#hiring

The year is 2026. The unemployment rate just printed 4.28%, AI capex is 2% of GDP (650bn), AI adjacent commodities are up 65% since Jan-23 and approximately 2,800 data centers are planned for construction in the US*. In spite of the current displacement narrative – job postings for software engineers are rising rapidly, up 11% YoY.

Indeed Job Postings: Software Engineers + Overall Postings, Daily and 21dma

The more important question insofar as it relates to the AI displacement narrative is: how intensely is AI being used for work? We can tease out the answer from a subset of the St Louis Fed data that buckets by frequency of AI use. We would posit that if AI represents imminent displacement risk, the real time population data would show an inflection upwards in the daily use of AI for work. The data seems unexpectedly stable and presents little evidence of any imminent displacement risk (solid lines at the bottom of the chart).

Displacing white collar work would require orders of magnitude more compute intensity than the current level utilization. If automation expands rapidly, demand for compute definitionally rises, pushing up its marginal cost. If the marginal cost of compute rises above the marginal cost of human labor for certain tasks, substitution will not occur, creating a natural economic boundary. This dynamic contrasts sharply with narratives assuming frictionless replication of intelligence. Even if algorithms improve recursively, economic deployment remains bounded by physical capital, energy availability, regulatory approvals, and organizational change.

For AI to generate a sustained macro contraction one must assume that labor income falls and no compensating rise occurs in investment, fiscal transfers, or external demand. The surge in new business formation is an interesting point of reference here.

Last year the US added an average of just 15,000 jobs a month, very few by historic standards.

Layoffs have remained limited, apart from some high-profile cuts at firms such as Amazon and UPS and the unemployment rate has held steady at around 4.3%. Meanwhile, the wider economy continues to grow, expanding at a robust annual pace of 4.4% in the most recent figures.

Last October the investment bank Goldman Sachs put out a report, which was widely cited, suggesting the US could be facing a new period of "jobless growth" thanks to the arrival of new technology and artificial intelligence (AI) in particular, allowing companies to do more with fewer workers.

Research suggests job losses due to AI have remained concentrated to just a few sectors. And many US firms, especially in tech, still have on their payrolls a glut of workers who were brought on during the pandemic, when there was a small hiring boom. That could also help explain the lack of new vacancies.

Laura Ullrich, director of economic research at Indeed, said in her view another reason hiring appetites took a hit last year was the uncertainty stemming from the Trump administration's cuts to government spending and his programme of tariffs. Assuming the economy remains strong, she does not think the new jobs numbers will stay this low. "I would definitely not call it a new normal, because I don't think it's normal," she said. "I don't think you can sustain the kind of labour market that we're in over the long term. "Having a very low-hire, low-fire, low-quits environment in a period of economic growth can only last so long."

I've been wondering myself lately: Is AI working for us, or are we working for AI?

What they found across more than 40 “in-depth” interviews was that nobody was pressured at this company. Nobody was told to hit new targets. People just started doing more because the tools made more feel doable. But because they could do these things, work began bleeding into lunch breaks and late evenings. The employees’ to-do lists expanded to fill every hour that AI freed up, and then kept going.

As one engineer told them, “You had thought that maybe, oh, because you could be more productive with AI, then you save some time, you can work less. But then really, you don’t work less. You just work the same amount or even more.”

Over on the tech industry forum Hacker News, one commenter had the same reaction, writing, “I feel this. Since my team has jumped into an AI everything working style, expectations have tripled, stress has tripled and actual productivity has only gone up by maybe 10%. It feels like leadership is putting immense pressure on everyone to prove their investment in AI is worth it and we all feel the pressure to try to show them it is while actually having to work longer hours to do so.”

The researchers’ new findings aren’t entirely novel. A separate trial last summer found experienced developers using AI tools took 19% longer on tasks while believing they were 20% faster. Around the same time, a National Bureau of Economic Research study tracking AI adoption across thousands of workplaces found that productivity gains amounted to just 3% in time savings, with no significant impact on earnings or hours worked in any occupation. Both studies have gotten picked apart.

Connecting the most prolific open source maintainers & contributors with their next jobs

The thread is called “Who is hiring?” And they get posted monthly-ish.

The report stated that layoffs are up 118% from the same period last year and 205% from December 2025. On the inverse side, employers added 5,306 jobs, the lowest since January 2009. It’s important to note that Challenger began tracking labor data in January 2009.  “Generally, we see a high number of job cuts in the first quarter, but this is a high total for January,” said Andy Challenger, the workplace expert and chief revenue officer of the company. “It means most of these plans were set at the end of 2025, signaling employers are less-than-optimistic about the outlook for 2026.” Transportation had the most cuts in January at 31,243, according to the report. The majority of these cuts came from UPS’s major layoff announcement.  Amazon, one of the tech industry’s largest companies, also announced significant job cuts. The company said it would lay off 16,000 workers, mostly corporate-level employees. The Challenger report said Amazon was the main contributor to the nearly 23,000 job cuts the tech industry saw last month.  The health care industry also saw large cuts, with more than 17,000 workers losing their jobs. That was the largest staff reduction for the industry since April 2020, the report stated.  “Healthcare providers and hospital systems are grappling with inflation and high labor costs,” researchers wrote. “Lower reimbursements from Medicaid and Medicare are also hitting hospital systems. These pressures are leading to job cuts, as well as other cutting measures, such as some pay and benefits.”

2010 - Dec 2025

The job openings rate, at 3.9 percent, changed little over the month. The number of job openings decreased in professional and business services (-257,000), retail trade (-195,000), and finance and insurance (-120,000). (See table 1.)

The number of job openings for November was revised down by 218,000 to 6.9 million, the number of hires was revised up by 6,000 to 5.1 million