Posts tagged labor market.
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.
The number-one breakout author in the Skillenai blog index in May 2026 is a man named Daniel Mercer who does not exist. He is the centerpiece of an AI-native Private Blog Network (PBN) — 221 fake bylines across 333 cheap cloud-themed domains — built to game a PageRank-style authority signal. This is the SEO content-farm attack of the 2000s, rerun on a labor-market corpus with LLM-generated content.
I tested my analogy that Forward Deployed Engineers are to AI Engineers what Solutions Architects were to Software Engineers. Across ~44K postings, the data agrees: FDE is literally AIE on the AI axis, SA on the customer axis. Plus, two twists I didn't expect.
Fortune today: spring 2026 hiring is broad-based. Jensen Huang: "software engineers are increasing." Both right at the aggregate. Drop a level and our US tech corpus shows tech has roughly two career-entry roles — Software Engineer and Data Analyst — and a longer list of post-experience lateral specializations (MLE, Platform, SRE, Backend).
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.
A new NY Fed study argues remote work, not AI, drives most of the post-pandemic rise in youth unemployment. 50,757 US tech postings show the matching supply-side fingerprint: % postings allowing remote rises monotonically from 24.6% at intern to 62.3% at staff, and the gradient holds inside every tech role.
A popular framing says Product Engineer sits at the intersection of Product Manager and Software Engineer. We measured the overlap across 35,067 job postings. There is no fat intersection region. Product Engineer is a modern-stack SWE archetype.
Python appears in 29% of tech postings (2x SQL) and uniquely dominates both edges of our knowledge graph — most-required by jobs AND third-most-mentioned in docs. Plus the salary twist: Python is the floor, not the premium.
