External signal·The Economist·Apr 13, 2026·5 min read
The tech jobs bust is real. Don't blame AI (yet)
“Tech jobs aren't going away. They are spreading through the economy.”
Summary
US tech firms are cutting jobs — Oracle, Block (more than 4,000 roles, nearly half its workforce), Amazon and Meta — and technology's share of US employment has slipped from a 2.5% peak in late 2022 to 2.3%, leaving more than 500,000 tech jobs "missing" relative to trend. The piece argues AI is probably not yet the cause. AI coding tools were primitive until Anthropic's Claude Code (February 2025); adoption is still low (the Census Bureau finds only about 25% of San Francisco-area firms use AI regularly, less elsewhere); and a Bank of England survey finds AI has had essentially zero employment impact over three years. History rhymes: tech hiring also stagnated in the mid-2000s due to the dotcom bust, outsourcing to firms like TCS and Infosys, and rising interest rates — the same forces (post-pandemic over-hiring, 2022 rate rises, a doubling of cloud-service imports) better explain today's slowdown. Meanwhile tech-skilled work is spreading into non-tech industries, with computer and software headcount up 12% in retail, 75% in property and nearly 100% in construction from 2022 to 2025.
Predictions for the future of work
Argues the tech-employment slowdown is, for now, mostly cyclical and structural — interest rates, offshoring and a post-pandemic correction — rather than an AI displacement event, at least until AI tools mature and adoption rises. Expects tech skills to keep diffusing across the wider economy, so tech work spreads rather than disappears.
Originally published by The Economist · Apr 13, 2026
Read the original at The Economist