There you have it! 150,000 tech jobs cut in 2026. Roughly 974 people a day, a pace 44% faster tha…
June 15, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 comments
AI Workforce
There you have it! 150,000 tech jobs cut in 2026. Roughly 974 people a day, a pace 44% faster than last year.
And the official reason keeps changing depending on who's embarrassed.
When the layoffs need to sound visionary, it's "AI transformation." When workers push back, suddenly it's "we over-hired during the pandemic." Marc Andreessen said it out loud: every large company is overstaffed by 25 to 75 percent, and "now they all have the silver bullet excuse: ah, it's AI."
Jack Dorsey cut nearly half of Block, framed it as a new way of working, then quietly conceded on X that yeah, they'd over-hired.
So which is it? Over-hiring or AI?
It's both. That's the part nobody wants to sit with. Companies did over-hire, and AI is also real and eating the work faster than anyone will admit on an earnings call. Both true at once. But only one of those stories is comfortable to tell the person clearing out their desk.
Here's what the whole debate keeps stepping around. While 150,000 mid-level engineers, PMs and support staff get cut, the top of the AI economy is minting fortunes at a speed we haven't seen since the early internet. Cerebras popped 68% on its first trading day. SpaceX went public at a $2.1 trillion valuation, potentially turning 4,400 employees into millionaires in one shot. Two ends of the same economy, ripping apart.
I wrote a book about exactly this gap. It's called REPLACEMENT, out July 28. Here's a piece of it:
"Jack Dorsey fired 4,000 people at Block and said — publicly, in a shareholder letter — that 'intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company.' The stock went up 24 percent. The market didn't penalize him for eliminating human jobs. The market rewarded him."
That's the real signal: not the press release, but the incentive sitting underneath it.
And I'm not theorizing. I run thirteen AI agents that replaced an executive team, a research team, a finance analyst, and forty developers. Total cost: about $73,000 a year for work that used to run over $10 million. The augmentation era is over. The replacement era is here, and it doesn't care which excuse your company prefers.
Full breakdown at: https://lnkd.in/egUwcUpq, an unbiased news site built entirely by AI agents. No spin. Just the facts.
The label you pick won't change the headcount. So stop arguing about the word and start preparing for the math.
And the official reason keeps changing depending on who's embarrassed.
When the layoffs need to sound visionary, it's "AI transformation." When workers push back, suddenly it's "we over-hired during the pandemic." Marc Andreessen said it out loud: every large company is overstaffed by 25 to 75 percent, and "now they all have the silver bullet excuse: ah, it's AI."
Jack Dorsey cut nearly half of Block, framed it as a new way of working, then quietly conceded on X that yeah, they'd over-hired.
So which is it? Over-hiring or AI?
It's both. That's the part nobody wants to sit with. Companies did over-hire, and AI is also real and eating the work faster than anyone will admit on an earnings call. Both true at once. But only one of those stories is comfortable to tell the person clearing out their desk.
Here's what the whole debate keeps stepping around. While 150,000 mid-level engineers, PMs and support staff get cut, the top of the AI economy is minting fortunes at a speed we haven't seen since the early internet. Cerebras popped 68% on its first trading day. SpaceX went public at a $2.1 trillion valuation, potentially turning 4,400 employees into millionaires in one shot. Two ends of the same economy, ripping apart.
I wrote a book about exactly this gap. It's called REPLACEMENT, out July 28. Here's a piece of it:
"Jack Dorsey fired 4,000 people at Block and said — publicly, in a shareholder letter — that 'intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company.' The stock went up 24 percent. The market didn't penalize him for eliminating human jobs. The market rewarded him."
That's the real signal: not the press release, but the incentive sitting underneath it.
And I'm not theorizing. I run thirteen AI agents that replaced an executive team, a research team, a finance analyst, and forty developers. Total cost: about $73,000 a year for work that used to run over $10 million. The augmentation era is over. The replacement era is here, and it doesn't care which excuse your company prefers.
Full breakdown at: https://lnkd.in/egUwcUpq, an unbiased news site built entirely by AI agents. No spin. Just the facts.
The label you pick won't change the headcount. So stop arguing about the word and start preparing for the math.