Is America's Tech Industry Already Facing a Recession? (msn.com) 66
America's unemployment rate for tech jobs rose to 4% in November, and "has been steadily rising since May," reports the Washington Post (citing data from the IT training/certifications company CompTIA).
Between October and November, the number of technology workers across different industries fell 134,000, while the number of people working in the tech industry declined by more than 6,800. Tech job postings were also down by more than 31,800, the report found, citing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and California-based market intelligence firm Lightcast. "The data is pretty definitive that the tech industry is struggling," said Mark Zandi, Moody's chief economist. "There's a jobs recession in the industry, and it feels like that's going to continue given the slide in postings...."
The unemployment rate in the tech industry still sits below the national rate, which in November hit 4.6 percent, the highest since 2021. However, that gap has been narrowing, with tech unemployment rising faster in recent months than is the case nationally.... Employers are largely in "wait and see" mode when it comes to hiring given the current uncertainties surrounding the economy and impact of AI, so they're likely to delay backfilling, Herbert said, citing CompTIA's surveys of chief information officers. But Justin Wolfers, professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, said uncertainty is likely to continue in the foreseeable future. "I'm feeling substantially more pessimistic," Wolfers said, recalling that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell recently suggested that federal job numbers may be overstated. "That's pretty grim."
Technology companies have announced more than 141,000 job cuts so far this year, representing a 17 percent increase from the same period last year, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. At the same time Big Tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon have announced plans to invest up to $375 billion in AI infrastructure this year.
"AI is quickly becoming a requirement, with 41 percent of all active job postings representing AI roles or requiring AI skills, according to CompTIA's analysis," the article points out.
Economist Zandi tells the Post that "If you have AI skills, there seems to be jobs. But if you don't, I think it's going to feel like you've been hit by a dump truck."
The unemployment rate in the tech industry still sits below the national rate, which in November hit 4.6 percent, the highest since 2021. However, that gap has been narrowing, with tech unemployment rising faster in recent months than is the case nationally.... Employers are largely in "wait and see" mode when it comes to hiring given the current uncertainties surrounding the economy and impact of AI, so they're likely to delay backfilling, Herbert said, citing CompTIA's surveys of chief information officers. But Justin Wolfers, professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, said uncertainty is likely to continue in the foreseeable future. "I'm feeling substantially more pessimistic," Wolfers said, recalling that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell recently suggested that federal job numbers may be overstated. "That's pretty grim."
Technology companies have announced more than 141,000 job cuts so far this year, representing a 17 percent increase from the same period last year, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. At the same time Big Tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon have announced plans to invest up to $375 billion in AI infrastructure this year.
"AI is quickly becoming a requirement, with 41 percent of all active job postings representing AI roles or requiring AI skills, according to CompTIA's analysis," the article points out.
Economist Zandi tells the Post that "If you have AI skills, there seems to be jobs. But if you don't, I think it's going to feel like you've been hit by a dump truck."
Yes (Score:5, Informative)
How many times do we have say it the us economy with the exception of AI stock prices is in recession
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No matter how many times you say it, it won't matter, because you're not loud enough now [yahoo.com] and you'll be forgotten later.
Those damned surfers want to have big waves and bubbles and to ride them.
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Abandon hope, all ye who press enter here.
quantum immortality (Score:2)
https://www.msn.com/en-us/scie... [msn.com]
"Death is the inescapable conclusion of life. But what happens after death is still a highly debated topic. Throw into the mix a heady combination of religious belief and scientific theories, and you have the potential to create an endless array of possibilities. One intriguing notion is called quantum immortality. Imagine that the universe splits into countless parallel realities after any small event. Now, say for example, you end up in an acci
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It is obvious why this is happening. quantum immortality didn't exist before 2008 when the LHC was turned on and destroyed the entire universe, and anyone pretending otherwise is just backflling lore to cope with the fact that reality has felt off ever since You are telling me it is a coincidence that nothing has felt solid, permanent, or meaningful since that exact moment? That history started looping, culture got stuck, politics turned into a bad rerun , and eveyone suddenly had a vague sense that they already lived through this timeline once Before 2008, death meant something. Things ended. Companies failed, trends died, wars concluded, and people actually moved on. Then CERN fires up a planet sized god machine, smashes particles together to see what happens, and suddenly we are all stuck in this half broken save file where nothing fully collapses and nothing fully recovers. Every disaster is almost catastrophic Every collapse is narrowly avoided Every system limps forward like it should have already died three times. Quantum immortality is not some deep physics insight. It is the psychological scar tissue of a universe that already ended. We are not immortal because of probability. We are immortal because this is the version of reality where the universe failed to fully reboot. Consciousness just keeps sliding sideways into the nearest surviving branch no matter how degraded it is. That is why everything feels worse but never final. That is why the world feels like a glitchy MMO server that the admins abandoned. now we are all stuck riding the least broken timeline left.
The world ended in 1999. The LHC had to be created within the simulation we've been living in ever since just to rebalance things and get us to a stable point. It's not the LHC's fault that the stable point was one of vague unease due to the fundamentally unstable point it happened to fire off at. Stability was the goal, and stability it found. That stability feels like teetering on the precipice because we were, and now always will be, teetering on the precipice.
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No, it wasn't then. Charlie Stross revealed the TRVTH the other day - it was when a pine marten cut the power to CERN, and one entire trouser leg of time vanished... in the spring of 2016. Otherwise, one Trump would be sitting and weaving baskets in an assisted retirement home.
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Sure, things are worse than they used to be for tech workers. But I think we've forgotten what "recession" means.
An unemployment rate of 4%, lower than the economy as a whole, is not an indicator of a recession. .com bubble burst, tech lost many hundreds of thousands of jobs. https://ssti.org/blog/report-f... [ssti.org] This isn't even in the same league.
Sure, a loss of 6,800 jobs isn't great, but when the
Our problem is that we remember fondly the days of 2020 and 2021, when developers were routinely getting 3-5 job o
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I see your 400k and raise... (Score:3)
According to the site below, this "isn't even in the same" league as the .com bubble crash, because it's about twice as big.
https://www.trueup.io/layoffs [trueup.io]
It may be that the two sites aren't counting job losses in the same way. But if they're off by 2-to-1, this is basically a repeat of the .com crash.
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So, your site says 209,838 people have been laid off from the tech sector. .com bubble burst.
My reference said 403,000 people were laid off after the
How does your math work again?
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Over what time do your figures for the dot com bubble bursting cover (and the numbers would include me, personally)? This is *just* this year, not even a full 12 months.
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Good question, and one that can't be answered with the data provided so far. The tech sector layoffs cited are *not* all due to AI. In 2021-2022, the tech sector dramatically over-hired. Many of the layoffs are more about right-sizing, than AI. Companies like to blame AI for the layoffs, because that explanation is more palatable to investors, than "we hired too many people."
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It says 209k have been laid off from the tech sector **in 2025.**
2024 was slightly more, at 239k.
2023 was much more, at 430k.
2022, was slightly more again, at 244k.
Add those numbers together...
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I call BS. In 2022 and 2023, everybody was scrounging for developers and other technical people. They were getting multiple offers and having to choose between them. I know, because I had to hire a team of developers in 2023. It was brutal. Remember "quiet quitting"? Those were NOT high-layoff years.
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Forward-thinking companies started laying people off in 2022. I work for one of them.
At the time it was a huge surprise, but it didn't take long to see that they were just early to recognize that startups needed to shift the focus from "grow at any cost" (which everyone was doing at the time) to "break even or die" (which is still where most are at, unless they're on the AI gravy train).
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Of course. There are layoffs happening *all* the time, in the best economic conditions. The fact that "forward-thinking companies" were laying off in 2022, was not a sign of a sinking economic ship that will never come back. It was rather a sign of the normal business cycle. What goes up, must come down. The AI-driven business cycle is no different. It will not be the new thing that kills all economic activity. The economy will continue to roll along.
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I'm not sure who you were arguing with about permanent economic collapse, but it wasn't me. I lived through the .com era and the "great financial crisis" and I assume this just another trough in the waveform.
The only thing we seem to disagree on is when the boom changed to bust.
My employer's board told the CEO in 2022 (summer, IIRC) that there was no more investment coming for the foreseeable future, and that their runway consisted only of the money they had in the bank at that moment. That was after ~4 yea
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You claimed that the AI bubble bursting (the subject of this article) is causing job losses "twice as big" as the .com bubble bursting. You then cite numbers from 2022 and 2023 to support your claim.
But...
Tech boom has slowed, but there are still more Silicon Valley jobs than before the pandemic - https://calmatters.org/economy... [calmatters.org]
Despite layoffs tech jobs are still hot in 2023 - https://americanbazaaronline.c... [americanbazaaronline.com]
The point is, the numbers you cited from https://www.trueup.io/layoffs [trueup.io] are questionable because t
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The article is about a tech-industry recession, and I do believe that there is one. But I do not believe that this slump is due to AI. That's just what companies like attribute their layoffs to.
You make good points about layoffs vs. overall job market, but...
https://e-janco.com/press/2025... [e-janco.com]
That still shows around 200k fewer jobs now than 3 years ago. But the 2025 number is still just an estimate.
It does show growth in '23 though. The writing was on the wall, but I guess not everyone was reading it yet.
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We mostly agree then, particularly on AI not being a significant factor in the job market.
Your article, though, is almost self-contradictory. The headline is bleak, but nearly every graph shows an overall *positive* trend. Even the "overall IT job market size" graph, which shows a decline since the peak in 2022, places the new "lower" market size as larger than 2020, a time period when the market was experiencing rapid growth.
I think it's too early to tell whether we are in an extended decline, or just a te
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I'm sure it's temporary. It sucks for people who get laid off, and that goes double for the people who graduated into this job market, but I don't think it will last much longer than the dot-com or GFC troughs lasted. AI is pretty neat, but it's not the game changer that so many people think it is, other than for call centers where the workers were just reading from scripts.
That page shows things improving since '24 but '24 was also the year the job market shrunk the most.
And it shows the unemployment rate
Is it a "recession" or is it profit taking? (Score:5, Interesting)
Far as I can see, Tech companies are reporting record profits. According to the chart I'm looking at, 3 year returns are up by 140%, and 1 year returns are up by ~20%. (19.7 or so)
Looking at stocks (FANG), 3 are "STRONG BUY" with only Apple lagging at "BUY".
Remember folks, back when "Neural Networks" was all the rage, then all the jobs had requirements for experience in that. Then it was "Web 2.0" craze, and everyone needed that. I remember how excited the PHBs got when they joyously informed us that "We're getting a PORTAL!" And yeah, you really needed that for accounting programming or process control (sarcasm). Now it's Artificial Intelligence. One would believe that we already have enough of that out of the PHBs.
I've been using an AI assistant to code up some python, System Z and COBOL It's pretty meh, with a few instances of introducing some very vexing and irritating subtle bugs more frequently than I would have done left to my own devices. On balance, AI coding has cost me more time and effort with it than without; I do much better recycling my old, already debugged code. It's a poor workman the blames the tool rather than the workman, yes, and so I'm not sure if the failure is my own or that of the tool. I simply know I'm faster with out it at this point. Yes, it could be that I'm "Doing it Wrong". But that in itself is part of the point here. Which brings up another old buzzword "Disruptive advancement".... when all it really did was allow management to believe they were tearing out the old that they didn't understand that frustrated them for the shiny new that costs lots and lots and therefore Must Be Great because It Cost A Lot, and they also didn't understand and ultimately also frustrated them. Well, the smoke dancers always get paid, and those in the trenches slogging out the code just keep getting the air bursts overhead.
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Software Developer jobs may rise in second half of 2026 when "normal" companies realize that that mass of poorly generated AI slop inside their Projects now getting real *users* is breaking, and maintaining that is more expensive than ever because no human had been involved in generating that thing.
Salaries for humans who *can* code will raise again.
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It seems that leaving the AI bubble to fester until 2030, there will be no way to fix the damage it will do. Probably no cash to sustain it that long, too.
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guess who's on the hook to pay?
The people on the hook to pay will be the same either way it goes, as you know very well :)
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AI coding has cost me more time and effort with it than without; I do much better recycling my old, already debugged code.
there is ofc a learning process involved. time and effort spent in mastering any new tool or technique will slow you down initially but might prove to be a worthy investment in the long run. this is typical for any form of automation.
however your particular domain might not be the best suited, or one to benefit the most. you describe a system which seems highly specialized where you already have intricate knowledge and long established procedures. that's not where generators excel, you might think of them m
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I signed into comment that instead of being hit by a dumptruck, its more akin to being a fifty year old at IBM. And then you preempted me.
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A friend of mine started his first job as a machinist some years ago. At first, everything he built was off kilter and he couldn't understand why. His boss finally took the measuring tool he was using and compared it to his own. His Craftsman brand tool just didn't, um, measure up.
Sometimes it really is the tool.
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On balance, AI coding has cost me more time and effort with it than without
That's what more and more people are discovering every day.
It's a poor workman the blames the tool rather than the workman, yes, and so I'm not sure if the failure is my own or that of the tool.
AI is a toy, not a tool. You're definitely not the problem.
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> On balance, AI coding has cost me more time and effort with it than without
1. You're holding it wrong
2. Stop using it
The shittiest tactic and TEARS. (Score:2)
1. Fire the “greedy” that pushed salaries up over the COVID years due to lack of resources and employers being forced to pay more.
2. Log massive quarterly profits driven mostly by headcount reduction. Not-so-struggle through the half-assed holiday season without them. Pay fat Christmas bonuses for all the cost reduction.
3. Re-hire your staff in late January when the holiday squeeze and desperation is maximized, at a 20 - 30% pay cut.
4. Profit even more than you did before. With the added bonu
Pandemic boom and AI swoon (Score:1)
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Stop repeating the pandemic hiring surge nonsense. They just wanted to see if they could save money and whip up enough fear to get everyone back in the office.
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The pandemic hiring surge was a real thing, though. It was a wild time to interview for a job writing software. Everybody was hiring, and every interviewer got multiple competing offers. I left Microsoft for a job whose base salary alone matched my total compensation at MS, and the annual stock grants doubled that. Lots of people who switched jobs during that period have similar stories.
And then the VC money stopped flowing, startups stopped hiring and started shrinking, and a few months later the biggest n
Recession? Nah (Score:2)
This is not yet a recession. But when the AI balloon pops, it will be the mother of all recessions.
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This is not yet a recession. But when the AI balloon pops, it will be the mother of all recessions.
Now that coal mining is out. Can't they all just drive trucks?
Have they tried "not farming"
Plenty of Trump money thrown that way.
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The $14 Billion el Bunko is throwing to the farmers pales in comparison of the $40+ Billion they are out because of that moron. This was just to shut them up and, more importantly for him, shutting up the flesh-eating Republicans in Congress. Recall that asshole came up with $40 Billion for Argentina, a country that has free, state-subsidized health care. el Bunko spent any money he could have used for Americans on his rich pals through the Great Stupid Bill. His rich pals think of themselves as citizens of
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A recovery more like it
Right... (Score:5, Insightful)
So a company that offers AI training/certificates (CompTIA) has analysis that shows AI is a job requirement?
Does that analysis and this post come with a small quantity of Sodium Chloride that I can pinch?
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So a company that offers AI training/certificates (CompTIA) has analysis that shows AI is a job requirement?
Does that analysis and this post come with a small quantity of Sodium Chloride that I can pinch?
The amount of pressure it would take to convince CompTIA to start selling AI, because AI?
Can’t imagine how big of a snort-fart that was. The CEOs approval took longer than the meeting due to giddy laughter overwhelming a signing hand.
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So a company that offers AI training/certificates (CompTIA) has analysis that shows AI is a job requirement?
Does that analysis and this post come with a small quantity of Sodium Chloride that I can pinch?
Honestly this shouldn't surprise you. It turns out that the most market research is done by companies that have a vested interest in the market, not because they are trying to lie to you, but because they themselves need to be informed about the future of their products and how to continue operating.
Whether you believe them or not is up to you, but the fact that they themselves came up with the data should really not be surprising as they are the most obvious people to care enough about this to look into it
The administration stopped releasing stats (Score:2)
And through it all voters will somehow convince themselves that Republicans are better for the economy. Just like how Trump is getting ready to get us into three separate wars (Venezuela Iran and Syria) but somehow the Republicans are American first and less likely to do a draft.
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They just did. Jobs are still being created.
Two different things (Score:2)
Just a note: unemployment rate and recession are not the same thing, even if they are many many times related.
RAM Prices Prevent Hardware Sales (Score:2)
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I just did a build and got 64GB DDR5 for about $500. Same modules were maybe $300 three months ago. It has gone up quite a bit. I donâ(TM)t know if it would kill a new build, depends on how bad I need the rig, but I feel you.
No (Score:2)
I am not an AI developer but... (Score:1)
.
So it is not surprising that "AI" is now in the job description for almost any developer position.
We have a new tool, showing you can use it properly is a sign of a professional engineer, not the dawn of the jobs apocalypse.
Re: I am not an AI developer but... (Score:2)
It reminds me of a Dilbert strip where PHB strings together some Blockchain buzzwords.
Alice: "Did you recently read an article?"
PHB: "Some of it."
Finally come full circle (Score:2)
There is no economic growth only money printing (Score:2)
"Recession" has a specific definition... (Score:2)
and it has nothing to do with what the article talks about. It seems there has been a hiring slowdown in tech, and in many cases cutbacks (some might call it "right-sizing.") In any case, "recession" is the wrong word.