{"id":17,"date":"2026-11-11T16:55:49","date_gmt":"2026-11-11T16:55:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blockoala.com\/index.php\/2026\/11\/11\/manus-drops-coding-tests-for-ai-collaboration-tasks-as-u-s-software-engineer-hiring-falls-below-half-of-its-2022-peak\/"},"modified":"2026-11-11T16:55:49","modified_gmt":"2026-11-11T16:55:49","slug":"manus-drops-coding-tests-for-ai-collaboration-tasks-as-u-s-software-engineer-hiring-falls-below-half-of-its-2022-peak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blockoala.com\/index.php\/2026\/11\/11\/manus-drops-coding-tests-for-ai-collaboration-tasks-as-u-s-software-engineer-hiring-falls-below-half-of-its-2022-peak\/","title":{"rendered":"Manus Drops Coding Tests for AI Collaboration Tasks as U.S. Software Engineer Hiring Falls Below Half of Its 2022 Peak"},"content":{"rendered":"

Manus has stopped using traditional programming tests for engineers and is hiring people it judges by how they work with its own AI agent. A separate late-2026 jobs report finds U.S. software-engineer hiring well below the 2022 peak, while demand is splitting across roles and skills.<\/p>\n

The account below follows a November 11, 2026 InfoQ report by Lin Qibei, edited by Cai Fangfang. It draws on comments from Manus co-founder and chief product officer Tao Zhang and on Lenny Rachitsky\u2019s newsletter analysis.<\/p>\n

How Manus is hiring<\/h2>\n

Zhang told a Web Summit interview that Manus\u2019s careers page still lists conventional titles such as frontend and backend engineer. He said that wording is for outsiders, because \u201cthe outside world hasn\u2019t caught up yet.\u201d Inside the company, work is no longer divided strictly by title.<\/p>\n

In the product and marketing team he leads, product managers can commit code, and designers have also started writing code. Some work that used to move between product, design, and engineering can now be done by one person using AI tools.<\/p>\n

Since March 2026, engineer candidates have not been asked to take a traditional coding test. They get four hours to use Manus on a real problem. Interviewers then review the full process with the candidate and look at whether the person is used to working with AI. Candidates still have to finish the task and explain how they did it. Unlike a conventional test, the AI tool is part of the assessment.<\/p>\n

Zhang\u2019s stated standard: \u201cAI is already very good at completing tasks, so we no longer need more people who are only good at completing tasks.\u201d He said Manus cares more about people who can get work done than about job titles. Following a clear instruction is not the same, in this account, as deciding what problem to solve, lining up the resources, and pushing a result through.<\/p>\n

InfoQ treats the Manus practice as one company\u2019s approach and turns to market data for a wider view.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

Hiring is down from the 2022 peak<\/h2>\n

On November 10, 2026, Lenny Rachitsky\u2014formerly responsible for product and growth at Airbnb and author of Lenny\u2019s Newsletter<\/em>\u2014published State of the Tech Job Market: Late 2026<\/em>, his fifth report in the series. It combines TrueUp, which tracks openings at more than 9,000 technology companies worldwide, with Live Data Technologies, which tracks hiring, departures, and promotions for about 124 million professionals.<\/p>\n

Live Data Technologies figures in the report say U.S. employers hired about 113,000 software engineers from May 2025 through April 2026, compared with 239,000 in 2022. That is a drop of about 53%, to less than half the 2022 peak, and the report says the count has fallen each year since 2022.<\/p>\n

TrueUp data in the same report show engineering openings up 29% in 2024 and 15% in 2025, then only 2.5% over the past year\u2014the first near-stall in this series, according to the newsletter.<\/p>\n

Product-manager openings have kept rising. Since early 2023, global technology-company PM openings are up 56% in total, versus 43% for engineering openings over the same period. Versus the March 2023 low, PM openings are up 75%, the highest level in nearly four years in that dataset.<\/p>\n

Among five core roles in the report, product management is the only one whose share of actual hires rose, from 16% in 2021 to 21% now.<\/p>\n

Design postings moved the other way. TrueUp counts about 1,900 product-design openings at technology companies worldwide, down 28% year over year and a new low since that tracking began. In early 2023, about 1.9 product-manager openings accompanied each product-design opening; the report puts the ratio now at 3.8 to 1.<\/p>\n

Posted jobs and completed hires do not move together. Since January 2024, engineering openings are up about 44% in total, while the number of engineers U.S. companies actually hired is down about 17%. Product-manager openings have also risen, but actual PM hires over recent years have been roughly flat or down\u2014still better than other core roles in the report. Rachitsky\u2019s reading is that companies may still want strong engineers and product managers, while suitable candidates are harder to find.<\/p>\n

Engineers remain the largest category. TrueUp still shows more than 65,000 engineering openings at the global technology companies it tracks. The scale of software-engineer hiring is much smaller than a few years ago, while product management\u2019s share of core-role hiring has grown.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

Forward-deployed roles rise; frontend and mobile fall<\/h2>\n

Not every engineering specialty is flat. The fastest-growing engineering title in the report is forward deployed engineer (FDE), a role widely associated with Palantir. Unlike engineers who mainly build general product features, FDEs work inside a customer\u2019s business, connecting software, data, and workflows and dealing with real deployment problems. The report says that as companies roll out AI applications, that work is drawing more attention. An FDE may write code, connect internal data, integrate existing systems, build AI-agent workflows, and handle technical issues during deployment.<\/p>\n

TrueUp counts global FDE openings up 4.6 times over the past year, to about 1,500. Public demand for the title had usually been only in the dozens. Rachitsky also notes that some of the increase may be renaming\u2014for example, sales-engineer roles retitled as FDE\u2014rather than new positions.<\/p>\n

Live Data Technologies\u2019 U.S. figures, covering January 1 through November 6, 2026, say Palantir hired at least 151 forward deployed engineers from other employers. Google, Accenture, and Salesforce are also hiring for the role; Google hired at least 122 FDEs from other employers in that window.<\/p>\n

Over the same past year, TrueUp shows frontend and mobile-development openings each nearly cut in half. Security engineering is described as one of the fastest-growing engineering specialties, behind only FDE.<\/p>\n

InfoQ links that split to the Manus example: product managers and designers using AI to take part in coding, and FDEs expected to understand a customer\u2019s business, join systems together, and get a deployment working. The report\u2019s suggestion is that understanding the business, coordinating technical pieces, and driving a problem to a result is being weighted more heavily in some engineering jobs than simply carrying out a task.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

Skills named in job posts<\/h2>\n

Rachitsky\u2019s read of job descriptions also shows a shift in named skills.<\/p>\n

Two years earlier, the skills appearing most often in product-manager posts were mainly SQL, Jira, AWS, and Python. In the latest descriptions, large language models (LLMs) are the most frequent skill keyword. Claude ranks third. Cursor, OpenAI, and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) are in the top eight, and AI model and application evaluation (\u201cEvals\u201d) is in the top ten.<\/p>\n

For engineering posts, Python is still the most mentioned skill and demand for it is still growing, but mentions of LLMs have passed Java, which declined over the past year. Traditional infrastructure skills such as Kubernetes remain in high demand.<\/p>\n

For design posts, Figma is still the most mentioned skill. This spring, Claude passed CSS to become the second most common keyword, and Cursor also appears more often than CSS. InfoQ notes that this lines up with Manus having designers work directly in code.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n

A Gartner forecast, not a headcount<\/h2>\n

A Gartner forecast released on November 10, 2026 says that by 2030 more than 20% of workers worldwide may need to change what they do and how they work. It expects the technology industry to be especially exposed, with nearly 70% of practitioners under a relatively high degree of AI impact.<\/p>\n

Gartner analyst Helen Poitevin said companies further along in AI use have already started redesigning operations and the split of work between employees and technology. InfoQ\u2019s closing point, drawn from the Manus process and the skill shifts in Rachitsky\u2019s report, is that employers are looking not only at whether someone can do one specialty, but also at whether they can use AI for work that used to take several roles. Specialist skill is still described as the base; combining it with AI tools to solve a real problem is presented as a further hiring requirement.<\/p>\n

Original article: https:\/\/www.infoq.cn\/article\/HKFSZ6a0DM97BV7FXP2t<\/p>\n

Sources cited in that article: a Web Summit post (https:\/\/x.com\/websummit\/status\/2119882930549858640?s=46), State of the Tech Job Market: Late 2026<\/em> (https:\/\/www.lennysnewsletter.com\/p\/state-of-the-tech-job-market-late), and a Gartner link (https:\/\/gtnr.it\/4etqMgt).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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