The recovery recently for certain jobs makes me a little optimistic.

The slight recovery of “Software Publishers” and “Custom Computer Programming Services” is a good sign to me. The continued decline specifically of “Computer Systems Design” makes some sense too. They hired like crazy for that role, and unlike the programming or publishing roles, I think “systems design” is a more difficult position to hire well. It seems like a bad sign to me that so much of the over-hiring was for that role. Just hiring to hire. So that one might struggle for a long time but the Publisher and Programmer jobs will recover sooner.

I think a lot of companies jumped on the AI trend as an excuse to let go of people (and improve their short-term bottom line). Inevitably, they’ll need to hire again.