Microsoft Says the Pandemic Just Created 150 Million Future Tech Jobs

Microsoft put out a post on Thursday that’s worth sitting with if you write code for a living, or you’re trying to convince someone else that they should. The pitch: the upheaval of 2020 didn’t just move meetings onto Teams and Zoom, it permanently rewired how companies think about hiring technical talent, and the ripple effects are going to show up in the job market for years.

The headline number is LinkedIn data showing remote job postings jumped 4.5x over the course of 2020. That’s a stat that’s been making the rounds since the start of the year, but Microsoft is using it as the foundation for a much bigger claim: roughly 150 million new tech and tech-adjacent jobs globally over the next five years. Not just software engineering roles — the “tech-adjacent” framing covers everything from IT support to data analysis to the kind of light scripting and automation work that’s crept into finance, marketing, and operations roles that never used to touch a terminal.

The other data point Microsoft leaned on is LinkedIn’s list of fastest-growing skills since the pandemic began, and programming sits at the top. That tracks with what a lot of us have been seeing anecdotally — bootcamps and online course platforms reporting surges in enrollment, self-taught developers posting portfolio projects, more non-technical coworkers asking how to automate a spreadsheet task instead of doing it by hand every week.

None of this should be shocking on its own. Remote work made location less of a hiring constraint, which widened the applicant pool for every open role and, in theory, should have made technical hiring easier rather than harder. But it also means more companies are competing for the same visible pool of experienced engineers, which is part of why “learn to code” has stopped being a niche career-changer pitch and started looking like basic professional insurance.

What I’ll be watching over the next few months is whether the demand materializes as broadly as Microsoft is projecting, or whether it concentrates in the usual suspects — cloud infrastructure, security, data engineering — while other corners of tech stay flat or even contract. A 150 million figure spread across five years and the entire globe is the kind of number that sounds enormous until you break it down by region and specialty. It’s also worth remembering this is coming from a company that sells training certifications and cloud services, so a rosy jobs outlook isn’t exactly against its interests.

Still, the underlying trend — remote work lowering the barrier to entry for technical roles, and companies leaning harder on software to survive a year that broke a lot of traditional operations — feels real even if the exact number turns out to be generous.