Posts tagged data science.
We traced 568,663 career histories back to the 1990s. Software Engineering fell from 69% of tech hiring to 41% - and the six roles that replaced it differ by 54x in how many of their people hold a PhD.
Data roles are a near-constant 10.5% of the tech org, from 10-person teams to 10,000+. What changes with scale isn't the size — it's the mix. And employers are hiring a very different mix than the workforce currently has.
Read the people, not the postings: national-lab data scientists build ML like Big Tech, while civil-service agency data scientists do statistics-and-reporting. Two different jobs under one title — and neither ever touches frontier tech.
We mapped the AI Engineer role from both sides — Skillenai's talent graph and job postings. Who feeds it, where they go next, and why the skills employers ask for don't match what workers list.
AI didn't torch the junior job market. A frozen labor market did — and the housing market, frozen by the same 2022 rate shock with zero AI, is the control group that proves it.
US employers ask 2.5x more generalist software engineers than AI engineers to build with LLMs, and the generalists do it in TypeScript and Ruby, without LangGraph. A demand-side look at who really builds AI.
Under identical titles, federal and private tech postings ask for different tools — a federal Data Scientist does statistics and reporting where a private one ships Python and experiments — and several modern data roles barely exist as federal jobs.
Federal tech jobs pay ~20% less than private — a gap that should drive workers out but doesn't. Using the new OPM workforce API, the Skillenai job index, and BLS, we price the public-sector bargain: near-zero mobility, near-total job security, and a pension that ties them together.
Middle managers' share of layoffs has climbed every year since 2020. We tested the two usual suspects — AI and remote work — against 97,500 US job postings. Both fail. The culprit that fits the timing is a title-inflation bubble we spent a decade blowing up.
A new LSE working paper used 243M hire records to argue remote work — not AI — caused the entry-level hiring collapse. We tested the prediction in today's US tech job postings, role by role. Every Bonferroni-significant broken ladder is in an AI-light role.
