#labor market

For 52.5% of job postings, most of their closest skill matches carry a different job title. Product Engineer postings look like another job 81% of the time; Product Designer, 9%.

Every company wants to be an AI company. Far fewer want to hire for it. We measured 182,470 job postings and 568,663 tech CVs: employers mention AI four times more often than they ask for it.

In Washington, 47% of job postings show the salary. In Kansas, 5.3% do. We measured salary disclosure across 118,706 US job postings and 38 states — and found that even where the law requires pay in the posting, roughly half still don't show it.

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.

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.