Hey everyone,

Quick gut check: as of this week, 2026 has already logged more tech layoffs than all of 2025. With four months still left on the clock.

Zillow cut over 500 people on Monday. Google, TikTok, and Etsy all followed within days. That's not a slow news week, that's a full week of headlines nobody wants to read while job hunting.

Here's the part almost nobody's writing about: the same week those cuts landed, companies were offering LLM specialists $220K to $280K in base salary alone and still couldn't fill the roles fast enough.

This week we're breaking down how the same industry can be bleeding jobs and begging for talent in the same seven days, and which side of that line you actually want to be standing on.

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Let's start with the ugly number. As of August 10, layoffs.fyi has logged 322 layoff events this year, touching 205,832 workers. That's already more than all of 2025 (338 events, 205,773 people), and we've still got four months left on the calendar. Do the math and it works out to roughly 927 people losing their job every single day this year.

Zillow's round hit first this week: CEO Jeremy Wacksman announced just over 500 cuts on Monday, calling it "ensuring we have a disciplined cost structure." Google, TikTok, and Etsy all announced their own cuts within days of each other. Google framed theirs as a team-level reorg, not a company-wide layoff, which is the kind of distinction that matters a lot on a press release and not at all if it's your job.

What most CS students hear: nobody's hiring, the market's dead, why bother.
What's actually happening: two completely different job markets got compressed into one scary headline.

Here's the split. Entry-level generalist software engineering postings are down about 25 to 28 percent from their 2022 peak, and new grads now make up roughly 7 percent of Big Tech hires. Rough. But AI and ML engineering is living in a different universe: a 63 percent talent shortage, 500,000-plus open roles worldwide, and starting pay for AI/ML roles running around $134,000, well above the general software engineer starting range. LLM specialists are pulling $220K to $280K in base salary alone.

The lesson: this isn't "AI is coming for your job." It's "the jobs still standing are the ones sitting next to AI." Engineers with LLM integration, MLOps, or cloud infrastructure experience are reporting 3 to 5 times higher callback rates than generalist applicants right now.

Your move: open your resume right now. If it doesn't have a single project that touches an LLM, a model pipeline, or AI tooling you actually built something with, that's this week's assignment before you send out one more generic application. You don't need a PhD. You need one real project and the ability to talk about it for five minutes without sounding like you copy-pasted the README.

The market isn't dead. It's just gotten a lot more specific about who it wants.

Support Jobless: Forward this to a friend who's deep in application hell, drop us into r/csMajors if you think people there would want it, or check out the job board for roles we've actually vetted. Referring friends unlocks free resources, from an ATS-proof resume template to a full CS portfolio guide.

Until next time,
Team Jobless