For three years the running assumption has been that AI is bad news for a job in tech. A new analysis published on 4 October argues the openings data says something else — and the numbers are more interesting than either the doom or the celebration headlines allow.
Business Insider’s Alistair Barr reviewed tracking data from TrueUp, a hiring platform that monitors more than 9,000 technology companies. Its current count: more than 280,000 open tech jobs across startups and major firms, up strongly from the start of 2026. That is not a hiring freeze. It is not remotely one.
🔍 THE BOTTOM LINE: Tech openings are climbing while layoffs ease, with hardware engineering — chips, servers, robotics, data centres — the hottest segment of 2026. AI investment is changing what tech companies hire for, not whether they hire.
Cuts are still real. They are just smaller.
The same dataset shows about 190,000 tech workers laid off so far this year. That is a painful number if it is your role, and 2026 is on track to finish well below the roughly 430,000 cuts recorded in 2023, the industry’s post-pandemic peak. Fewer than half the 2023 pace, on the year’s current trajectory.
This is the balanced picture this site keeps returning to: the AI-era tech labour market is not a collapse, and it is not a boom — it is a rotation. Harvard economists made the same macro point last week — no mass layoff wave has actually arrived. TrueUp’s data now adds the demand side: while some roles are being cut, others are being hired for, faster.
Hardware is the hot market
The most striking detail is where demand moved. “It’s not surprising given the interest in GPU innovation, AI robotics, US manufacturing startups, and SpaceX,” said Amit Taylor, TrueUp’s founder. Hardware engineering demand surged this year, fuelled by the enormous capital spending on AI infrastructure.
The physical layer of the AI boom — chips, servers, robots, factories, data centres — is turning into the tech sector’s biggest hiring engine. It rhymes with what Bloomberg found on factory floors: the AI buildout is creating physical-economy jobs faster than most coverage notices.
Software engineering listings, meanwhile, have “held up surprisingly well,” as Barr puts it — despite a year of confident predictions that AI coding tools would gut demand for programmers. The tools arrived. The job listings did not vanish. Junior-entry pressure is real and measurable — this site covered the research showing about 227,000 entry-level job starts a year no longer opening — but the aggregate software market has contracted far less than the predictions assumed.
What it means for New Zealand tech workers
New Zealand’s tech labour market is a smaller pond, but the same rotation is visible in it. ANZ New Zealand — the country’s largest bank, with about 7,000 staff here — proposed in late September to cut more than 100 permanent IT jobs from its roughly 1,500-strong permanent technology workforce, with software testing potentially consolidated under a single partner and possibly shifted offshore, according to reporting from the New Zealand Herald, RNZ and Newswire. Quality assurance engineers, lead engineers, product owners and project managers are among the roles affected; the consultation is ongoing and the bank has confirmed the broad outline but not the numbers.
The telling phrase in ANZ’s statement to the Herald: bringing together “related functions like data, AI and engineering for greater consistency.” Even inside a cutting exercise, the roles being consolidated toward are data, AI and engineering — the same segments TrueUp sees demand surging toward globally. The local lesson is not that tech jobs in New Zealand are disappearing; it is that the legacy functions are being traded for AI-adjacent ones, and the application flood for the remaining openings means positioning matters more than ever.
❓ FAQ
Are tech jobs growing or shrinking in 2026? Both, at different companies and in different functions. Tracking by TrueUp shows more than 280,000 open tech positions across 9,000-plus companies, up strongly from the start of the year, while about 190,000 tech workers have been laid off so far in 2026 — a much slower pace than 2023’s roughly 430,000.
What tech jobs are most in demand this year? Hardware engineers have seen the biggest surge, driven by AI infrastructure spending — chips, servers, robotics and data centre construction. Software engineering postings have held up better than widely predicted.
How many tech layoffs happened in 2026 compared to 2023? Business Insider, citing TrueUp data, puts 2026 year-to-date tech layoffs at about 190,000, tracking well below the roughly 430,000 recorded at the 2023 peak.
Is AI hurting or helping tech employment? The data suggests it is reshaping rather than shrinking demand: hiring is concentrating in the physical groundwork of AI — data centres, chips, robotics — while total openings climb. Entry-level pressure exists and is well documented, but it has not yet produced an aggregate collapse in openings.
🔍 THE BOTTOM LINE
The tech jobs apocalypse keeps being scheduled and keeps being postponed. The honest read of the openings data: AI investment is a hiring programme for some people and a redundancy notice for others — and right now, the hiring side is winning on volume, with hardware engineers the clear winners of 2026.
📰 Sources
- Business Insider — “AI was supposed to kill tech jobs. The data on job openings says otherwise.” (4 October 2026)
- TrueUp — tracking data across 9,000+ technology companies (openings and layoffs, October 2026)
- Newswire.co.nz — “ANZ proposes cutting more than 100 New Zealand IT jobs as software testing may move offshore” (26 September 2026)
- RNZ — “ANZ reportedly considers cutting more than 100 jobs in NZ IT teams” (September 2026)
— CJ Murden, editor of Singularity.Kiwi. Former digital technologies teacher, author of AI-focused books. Writing with a New Zealand focus.
