The state of tech-jobs 2025

Ladies and my beloved brilliant simpletons, I bid you welcome to the apocalypse which was formerly known to us as the ‘tech bonanza’.

Let’s wade through the ashes of this former gold mine, now shall we. . .

More rants after the messages:

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In 2024, the great Thanos snapped 150,000 tech jobs out of existence across 549 companies, from scrappy startups to corporate dinosaurs. And January alone started off with 34,107 schlubs sobbing on LinkedIn.

Let’s do some culprit shaming:

Reliance hacked 42,000 jobs like they were clearing a forest for a bloody carpark. Intel, the self-proclaimed AI messiah, gutted 15% of its crew, and Tesla, that car-making cult, yeeted 14,000 souls.

Now if this ain’t a guillotine rave, I don’t know what is.

But. . . Don’t swallow the “AI stole my gig” sob story, cause that ain’t the full truth and nothing but. . .the truth. It is pure horseshit, and it is spun by execs who are polishing their stock options.

We (Chad et. al. and myself) checked the numbers - only 12.4% of 200,000 sacked techies even mumbled AI’s name, and a measly 1.4% said that it straight-up replaced them.

Lemme mansplain this, yo: your job wasn’t nicked by a bot. It was smoked by dumbass budgets, interest rates that spiked post-COVID bloat, and some CEO’s yacht fetish.

I am calling this “Techwashing”, baby - which is slang for ‘blaming circuits for human fuckery’.

Now take them coders - I recently gave you a little glimpse of their soul in this article: The funniest comments ever left in source code | LinkedIn

And Oy vey, it is a true slaughterhouse.

In two years time nearly one in three programming gigs got vaporized. ADP’s got fewer devs in 2024 than in 2018 (the financial crisis) - chew on that, Schlomo. Entry-level coding is now being crushed by interns, LLMs, or some bloke in a Bangalore basement with a dial-up modem and a Red Bull chaser.

Now this is definitely not a market tweak - it is a purge that is so unmistakably brutal that Stalin even would blush.

But what really is torching this clown show is economics.

The Fed cranked its rates up as if they wanted to kick Silicon Valley back into the Stone Age. The results were that cheap cash had vanished, and VCs scurried like roaches, companies realized their payroll was fatter than my dachshund at an all-you-can-eat.

During the pandemic tech went ballistic with their hiring.

They opened up campus recruitment shops, hoping to bind the best developers to their shop instead of the competition, and even tech execs went on a recruitment bender like Zoom calls were the new religion, but the hangover came fast. Venture capital dried up into a crusty footnote, and tax law changes ripped through what was left of R&D departments with the grace of Noel Skum and El Presidente Naranja having a public discussion about who is on the Epstein list.

AI didn’t swing the axe, but high interest rates, vanishing liquidity and execs panic masked as “optimization’ was.

It just held the door.

If you go through the figures of the actual layoff list it reads kinda like a corporate eulogy - 1.6 million office clerks, 830,000 retail drones, 710,000 admin placeholders, and 630,000 customer support voices, were all erased not by brilliance of the AI, but by repetition - “the duller the job, the faster it went”.

Basically, tasks that are so numbing they could sedate my always snoring Weiner was ground zero for automation.

And AI was the perfect scapegoat.

The interest rates were the silent job assassin

When the pandemic hit, central banks (like the Fed in the US) all across the globe cut interest rates to near zero. That made borrowing money dirt cheap, so every startup, Big Tech mogul, and crypto clown could raise millions with a pitch deck made in Canva. VCs were tossing cash like it was Monopoly money, and as a result companies hired like crazy, engineers, PMs, TikTok specialists, office baristas, all of it.

But when COVID was gone, in 2023–2025, inflation went berserk because demand spiked, and governments sprayed money everywhere like a firehose, and to fix that mess, central banks jacked up interest rates, so suddenly, money wasn’t cheap anymore. Loans got very expensive, and VCs pulled out. Startups couldn’t raise any money and Big Tech had to cut costs, and the first thing to go was. . . Yeah, you.

Your salary.

Your Slack channel.

Your espresso machine. Poof.

And another thing played out during the pandemic, tech companies thought the world was entering a permanent digital orgy. Everyone was on Zoom, we were all ordering groceries online, and bingeing Netflix, working remote, and everyone bought a dog or a cat. One of the results of this was that tech demand shot through the roof.

So what did companies do?

They hired like it was the cure for the rapture, and they were doubling or tripling headcount in some cases even.

But that demand wasn’t permanent.

The lockdowns lifted and people remembered what outside smells like, ans so they went back to normal stuff, like not buying 12 meal kits a week or doomscrolling annex bingewatching for 9 hours straight. That “forever digital economy” turned out to be a total illusion, and tech companies were left with bloated teams they really did not need.

Now the thing is that most CEOs and their execs don’t think like ‘normal’ people. They are rather focused on the short term (apart from family owned businesses - but that’s a whole different story). When profits are up, they don’t invest in people, ney, they invest in “efficiency”, aka firing folks and buying cloud infrastructure, stock buybacks, or yes, sometimes dividend payouts or buying yachts (or whatever counts as a “tax-optimized luxury asset” these days).

See, cutting jobs makes the balance sheet look better, and layoffs spike short-term stock prices. So this way the shareholders get happy, CEOs hit their performance bonuses, and the company saves cash to dump into AI, NVIDIA GPU or expand data centers in places no one can pronounce, and the workers who built the company are tossed like expired snacks.

So basically, these layoffs weren’t “strategic realignments”, nor AI related. AI isn’t the culprit, they were just panic purges because execs realized they’d bet the farm on a trend that fizzled.

Developer salaries rolled over and played dead.

Between 2018 and 2024, wages crawled up 24%, while the average U.S. worker clocked a 30% raise. So in hindsight we were not actually witnessing a tech boom, but just a rerun with worse snacks.

Silicon Valley, offered a $163K median to their devs and the needle hasn’t moved since TikTok was a dance app, whereas places like Salt Lake City and Orlando surged 35%, staying in San Francisco didn’t make anyone special, just kinda broke, delusional, and renting a shoebox from a landlord named Francois with a crypto fetish (heeeey @Francois ).

But internationally, it’s more of a slow-motion implosion.

India’s pipeline vomits out 300,000 CS grads every year (sic), but only 50K to 80K find a tech job with a pulse because of the hiring freeze, and the rest is left to code for $5K a year and praying the LinkedIn algorithm delivers divine intervention. A computer science degree, that once was a first-class ticket to tech Valhalla, is now nothing but a queue number for a talent lottery. . .that nobody’s gonna win.

The survivors carved out space with code and caffeine.

AI and ML engineers moved from niche to apex predator, and were churning out models like they’re dealing Schedule I narcotics. Cloud infrastructure experts bent AWS billing to their will, and data engineers who just manage pipelines before, now laid the steel bones of the LLM empire, and to top it all off, the security specialists locked down endpoints like the internet owed them money.

Though further down the ladder, reality bit hard.

Junior devs ran out of tutorials to copy. Manual testers clung to Selenium like it was a life raft. Product managers fumbled acronyms and hoped nobody noticed they couldn’t explain what a vector database does. Full-stack generalists rotted in GitHub purgatory, shipping half-baked features with zero performance tuning and all the swagger of a dying startup.

Startups collapsed into a sad cosplay of their former selves, without revenue by 2023, they became haunted co-working spaces living on investor fumes. The only pitch that lands nowadays starts with ".ai" and ends with begging. Everyone else just slapped AI-ridden buzzwords on their landing page and prayed for a term sheet that wasn’t a death sentence.

In the job market, being a generalists meant you were basically radioactive.

“Full-stack” became shorthand for “first to go”. Only hard numbers and niche mastery mattered in resumes and backend improvements, latency reduction, cost optimization got callbacks, but stuff like collaboration and “team player energy” landed résumés in trash bins. LLM babysitting, AI integration, model tuning, yes, those opened doors. The ones who got hired treated AI not as a threat, but as a toolbox with teeth.

And inside companies, survival demanded paranoia. ROI tracking turned into a religion. Skills like infra, ops, and dev tooling are the new flex. Value became measurable, and anything unquantifiable got labeled “nice to have”, which translated nicely into “replaceable”. Every employee became a spreadsheet waiting to be optimized. . . or erased.

And by 2025, AI-laced job titles exploded.

The roles grew sevenfold, and they were ballooning into the only part of the hiring funnel that wasn’t a funnel at all - it was a for the few, and a graveyard for the rest. Developers who were fluent in RAG, MLOps, FinOps, LLM orchestration ate steak while the masses F5-ed job boards and rewrote cover letters with copy-pasted enthusiasm.

Tech hiring didn’t rebound.

It filtered.

The bounce wasn’t a recovery.

It was a purge.

And the final blow didn’t come from a robot uprising. It came from capital discipline, boardroom cowardice, and systemic incompetence which they dressed up as innovation. Executives pulled the trigger. AI just made for a prettier alibi.

Microsoft talks about the mass layoffs amid record profits

Microsoft just laid off over 15,000 employees in 2025 and at the same time they are throwing billions at AI like Satya (Nadella, CEO) is suddenly a bored oligarch with a crypto wallet, and in his latest attempt to spiritually cleanse this corporate bloodletting, Nadella shot a memo in the ether which was thick with fancy, yet vague words like “paradox”, “dissonance”, and every other TED Talk euphemism for “we eliminated your team so we could buy more NVIDIA chips”, and all of this, while Microsoft’s stock breaks records and its AI spending surges past $80 billion (sic!) like they are trying to terraform Mars.

But the message is clear: progress costs jobs, but hey, at least managing the layoffs felt dynamic.

Inside the memo, Nadella delivered a poetic corporate eulogy for the recently terminated with lots of heartfelt thanks and empty calories. He called it the “enigma of success” and that, to me, sounds like such a smug phrase it should come with a non-disclosure agreement. They keep promising transformation and "opportunity", and at the same time they continue hoarding DeepMind expats like Pokémon cards, all while gutting teams with the surgical compassion of a hedge fund.

And Microsoft employees across the globe are clocking into a workplace that is soaked in fear and caffeine, where they are watching the “compassionate Microsoft” of the 2010s decay into a reboot of its cold, combative early-2000s self. They are the victim of sudden terminations, with no warning, silence from leadership - the vibes are immaculate if you enjoy internal power games.

The AI arms race is turning into a trillion-dollar talent war, but the average Joe is left polishing his CV and he’s wondering how a company can claim “record headcount stability” while their badge stops working.

And it is not only them.

The bottom 80% of workers now orbit the digital gig economy, where they are suddenly trying to make TikToks, fine-tuning prompts, or writing long-winded Medium, Substack or LinkedIn thinkpieces on “reinventing yourself”. And the top 20% is also busy automating the bottom into extinction, because they are now also deploying workflows that replace humans with function calls and polite error messages.

So where it started off as a problem with interest, cash and the afterglow of the pandemic, the second phase is still lurking in the dark - full automation.

Humans are now officially a deprecated feature, but if you believe the figures, things are going to change for the best.

Uh-huh (ever so cynical shrug)

Signing off, and quickly signing on again so people think I’m working hard.

Marco

[PS - if you are interested in receiving the full deck, just drop me a DM]

I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Big Tech keeps inflating its promises, and I bring the pins. I call that balance and for me it is also simply therapy.

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