STATE OF THE TECH JOB MARKET IN 2026 Twice a year, I dig into trends in hiring and job openings. This is the fifth report I've done, and the most surprising yet: 1. PMs are winning in the AI era 2. Engineering demand has stalled 3. Design openings are at a record low 4. Every role now requires AI skills 5. Tech jobs are concentrating in the Bay Area 6. Remote roles are at a record low 7. The tech job market is growing fast, but mostly outside of software (gasp!) Full report here:

Narrative violation: Met a fisherman from Santa Cruz last night who’s been fishing for over 50 years. He said the ocean is the healthiest he’s ever seen it. More fish than ever, whale populations are booming, species that had nearly disappeared are coming back. Not all doom and gloom out there.

My biggest takeaways from Head of Product for @Gemini and Google's other frontier AI models—Tulsee Doshi (@tulseedoshi): 1. Great PMs are more in demand than ever. “When you can build anything, building something great actually is now where most of the value is,” Tulsee said. The scarce skill is now identifying which of the thousands of possible things to build is the one worth building. Alongside that is putting that judgment into practice: aligning people and converting speed-induced chaos into a coherent direction. 2. The PM role has shifted from writing requirements to creating something with “heft.” The PM who hands a requirements doc to an engineer and calls it done is not going to do well in this new environment. The new baseline is going one step further: actually producing something of substance, be it a prototype, a thorough data analysis, or even a ready-to-ship MVP. 3. Tulsee hires PMs who have opinions about models. She wants PMs who play with models every day, have their own use cases for judging whether a model is good, and stress-test capabilities themselves. They’re also technical enough to roll up their sleeves, dig into data, and build an eval. And they’re adaptive: “The space is changing every two weeks. A roadmap you wrote two months ago, you’re gonna be looking at it again and rewriting it.” 4. To understand a new model, test it on work you care about. When a new model comes out, some people try 3D animations, others creative writing or hard financial analysis. Tulsee’s advice for evaluating new models is to pick tasks where models “are already showing signs of life” but aren’t perfect by your own definition. That leaves room to see different models handle the problem differently, and it’s where you’ll notice how the models improve. 5. Model development is less like engineering and more like alchemy. “Model training is kind of like Snape’s potions class,” she says. “You can put all the ingredients in and be thoughtful about what you expect, but you also have to expect that there will be a little bit of magic.” Her team’s job is to identify where the model shines (often in ways no one planned) and to turn that into something great for users. 6. Tulsee’s 60-20-20 rule is a practical way to build ahead of the models. Your AI product roadmap should look like this: roughly 60% of what you build should work today, another 20% should be close—“not perfect, but you can see how the models might get here in the very near future”—and the final 20% should show glimmers of something magical that the model can’t quite do yet. The exact numbers are flexible, but the idea is to be ready to double down on something that just became possible. 7. Your first eval can be five prompts. When tackling evals, the most common mistake people make is waiting until you can build something large-scale before even starting. “Start with even just five prompts,” she says. “Start simple. Start with even just yourself as the rater.” A set of even 20 prompts that creates a signal between model A and model B is “so powerful.” Getting to a small, honest set of examples forces you to articulate what “good” looks like. Get clear on a set of good examples first, then scale up. 8. Burnout comes from chaos and grunt work more than from long hours. Tulsee admits everyone on her team is “putting in all of the hours.” But in her experience, burnout comes from churn and chaos, and work that feels like a waste of time. Work you’re excited about is exhausting but brings more joy. That’s why she hopes AI tools can reduce burnout by removing the grunt work, so people spend more time thinking and being creative. My tech workforce survey found the same thing: more hours doesn’t necessarily equal burnout. 9. Google’s full-stack AI strategy gives it an advantage few competitors can match. From custom TPU hardware to products used by over a billion people each, Google operates across the entire value chain. Tulsee describes Google’s goal as building models across the “Pareto curve of cost to quality”—not just the frontier LLM but models that serve a search user, a software engineer, and a cyber defender. Frontier competition matters to Google, and Tulsee is direct about Google’s intention to win the SOTA model race.

Why PMs are suddenly valuable again with Tulsee Doshi (@tulseedoshi)—Head of Product for @Google’s frontier AI models, including @Gemini, Nano Banana, Genie, Veo, and more. We discuss: 🔸 The rising value of great PMs 🔸 Google’s full-stack frontier AI strategy 🔸 Why model development is like Snape’s potions class 🔸 Why the PM role has shifted from writing requirements to creating something with “heft 🔸 How to write your first eval Listen now 👇

Wispr Flow's head of content says some of its creators with 1,000 or 2,000 @instagram followers make more than full-time influencers. Hector Serrano's case for small accounts: "Creators with no following end up being better investments for brands because influencers kind of are seen now as sellouts a lot of the time." The pay isn't $50 or $100 a video: "It's truly uncapped. If they have really good videos and they put a lot of effort in, we have creators now that are making like $13,000 a month." @WisprFlow, the voice-to-text app, raised $280M at a $2B valuation in August. From @lennysan's podcast.

Announcing: Lenny's Newsletter as a physical magazine! Eight hand-picked posts, perfect-bound, with your name on the cover. For the next 48 hours, shipping is FREE worldwide. Grab it here:

Was chatting with an experienced architect last night. She said that what used to take them 1.5 years of work (turning architectural designs into construction-ready drawings), now takes them *8 minutes* with AI.

The holidays are fast approaching, so I’m back with my sixth (!!) annual gift guide. It's got over 100 gift ideas—all things I actually use, love, and recommend. This started out as a random post idea, but now you’d be surprised how many people ping me asking when the new list will be out. As always, the collection includes a mix of practical stuff with a lot of fun and delight, from high-end products to very affordable items. There are no affiliate links here, and I’m not benefiting from recommending any of these products. Pro tip: After reading it, point your favorite AI agent at the post and have it brainstorm gifts for your family, friends, and coworkers. Here's the guide:

Stop looking for advice. That’s the advice. I’m a Gen X founder who spent years refusing to make social content. Two reasons. First, my generation is allergic to anything that smells manufactured, and most social media has a content-farm ick to it that’s hard to shake. Second, I’ve seen myself on camera. The ums, the ya knows, the restarts, the mumbling. Not a great look. Meanwhile, my silence was actively hurting my company. :) Repetition got me over it. Even someone with my communication challenges has something to contribute. @hectorserrranoo on @lennysan's podcast illustrated the challenges are universal. He’s worked with famous creators. They all stutter. They all refilm. One puts a pen in his mouth between takes to get the words out. Hector’s own viral video took three thirty-minute cuts to become fifteen clean ones. So the ums I was worried about? They have them too. You just never see them, they turn the camera on anyway. We don’t have a skills gap. We have a willingness gap. The only fix is reps. 💪

My biggest takeaways from @hectorserrranoo, Head of Content at @WisprFlow: 1. Paid UGC is one of the highest-alpha opportunities for B2B SaaS right now. Paid ads are nothing new, but Hector has discovered there’s still a huge opportunity in doing them differently. E-com brands have long hired creators to produce ads, compensating them based on performance. Now platforms like @TrybeUGC allow B2B SaaS companies to do the same. Hector calls it “the TikTok Shop method, but for Meta Ads.” Wispr Flow was one of the first companies to hop on, and paid is now one of its main growth pillars. 2. Turn on paid early, but only after PMF. Hector credits Wispr Flow’s growth primarily to the quality of the product. “There’s really no hack besides having a good product.” But once you have organic pull, don’t wait to start paid UGC. Hector argues that paid is the fastest way to learn whether your messaging lands and whether cold traffic converts. 3. The key is to incentivize creators by giving them a % of GMV or ad spend. Wispr Flow pays its creators a percentage of the spend behind their ads. E-com brands pay a percentage of GMV. Earnings are also uncapped, so some of Wispr Flow’s creators make over $13,000 a month. “They’re making more money than full-time influencers.” 4. A “smart retainer” keeps new creators around long enough to get good. Pure commission is risky early for new creators, since their initial ads won’t perform well, so Wispr Flow sets a floor. Hit a quota of, say, 25 videos and you’re guaranteed $1,500. If your commissions only reach $500, they top you up by $1,000. If they reach $3,000, you keep the commissions and the retainer doesn’t apply. Three or four months in, the best creators break out and earn purely on commission. 5. Recruit your first creators off-platform, by hand. A new brand may struggle to attract great creators, so Hector manually searches Instagram for niche keywords (“tech,” “nine-to-five,” “lawyer,” “doctor”), then searches the follower lists of creators he likes, “because typically good creators know other good creators.” He sends 150 to 250 targeted DMs over a week, with no mass-messaging software, and usually lands five or six really good creators. 6. Copycat ads die fast, so push every creator to experiment. Creators can see which ads get the most spend, and the instinct is to copy them. Meta’s Andromeda system scans each ad’s transcript, frames, and on-screen text, and groups ads that are more than 60% similar, so lookalikes fatigue quickly. Hector reminds creators that the top earners got there by experimenting. 7. Recruit niche creators to target your ICPs. Each creator should speak to a different audience you want to target. Wispr’s creators range from moms, lawyers, engineers, and sales reps to a 45-year-old founder of an eight-figure e-commerce business. People “mistake UGC for thinking it’s just college kids making content,” but a dev tool’s user is probably an older technical person. For those audiences, “the more boring and the uglier the ads are, the better they will perform.” 8. You need two people to run a paid-UGC program: a creative lead and a media buyer. Hector runs the creator side: comms, concepts, and approving videos. Eric, the media buyer, lives in Meta Ads Manager. For the creator role, look for an online following, not a resume. Hector had a 2.5 GPA. Tobin, Wispr Flow’s early marketing intern, had a 4.0 from Waterloo. Both became great marketers. Hector’s bar is someone hardworking and talented who has grown an account from zero to 10,000 or 15,000 followers, ideally on Instagram. 9. “The best marketers are allergic to AI.” Hector isn’t against automation behind the scenes. His point is about the final output people see. Even the top AI labs use teams of humans to produce their videos and designs. For an AI company like Wispr Flow, AI influencers and AI-generated static ads would land badly and look off. Matt, Wispr Flow’s former head of growth, runs more automations than anyone Hector knows, but “that last 10% that’s the most important always has a human on the endpoint.” 10. Develop young talent like a soccer academy. Hector played youth soccer in Spain and the U.S. before Division I, and he wants startups to copy the model: scout young talent, give them money and room to experiment, let them fail, and coach them until they become A players. His first seven months at Wispr were “all over the place,” and it took about a year to feel comfortable. “A 30- or 40-year-old founder doesn’t understand what an 18-year-old kid who’s in these Discord chats” sees every day, and the people you develop stay loyal. Watch the full conversation:

Hector Serrano (@hectorserrranoo) runs what may be the most innovative paid growth program in Silicon Valley. He joined @WisprFlow at 19, days after quitting D1 soccer. After making every ad himself for 1.5 years, he took the playbook the best e-com brands have used for years and made it work for B2B SaaS: creators make the ads, get paid a cut of the ad spend, and the best of them earn $100K+ a year. Over the past year, Wispr Flow grew revenue 30x+ and recently raised at a $2B valuation. Hector shares his full playbook. We cover: 01:17 What Hector does at Wispr Flow 03:10 The number-one growth lever 04:25 When to start investing in paid ads 08:27 The paid-UGC strategy and how it developed 13:44 How creator compensation works: percent of ad spend vs. GMV 20:07 The profile of a great modern marketing hire 25:03 The importance of young talent 28:22 Hector’s journey from D1 soccer to Wispr Flow 31:03 Step-by-step: How to build a paid-UGC group from zero 43:03 Reaching out to creators 45:37 Building culture inside your creator group 48:31 The role of the media buyer alongside the creative lead 50:05 Team size and structure 53:44 Why UGC works even in technical and enterprise SaaS 56:15 Advice for people embarking on the creator path 59:50 Common mistakes to avoid 01:02:21 The sports approach to hiring 01:03:52 Why the best marketers are allergic to AI output 01:08:07 Founder-led content 01:16:01 Why YouTube packaging matters more than production quality 01:20:06 Lightning round and final thoughts Also available on YouTube: