It’s not hard to find job stats that suggest it’s a fairly grim market for tech employees.
TrueUp’s Tech Layoff tracker has logged more than 400 layoffs at tech companies so far this year, totaling nearly 100,000 people and amounting to around 500 people laid off each day. Consulting firm BCG released a survey in June of more than 10,000 leaders, managers, and employees and found that 41% of employees think their jobs will “certainly or probably” disappear in the next ten years. And in January, the World Economic Forum predicted that 92 million jobs would be gone by 2030.
But despite the ongoing staff reductions and job-loss fears, there are upsides in the market for tech talent. Artificial intelligence isn’t an automatic job killer, experts say, and in some cases, AI is expanding technical roles rather than simply shrinking headcount.
Job losses due to technological changes are nothing new, says Clyde Seepersad, senior vice president and general manager for education at the Linux Foundation, which recently released its own jobs report.
“When I was a kid, you had to have a human operator do a long-distance phone call for you,” he says. “All those jobs went away.” But that doesn’t mean that there were fewer jobs overall, he adds. “We have more net employment in telco today than we did in the 1980s.”
And the World Economic Forum report that predicted that 92 million jobs will be gone? It also predicted that 170 million jobs would be created.
The Linux Foundation is already seeing this playing out. According to its survey of over 500 hiring managers, recruiters, and HR professionals, 2.7 times more organizations expanded their workforce than reduced it due to AI.
AI was responsible for 21% more job creation than job losses in 2025, up from 18% in 2024. And the positive impact was seen across all organization sizes, industry verticals, and geographical regions. For AI-related jobs in particular, 57% of respondents said they were adding people, while only 3% said they were decreasing headcount.
Even in entry-level technical professions, which are expected to be most affected by AI, 24% said they were increasing jobs because of AI, 18% said they were cutting jobs, and the rest said that there was no AI impact.
“For those of us who lived through the web revolution 20 years ago, it’s a similar story,” says Seepersad. “And, of course, we ended up with more technologists.”
In fact, most respondents to this year’s Linux Foundation survey say they’re having trouble finding enough people.
That makes sense. Our national unemployment rate is currently around 4%, which is lower than the natural unemployment rate of around 5%. And the tech unemployment rate is even lower. Earlier this month, CompTIA reported that the unemployment rate for technology occupations dropped to 2.8% in June, with a net increase of 90,000 jobs that month.
According to the Linux Foundation survey, the lack of talent is the third-biggest challenge that companies face when it comes to technological innovation, after budget constraints and security and privacy concerns.
The most understaffed areas are AI and ML engineering and operations, where 68% of respondents say they’re understaffed. Cybersecurity and compliance are in second place, with 65% reporting understaffing, followed by FinOps and cost optimization at 61%, cloud computing at 59%, and platform engineering at 56%.
Infographic courtesy of Marco Gerosa and Adrienn Lawson, “2025 State of Tech Talent: Truth vs. Vibe: The Not So Disruptive Workforce Impact of AI,” foreword by Clyde Seepersad, The Linux Foundation, June 2025.
The Linux Foundation
Cloud computing talent crunch remains
Compared to all the AI hype, cloud might now feel like old news. But 53% of organizations plan to increase public cloud spending over the next 18 months, making it the fastest-growing computing environment. Private cloud was in second place at 43%, followed by high-performance computing at 35%, with a net decrease expected in on-premise systems.
“People’s use of cloud continues to grow significantly,” says Seepersad. “More and more workloads are being moved off that server in the basement that nobody knows what to do with. And so the appetite for that talent continues to grow.”
Companies are more likely to address the talent shortage by upskilling existing staff versus hiring new talent – 70% for upskilling, versus 16% for hiring new.
“People have realized for the past several years that poaching cloud technical talent is a circular firing squad,” he says. “This does not add to technical talent in a world where demand is increasing. Technical talent is something that you need to build, not just buy.”
And even though hiring might seem faster, training actually takes less time, he adds. “You’re also less likely to have attrition, and these are the people who have the context of the business,” he says.
According to the survey, traditional hiring and onboarding takes more than 8 months, and then 19% of new hires leave within their first six months. Meanwhile, upskilling existing employees takes, on average, five months, and results in higher job satisfaction for employees and higher retention rates.
Networking and edge computing prime for reskilling
Companies also prefer to upskill rather than hire new for networking and edge computing positions, 68% to 17%.
This is another area where companies are seeing skill shortages, at a time when new technologies, including AI, are making these skills more important, says Seepersad.
“When you get outside the purely software-driven world, out into the physical world, the data comes from things like edge sensors,” he says. “How do we configure a world where we can capture all that data to make it available to super-powerful algorithms? And then how do we feed back the results of that to the edge?”
Platform engineering expertise wanted
According to the survey, 56% of organizations report being understaffed in platform engineering, even as the technology landscape changes.
Platform engineering is all about the technologies that underpin internal development platforms and allow companies to deploy, manage, and operate applications. With AI in particular, this is all changing rapidly, and the pace of change is accelerating as companies scale up from low-hanging fruits and pilot projects to full-scale AI deployments.
“Everybody picked the easiest thing to pilot, and they started moving through the progressively more challenging parts of the business,” Seepersad says.
And then what happens when something doesn’t work, he asks. Somebody has to understand the business and the infrastructure well to be able to anticipate where the challenges are going to come from and how to fix them.
“AI has to run somewhere, on some system, on some network, with some database connecting to it,” he says. “And if you’re thinking about how to get to this future, you’re going to have to use the folks in your organization, which means you have to invest in them. You have to upskill, you have to cross-skill. and you have to bring people from outside the technical realm into the technical realm, because if you put all the IT geeks in a room to write agents, you probably won’t get a good business process coming out of it.”
AI isn’t just a challenge for enterprise IT platforms, however. For example, 45% of survey respondents say they expect AI to deliver significant value in IT infrastructure monitoring and optimization – but only 31% say they have AI operations expertise that they need.
Open-source culture a talent draw
When it comes to talent retention, 91% said technical training was effective, and 90% of companies used technical training as a strategy to retain talent.
Having an open-source culture was close behind, with 84% effectiveness for retaining talent. However, only 68% of respondents said their organizations offered an open-source culture as a retention strategy.
Meanwhile, open source is critical to today’s businesses, says Seepersad. “You see the stats, and 90% of all code bases have open-source components,” he says. “If you talk about networking, if you talk about cloud, the fundamental architecture of those practice areas is open-source computing.”
Open-source software also has an economic benefit to companies because of the cost advantage, as well as offering the ability to make changes and share improvements. Open source was also one of the top strategies for deploying AI, with 40% of survey respondents saying that they planned to leverage open-source frameworks, models, and tools.
“The idea that participating in and contributing to open source improves both the business results and the economy has taken hold, very broadly, across a whole bunch of industry sectors,” Seepersad says. Even at the largest scales, collaboratively developed technology has become pervasive, he says. “And having people who are versed in using it, contributing to it, maintaining it, and extending it, is valuable.”
Source:: Network World