An economy that needs fewer of us
The IT eldorado is over, and the people who built their lives on it are finding out what it rested on. The official statistics are slow to show it. The people living through it are not.
About 120,000 tech jobs were cut worldwide in the first half of this year, and the first quarter alone saw more than twice as many as a year earlier. May was the worst month for US tech job cuts in almost two years. Amazon has shed 30,000 corporate roles in two rounds, Meta a tenth of its staff, Block nearly half. These are companies reporting record revenue, and Amazon’s chief executive has said in plain words that AI agents mean the firm will need fewer people for some of the jobs done today. Some analysts think AI is partly the excuse, and that the savings pay for data centres. For the person laid off, the difference is academic.
In Poland the party ended in 2023, when IT job postings fell by a third in a year. The market that has come back since is a different one. Postings are up sharply in 2026, but more than 90 percent of them are for mid-level and senior people. Juniors get about 5 percent, and an entry-level listing draws 47 applications on average, 146 for a junior frontend role. In Kraków, where nearly half of all corporate jobs are in business services, group layoffs have run into the thousands two years in a row. HSBC is cutting about 400 jobs there and moving the work to India, and Shell has let 300 people go.
I have to be honest about what the headline numbers say, because they say something different. Kraków’s unemployment rate was 2.8 percent in August, up from about 2 percent at the end of 2024. In America recent graduates faced 5.6 percent unemployment against 4.2 percent overall, a Stanford study puts employment of workers aged 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed occupations about 19 percent below where it would otherwise be, and economists still argue about whether AI is the cause. Mass white-collar unemployment is not in the data. What is in the data is a ladder with its bottom rungs sawn off, and a middle class that has stopped feeling safe.
Remote work is where it bites hardest. Those who have a remote job mostly still have it, but new ones have dried up. Postings offering remote or hybrid work peaked at more than 10 percent of American job ads in 2022, and today only about 4 percent of new postings are fully remote, each drawing more than two and a half times the applications of an office job. On one of Poland’s biggest IT job boards, hybrid overtook remote this year for the first time in years.
So picture the engineer who spent the good years building a house two hours from any city, on a salary the local economy could never pay. While the job lasts, nothing has changed. On the day it ends there is nothing within driving distance, and the remote market that once competed for them now draws a crowd for every opening. They were rich, and on paper they still are.
And driving distance has shrunk. Petrol in Poland rose by more than a zloty a litre in the first days of September, when the reduced VAT on fuel expired just as Hormuz tightened again, and diesel reached a record 8.89 zloty in mid-September and has since passed 9 in some regions. Take the classic commute between Katowice and Kraków, about 160 kilometres a day. At today’s prices that is roughly 90 zloty of petrol for every day at the office, close to 1,900 zloty a month, and some 330 zloty more than in August. The job in the next city, which used to be the fallback, pays less every time the price board changes.
It is the same swap at household scale. A buffer, the job market within driving distance, traded for a dependency on one kind of employer staying generous. In 2021 it was the rational choice. So, a year later, was Qatari gas.