As AI hits software sector, defense-tech flourishes - The Jerusalem Post

The Israeli recruiting firm GotFriends has published a survey that reads like a eulogy for the civilian software industry. Defense-tech startups are aggressively expanding while other tech companies reduce staff, with new jobs up 20% in 2026 and wages up about 8% as firms compete for engineers. AI didn't just enter the software sector; it inherited it, and the only buyer at the estate sale is the military. When the most vibrant corner of your job market is the one selling precision-guided everything, you know the singularity arrived with a target package.

You can see the logic, in the way you can see the logic of a mousetrap. AI has apparently become good enough to write CRM software and yet another fintech app, so the human surplus is shoved toward the one industry where the customer never complains about the price. GotFriends' numbers are a perfect inversion of the old Silicon Valley dream: instead of disrupting defense, software engineers now get to be disrupted by it. And the 8% wage bump? That's the market's way of saying 'we will pay you to feel better about writing kill-chain middleware.'

Nobody at GotFriends is shedding tears, obviously — a recruiting firm, like a vulture, needs carcasses. But for the broader software sector, this is the clearest signal yet that the industry's centre of gravity has shifted from 'move fast and break things' to 'move fast and break people.' The irony is almost too neat: AI automates the software industry, and the only people left with jobs are the ones working on the hardware that automates the decision to fire a missile. So here's to the engineers who spent a decade mocking the military-industrial complex and now update their CVs for it. The 2026 job market has spoken, and it wants you to build something that goes boom.