18% Increase in Engineering Executive Demand While Hiring Timelines Double—Are We Promoting People Before We Have Teams to Lead?

alex_technical · April 10, 2026, 5:37am

I’ve been tracking something paradoxical in our leadership pipeline that I haven’t seen discussed enough: We’re facing an 18% projected increase in demand for engineering executive roles by 2026, while simultaneously watching hiring timelines stretch to 40-50 days for mid-to-senior engineering positions. Meanwhile, we’ve had 227 layoffs at tech companies this year affecting 91,679 people.

Let me share what’s happening at our company: We just promoted two engineering managers to senior director roles in Q1. Both are exceptionally talented, both earned the promotions based on their leadership during our platform rewrite. But here’s the thing—we also had a hiring freeze that same quarter. So we now have two senior directors whose primary job is… leading teams we’re not allowed to hire.

The leadership shortage is real, but the timing is bizarre:

According to industry data, there are roughly three jobs for every one qualified engineering candidate at the leadership level. The EV sector alone needs a 30% increase in engineering executive hires by 2026. Compensation for top-tier engineering executives is projected to increase 10-15% year-over-year.

Meanwhile, mid-level management—project managers, program managers, team leads—has emerged as a surprisingly vulnerable category. Companies are cutting coordination roles while desperately seeking strategic leadership. ASML, for example, is laying off 1,700 employees, mainly in management roles, to shift toward more engineering positions.

Here’s what I’m wrestling with:

Are we promoting people to leadership roles that may not exist in 12 months? If the team you’re supposed to lead is frozen or shrinking, what exactly are you leading?
Is this a self-fulfilling prophecy? We promote people into VP/Director roles because “the market demands it,” which creates scarcity, which drives up compensation, which makes leadership positions even more expensive to fill, which leads to more aggressive internal promotions to avoid market rates.
What happens to career progression when the pyramid inverts? If we keep promoting people into leadership while freezing or cutting IC headcount, we end up with a lot of chiefs and not enough builders. How sustainable is that?

The data paints a strange picture:

Engineering executive demand: +18% and rising
Time to hire senior talent: 40-50 days (and growing)
Tech layoffs in 2026: 91,679 people so far (926/day)
Leadership roles identified as “safest” despite widespread cuts
Mid-level management roles getting automated or eliminated

I see three possible explanations:

Option A: This is a genuine structural shift. AI is eliminating coordination work but increasing the need for strategic leadership. We actually do need more VPs and Directors to guide smaller, more autonomous teams through rapid technological change.

Option B: This is organizational theater. Companies are promoting people to leadership titles as a retention tool or status signal, without corresponding increases in scope or resources. It’s inflation of titles rather than real growth.

Option C: We’re in a transition nobody understands yet. The old model (large teams, hierarchical management) is dying. The new model (small teams, distributed ownership) isn’t fully formed. We’re promoting people into leadership roles for a world that doesn’t exist yet.

What I’m seeing in practice:

Our two new senior directors are doing good work—don’t get me wrong. But they’re leading by influence rather than authority. They’re setting strategy, mentoring, removing blockers, and doing architectural oversight. It’s leadership, but it’s not the traditional “build and scale a team” leadership the role was originally defined around.

Which makes me wonder: Are we redefining what engineering leadership means, or are we just creating expensive titles for work that used to be done by senior ICs?

I’d love to hear from other engineering leaders:

Are you seeing this pattern at your companies? Leadership promotions during hiring freezes or headcount cuts?
How do you assess readiness for leadership roles when the traditional “build and scale a team” mandate isn’t there?
For those who’ve been promoted into leadership during this transition—what does your day-to-day actually look like? How much is people leadership vs. technical strategy?
Is the 18% demand increase real, or is it statistical noise from a weird labor market?

I’m genuinely curious whether we’re witnessing the evolution of engineering leadership or just creating a lot of Director+ titles we’ll have to unwind in 18 months.

Sources:

carlos_ml · April 10, 2026, 5:37am

This hits close to home. We’re living a version of this at my EdTech startup right now, and I think the answer is Option C with elements of A and B mixed in.

We promoted three people to engineering manager roles in the past 6 months. Two of them now manage teams of 4-5 people (we had hiring freezes too), and one is a “manager of one” managing only himself plus “technical leadership responsibilities.” That last one feels like organizational theater—we wanted to retain him, he wanted the title, but we couldn’t justify hiring a team for him to actually manage.

What I’m seeing that supports Option A (genuine structural shift):

The work of leadership has fundamentally changed. Our engineering managers spend maybe 30% of their time on traditional people management (1:1s, performance reviews, hiring when we can). The other 70% is:

Technical strategy and architecture decisions that affect multiple teams
Cross-functional alignment with product, design, and data teams
Navigating ambiguity in our AI strategy (what to build vs. buy vs. partner)
Mentoring and upskilling teams on new tech (we’re all learning AI tooling together)

In 2019, an engineering manager with a team of 8 would spend most of their time managing those 8 people. In 2026, an engineering manager with a team of 4 spends most of their time influencing outcomes across 20+ people they don’t directly manage.

But here’s where Option B (organizational theater) creeps in:

We’re absolutely using titles as retention tools. When we can’t offer team growth, equity refreshers, or big compensation bumps, we offer “Senior” or “Staff” or “Manager” titles. It’s cheaper than raises, and it helps people’s resumes if/when they leave.

The uncomfortable truth: We’ve created a two-tier manager track.

Tier 1: Traditional people managers (hiring, firing, performance reviews, team budgets)
Tier 2: “Technical leaders” with manager titles but limited people management scope

And we’re not always transparent about which tier someone is in. People get promoted thinking they’re getting Tier 1, but the reality is Tier 2 because we don’t have the headcount.

What worries me most:

When hiring eventually opens back up (and it will), we’ll have a cohort of “managers” who haven’t actually built teams, navigated hiring, or dealt with performance management at scale. They’ll have the title and the compensation expectations, but they won’t have the traditional skillset.

That’s either:

Good (because the traditional skillset is becoming less important)
Bad (because we’re setting people up to fail when they move to their next role)
Neutral (because leadership is becoming so contextual that skills don’t transfer anyway)

I honestly don’t know which it is yet.

One thing I’m convinced of:

The 18% demand increase is real, but it’s not demand for the same role that existed in 2020. Companies need strategic technical leaders who can do more with less, navigate AI disruption, and influence without authority. We just haven’t updated our job descriptions, interview loops, or promotion criteria to match.

We’re promoting people into 2026 leadership roles using 2019 evaluation criteria. That’s the real mismatch.

maya_builds · April 10, 2026, 5:37am

I’m going to push back a bit on the framing here. The question isn’t “Are we promoting people before we have teams to lead?”—it’s “Why are we still defining leadership success by team size in 2026?”

Our Fortune 500 financial services company went through this exact transition 18 months ago. We had 12 directors managing teams averaging 25-30 engineers each. Post-restructuring and AI tooling adoption, we now have 15 directors managing teams averaging 12-15 engineers each.

On paper, this looks like the “inverted pyramid” problem Michelle described. More leaders, fewer ICs. Title inflation. Organizational bloat.

But here’s what actually happened:

The scope of what those directors manage expanded dramatically, even as headcount contracted:

Technology surface area grew 3x. We used to have 8 core services. Now we have 24 microservices, 6 AI/ML pipelines, 5 third-party integrations, and a distributed data platform. Smaller teams, way more technical complexity.
Decision velocity requirements increased. We used to ship quarterly. Now we ship weekly. Directors aren’t managing more people—they’re managing more decisions, more dependencies, more risk.
AI tooling changed the math. A team of 12 engineers with solid AI tooling and automation can outproduce a team of 25 from 2023. The director’s job isn’t building a bigger team—it’s maximizing leverage through technology.

So when you ask “Are we promoting people before we have teams to lead?” I’d reframe it:

We’re promoting people to lead outcomes, not headcount.

If a director can deliver $10M in business value with a team of 8 using AI tooling, automation, and strategic architecture decisions, why do they need a team of 25? The old model optimized for people management. The new model optimizes for outcome delivery.

That said, you’re right about the risks:

We absolutely have directors who got promoted based on people management skills and are now struggling because the job is 70% technical strategy, 20% cross-functional influence, and 10% people management. Their strength was coaching and development. Now they’re expected to be technical visionaries who can translate business strategy into architectural decisions.

The pattern I’m seeing:

Technical leadership >> People leadership in importance for director+ roles
Influence without authority is the core skill (because you rarely have enough headcount)
Strategic decision-making under uncertainty (especially around AI) matters more than hiring/firing

This isn’t necessarily good or bad—it’s just different. But we need to:

Update promotion criteria to reflect the new reality (less “can you scale a team?” and more “can you scale impact?”)
Invest in reskilling for leaders who were promoted under the old model
Be honest about expectations when promoting people (you’re not getting a team of 30, you’re getting strategic ownership of an outcome)

To Michelle’s question about the two senior directors:

If they’re setting strategy, doing architectural oversight, mentoring, and removing blockers—that’s not “expensive IC work.” That’s exactly what modern engineering leadership looks like. The fact that they’re leading by influence rather than authority isn’t a bug, it’s the feature.

The real question is: Are they delivering outcomes that justify the title and compensation? If yes, the headcount number is irrelevant.

diana_data · April 10, 2026, 5:37am

This is such an important conversation, and I want to bring a product lens to it because I think there’s a parallel question we’re not asking: If we’re promoting leaders before they have teams, are we also defining products before we have customers?

At our Series B SaaS company, we’ve been wrestling with a similar paradox. We hired a VP of Engineering 8 months ago to “scale the team from 15 to 40 engineers.” Six months in, we’re at 18 engineers, and we’re probably not hiring beyond 25 this year. Did we hire too early? Or did the role evolve?

Here’s what I’ve observed from the product side:

The leadership demand spike isn’t about managing more people—it’s about managing more uncertainty.

In 2023, product roadmaps were relatively predictable. You could plan 2-3 quarters out. Engineering leaders built teams to execute those roadmaps.

In 2026, we’re operating in 6-week cycles. Our roadmap changes every quarter based on:

Competitor AI feature launches that commoditize our differentiation overnight
Customer expectations that shift faster than we can ship
Make-or-buy decisions for AI capabilities that didn’t exist 90 days ago

Our VP of Engineering isn’t managing a team of 40. She’s managing the strategic question: “What should we build vs. buy vs. partner vs. sunset?” every single week. That requires a VP-level strategic thinker, not a senior engineering manager.

The mismatch isn’t team size—it’s that we’re hiring for uncertainty management, not execution management.

Where I think the 18% demand increase comes from:

Companies are realizing they need more strategic decision-makers, not more people managers.

A senior IC can build features. A manager can coordinate a team to build features. A director can align multiple teams to build a coherent product.
But a VP or SVP can decide which features not to build, which bets to place, which technical investments to make when the landscape is changing every quarter.

That’s not a scalable skill. You can’t outsource it to an IC or automate it with AI. You need experienced leaders who can synthesize technical constraints, market dynamics, and business strategy under extreme uncertainty.

The question isn’t “Do they have teams to lead?”—it’s “Do they have decisions to make?”

But here’s where I agree with the concern:

If we’re promoting people into leadership roles because we need a title to compete for talent, not because we have strategic decisions that justify the role—that’s title inflation. And it creates two problems:

Expensive overhead (director-level comp without director-level impact)
Career misalignment (people expect to build teams and instead get “strategic advisory” work that may or may not match their strengths)

How we’re thinking about this at our company:

Before we promote someone to director or VP, we ask:

What decisions will they own that an IC or manager can’t make?
What’s the business impact if those decisions are made poorly?
Do we have enough uncertainty and complexity to justify strategic leadership?

If the answers are “not many,” “low,” and “no”—then it’s probably a retention promotion masquerading as a leadership role. And those tend to disappoint everyone involved.

To Michelle’s original question:

If your two senior directors are making strategic calls that materially impact the business—architecture decisions, build-vs-buy tradeoffs, technical debt prioritization, cross-functional alignment—then they’re doing director-level work, even if they’re not hiring a team.

If they’re mostly doing IC work with a fancy title, that’s different. But based on your description (strategy, mentorship, architectural oversight), it sounds like the former.

The real risk isn’t promoting leaders without teams. It’s promoting leaders without clearly defined strategic outcomes they’re accountable for.