Prompt Engineer or Generalist: Which Path Pays More and How to Break In in 2026
You’re on a lunch break, scrolling job posts with one eye on your bank app. One role says “Prompt Engineer — $160k.” Another says “AI Generalist — $95k to $130k.”…
You’re on a lunch break, scrolling job posts with one eye on your bank app. One role says “Prompt Engineer — $160k.” Another says “AI Generalist — $95k to $130k.”…
You’re in your apartment at 11:47 p.m., polishing your portfolio one more time. You paste a take‑home prompt into an AI tool “just to check your approach,” and it spits…
You just rolled out AI-assisted coding across the org. The demo was magic. PRs doubled. Everyone cheered. Then two months later, your on-call channel turns into a crime scene. The…
You’re on call at 2:13 a.m. A service is flapping, CPU is fine, memory is fine, and yet the process is gone—again. The postmortem will say “use-after-free” in a library…
Last month, a staff engineer told me a story I can’t shake. Their team added an AI coding agent to “speed things up.” It worked—until the first production incident. Nobody…
You did the “right” things. You finished the degree or the bootcamp. You built a few projects. Then you opened the job boards and saw it: “Entry-level” roles asking for…
It’s 2:10 a.m. Your monorepo build is still running. The on-call channel is quiet, but you can feel the tension anyway. Tomorrow morning, someone will ask the same question they…
You’re in a sprint review. Someone shares a screen recording: a list page that “feels sticky” when you type in the search box. You already tried memoizing a few components.…
You’re in a meeting. Someone says, “We need better prompts.” All eyes turn to you because you’re the one who “gets” ChatGPT. You laugh, but inside you think: Could I…
You’re on a Tuesday standup call, half listening, half watching Slack light up. Another “reorg” rumor. Another teammate quietly updating LinkedIn. You close your laptop and look at the other…