The job market is running two stories at once. The U.S. economy added 304,000 jobs this year and the jobless rate is still 4.3%, while more than 85,000 tech workers have lost their jobs and recent grads are facing the worst unemployment in years.
Both stories are true. Investors trying to read where the economy is headed have to pick the right one.
Tech is taking the hit, with job cuts in the sector up 33% year over year through April. Meta announced 8,000 layoffs this week, roughly 10% of its workforce, while Intuit said it's cutting 3,000 jobs - about 17% of its global staff - as it speeds up its AI rollout.
Total U.S. layoffs across all industries are above 300,000 this year. That sounds rough until you remember last year's number was nearly double, padded out by federal cuts from the new Trump administration.
The CEO quotes tell the story. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg told staff "success isn't guaranteed" in the AI era, while Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei expects AI to wipe out as much as half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years.
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The other side reads differently, with Jeff Bezos recently telling CNBC he expects AI to drive a labor shortage. "It's going to elevate all of these people. We're going to have so much productivity," he said.
Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan, who warned about "automation anxiety" at Web Summit Vancouver, is still hiring software engineers, product managers, and sales leaders.
Steven Schwartz, CEO of the $1.6 billion creator marketplace Whop, said he expects a bigger team in two years than he has today. The pain isn't spread out evenly across the workforce.
The unemployment rate for recent college grads is 5.6%, above the 35-year average of 4.5%, according to the New York Federal Reserve. A Stanford study found 64% of Americans expect AI to cut jobs over the next 20 years.
President Trump pulled an AI executive order at the last minute on Thursday, with the order asking the federal government to pre-check frontier AI models for cybersecurity risk. Trump said he worried it could "be a blocker" to U.S. competitiveness.
For investors, the signal under the noise is where the cuts are landing. Top-of-the-org-chart hires keep coming, while bottom-of-the-ladder roles are thinning out the fastest.
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