State of Software Engineers 2019: global demand for AR/VR engineers up by 1,400%, gaming developers up 146%, security engineers up 49% but slower than in 2018
Overview — The worldwide process of digital transformation, while something of a buzzword, reflects a critical truth: every company is now a technology company.
Context & Ripple Effects
Hired's [[a:|State of Software Engineers]] report captured the pre-pandemic peak of specialty hiring: AR/VR demand up 1,400% globally, gaming developers up 146%, and security engineers up 49% — notable mainly because that was a slowdown from 2018. The AR/VR spike was acute enough that within months tech companies began poaching Hollywood's visual artists to fill the gap.
The arc since then shows how cyclical these specialty booms are: by late 2023, ~90% of surveyed engineers said getting hired had gotten harder than pre-pandemic, yet by Q1 2026 security postings were surging again, up 11% YoY, this time driven by AI-generated code threats — the same role whose growth Hired flagged as cooling.
First-order effects
- AR/VR and gaming employers face an immediate talent squeeze at 2019 demand levels, pushing them beyond the traditional engineering pool — toward adjacent creative labor like film VFX artists.
- Security engineers see their bargaining power soften even as absolute demand grows, since 49% growth trails the prior year's pace and signals supply catching up.
Second-order effects
- Hollywood studios lose visual-effects and 3D talent to tech employers offering better conditions, raising production costs on the content side just as AR/VR platforms scale.
- Slower security-hiring growth lets enterprises backfill cheaper in 2019-2020 — a lull that reverses hard once AI-driven threats reignite posting growth years later.
Third-order effects
- Specialty engineering labor markets behave as rotating booms: whichever stack is 'hot' (AR/VR in 2019, security again by 2026) reprices first, while generalist demand swings with the broader cycle of layoffs and record tech employment.
- If each wave follows this pattern, workforce planning shifts from headcount forecasting to specialty rotation — companies staffing for the current spike risk over-hiring into the next trough.
The trend: Engineering demand rotates through specialty booms — AR/VR and gaming in 2019, security re-accelerating by 2026 — with each wave repricing niche talent ahead of the broader hiring cycle.