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    AI-era IT jobs

    Software developer jobs: nobody asks for JavaScript anymore

    October 27, 2026
    7 min read

    Part of a 14-post series on IT jobs in the AI era. Start with the overview: IT job market 2022 to 2026: openings fell, jobs held.

    In the six months around ChatGPT's launch, 32% of software developer job descriptions named JavaScript. In May to October 2026, 14% do [job-page study, 2026]. I counted this in 1,511 company job pages from October 2022 to March 2023 and 2,730 from 2026. The pages come from the Greenhouse, Lever and Ashby boards that tech employers use; the old ones were recovered from web archives. I removed AI vocabulary before counting, so these figures describe the part of the ad that is not about AI. The fall is the same in Europe and the US. Developers use JavaScript about as much as they did in 2022, so what changed is what employers bother to write down.

    What fell out of the developer job ad

    Share of software developer job descriptions mentioning each term, Oct 2022 to Mar 2023 vs May to Oct 2026 Source: Mustard Seed Solutions job-page study, 1,511 vs 2,730 software developer job pages; 2026 shares re-weighted to 2022-23 text length.

    HTML/CSS fell from 16% to 5% of developer job pages between the two periods, React from 30% to 21% and "front-end" from 30% to 22% [job-page study, 2026]. "Agile" fell from 27% to 12%. In Dice's count of US tech postings for January to October 2022 it was the most frequent skill of all [Dice, 2022]. Web3 and blockchain went from 9% to 3%.

    Some of the culture vocabulary went with them. "Passion" sat in 49% of developer job pages in 2022-23 and in 26% in 2026, and "adaptability" went from 42% to 34%.

    Two checks make me trust these falls. Hacker News "Who is hiring?" posts, a separate sample of mostly start-ups, move the same way: front-end mentions in developer posts fell from 28% to 14% [HN Who is hiring, 2022-2026]. The falls also hold inside the same companies. Among employers present in both periods, 19 of the 20 biggest skill moves point the same way as in the full sample [job-page study, 2026].

    Part of the drop is mix, because there are fewer front-end openings than in 2022. Part of it is assumption. Stack Overflow's survey of professional developers shows JavaScript use at 68.0% in 2022, 68.9% in 2025 and 64.6% in 2026, and HTML/CSS went from 55.0% to 63.1% and then 59.7% [Stack Overflow survey, 2022-2026]. GitHub shows the same in Poland, where JavaScript's share of developers' language activity barely moved, from 11.4% to 10.6% between late 2022 and late 2025 [GitHub Innovation Graph, 2025].

    What replaced it: running software in production

    Share of software developer job descriptions mentioning each term, risers Source: Mustard Seed Solutions job-page study, same samples as above.

    The words that grew describe what happens after the code ships. "Reliability" went from 11% to 30% of developer job pages, observability from 4% to 18%, "scalability" from 40% to 54% and distributed systems from 12% to 21% [job-page study, 2026]. On-call duty went from 4% to 8% of pages, and code review from 18% to 25%.

    Python moved the opposite way to JavaScript, up from 32% to 38% of developer job pages. Here the survey agrees: developers using Python went from 43.6% to 57.2% [Stack Overflow survey, 2022-2026].

    The soft words changed as well. "Ownership" went from 26% to 43%, "ambiguity" from 6% to 15% and "judgment" from 3% to 10% [job-page study, 2026]. All three also rise inside the same companies, which rules out a handful of firms rewriting their templates.

    I have read and written enterprise IT specs for fifteen years, and my reading is that employers stopped describing the tools a junior learns first and started describing what a senior is trusted with. The experience numbers point the same way. The median minimum experience asked in developer job pages rose from four years to five. Ads asking for eight or more years went from 7% to 12% of pages, and ads asking for one to two years fell from 14% to 10.5% [job-page study, 2026]. Indeed sees the same direction across US tech: postings asking for five or more years rose from 37% to 42% between mid-2022 and mid-2025 [Indeed Hiring Lab, 2025].

    Europe and the US: same direction, Europe moved further

    Europe posts fewer developer jobs than the US and is recovering more slowly. In September 2026 Indeed's software development postings stood at 49 in Germany, 53 in France and 62 in the UK, against 77 in the US (February 2020 = 100) [Indeed via FRED, 2026]. US postings were up 19% on a year earlier, while Germany's were down 16%.

    The skills shift runs the same way on both sides of the Atlantic and is a little sharper in Europe. In the 195 European developer job pages from 2022-23 and 337 from 2026, JavaScript went from 31% to 13%. In the US (563 and 1,210 pages) it went from 31% to 12% [job-page study, 2026]. "Agile" was a European habit: 39% of European developer ads used the word in 2022-23, against 23% in the US, and both are now at or below 16%. Reliability rose from 12% to 36% in Europe and from 12% to 31% in the US. Python is where Europe caught up, going from 22% to 35% of European developer pages against 37% to 43% in the US.

    The European sample is small, so treat those levels as rough and the direction as the finding. Poland has too few pages in the sample (19 in 2022-23) for a share of its own, and the GitHub figures above are the best Polish signal I have.

    Where AI went in the ad

    I removed AI terms to see the rest of the ad clearly, but they grew more than anything above.

    Share of software developer job ads mentioning AI, any mention vs requirements section Source: Mustard Seed Solutions job-page study (1,511 vs 2,730 pages; requirements sections found in 1,286 and 701) and HN "Who is hiring" software posts by year.

    In 2022-23, 22% of developer job pages mentioned AI somewhere, mostly in the company description. In 2026 it is 73%. The stricter count matters more: AI named in the requirements section went from 8% to 51% [job-page study, 2026]. On Hacker News the share of software posts mentioning AI rose every year, from 17% in late 2022 to 58% in 2026 [HN Who is hiring, 2022-2026]. Read together with the risers above, the 2026 requirements section asks a developer to use AI tools and to own what happens in production.

    What this means if you are a software developer

    1. Put production work on your CV next to your stack. Name the incidents you handled, the service-level targets you owned, the on-call rota you sat on and the monitoring you set up. Developer ads now mention reliability (30%) and observability (18%) far more often than HTML/CSS (5%).
    2. Lead with a system you ran end to end and what changed because of you, and move the framework list lower. Employers now assume JavaScript and React. "Ownership" appears in 43% of 2026 developer ads, more often than any programming language.
    3. Show how you use AI tools and what came of it. Half of 2026 requirement sections name AI. One line on what you built or sped up with it, and how you checked the output, answers that requirement better than a list of tools.

    Sources

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