Job Titles Explain Under 10% of the Skills a Tech Job Requires
For 52.5% of job postings, most of their closest skill matches carry a different job title. Product Engineer postings look like another job 81% of the time; Product Designer, 9%.
insights-and-analytics
Posts in insights-and-analytics.
The AI Paper Flood Is 28x More Researchers, Not 28x More Slop
arXiv AI submissions grew 18.9x in a decade. We decomposed the growth: it's ~28x more researchers, each publishing just 9% more. And only 0.51% of 84,420 papers have a near-duplicate.
Software Engineer Pay vs. Company Trajectory in 2026: Why the Offer Number Isn't Enough
We mapped advertised software-engineer pay against how much each company is actually growing or shrinking — using live job postings and workforce-flow data. Pay turns out to tell you almost nothing about where a company is headed.
44% of Tech Job Postings Mention AI. Only 10% Require It.
Every company wants to be an AI company. Far fewer want to hire for it. We measured 182,470 job postings and 568,663 tech CVs: employers mention AI four times more often than they ask for it.
Pay Transparency by State: What 118,706 Job Postings Reveal
In Washington, 47% of job postings show the salary. In Kansas, 5.3% do. We measured salary disclosure across 118,706 US job postings and 38 states — and found that even where the law requires pay in the posting, roughly half still don't show it.
Federal Data Science Is Two Different Jobs — and Neither Crosses to Big Tech
Read the people, not the postings: national-lab data scientists build ML like Big Tech, while civil-service agency data scientists do statistics-and-reporting. Two different jobs under one title — and neither ever touches frontier tech.
Who Becomes an AI Engineer — and Where They Go Next
We mapped the AI Engineer role from both sides — Skillenai's talent graph and job postings. Who feeds it, where they go next, and why the skills employers ask for don't match what workers list.
The Lock-In Economy: Why Entry-Level Jobs Vanished (and Why It Wasn't AI)
AI didn't torch the junior job market. A frozen labor market did — and the housing market, frozen by the same 2022 rate shock with zero AI, is the control group that proves it.
Who Actually Builds With LLMs: 2.5 Software Engineers for Every AI Engineer
US employers ask 2.5x more generalist software engineers than AI engineers to build with LLMs, and the generalists do it in TypeScript and Ruby, without LangGraph. A demand-side look at who really builds AI.
Do Product Managers Out-Earn Engineers? Not Level-for-Level
A viral Levels.fyi post says the median PM out-earns the median engineer. Across the open job market, that gap is a spam artifact plus a composition effect — match them rung-for-rung and the engineer wins every level.