasingly looking for employers that provide opportunities for professional development. College students entering the workforce are not just looking for a first job, they are also looking for a strong start to their careers. That includes access to new technological platforms, as well as new training related to AI. Recent grads also want job security, a solid benefits package, and a high starting salary.
The class of 2026 seems aware of what they bring to the table, if recent research is any indication. About 1 in 5 employed grads feel that they are overqualified for their current role. A similar number said they intentionally applied for a job beneath their level of skill, just to get their foot in the door. In that same survey, more than half of respondents explicitly said their current job is a stepping stone. This means that HR departments should help to showcase opportunities for advancement. If attractive enough, they could prompt these workers to stay longer-term.
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The End of the Coder?
Communications of the ACM, June 9
For decades, the career of a software developer was defined by the ability to translate human requirements into precise, machine-readable syntax. But a rapid succession of ever more powerful AI releases has brought that definition to a breaking point. New AI tools can create not just simple code snippets, but also long-running, multi-agent workflows. That has many software professionals questioning whether they are actually needed for the technical work of their jobs. In other words, if AI can now write, debug, and deploy software for near-zero cost, what is the impact on human software development professionals?
Within the computer science profession, the growing consensus is that, while the role of the coder may be endangered, the role of the engineer remains essential. However, that role is being redefined as part product manager, part reviewer, and part AI orchestrator. That being said, the value proposition of a professional engineer has always extended far beyond syntax. Coding is often the easy part. Great software engineers impact much more of the software development lifecycle than just creating code. Requirements analysis, architecture and design, effective testing strategies, planning, and stakeholder management are all critical activities for project success.
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Hyper-Efficient Mediocrity: The Future Jobs of Generative AI
ACM Ubiquity, May 2026
The rise of generative AI has many organizations scrambling to figure out how to deploy it at scale, while also maximizing productivity and other workforce gains. This leads to the inevitable question: What kinds of jobs can you hire an LLM to do? The earliest use cases were basic tasks, such as composing emails, writing basic strategy documents, or analyzing data for company presentations. However, the focus has now shifted to AI agents, and their ability to automate all basic knowledge work. Going forward, the emphasis will likely be on three key areas of work: conversation, distillation, and fabrication.
A conversational interface is where the user has dialogue with a computer system, gradually reaching results. It is something we have come to expect once search engines became the standard way to find information. The reason it is called a conversational interface is that you type a search, see the results the system suggests, and then try a more precise search until you find what you want. You have a conversation with the system and the system will always return a result, though it may be inaccurate or even irrelevant. What the system will answer is a result of what kind of information it has an overview of, the underlying search algorithm, but also what kind of results the owner of the system wants to emphasize. Generative AI takes this conversational element further, and not only provides links to sources, but also puts together the content of the answer based mainly on what it has seen of similar texts.
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