Unemployment is spiking for US IT pros - unless you want to babysit bots
- Reference: 1749487210
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/06/09/it_unemployment_rate_janco/
- Source link:
The latest look at Bureau of Labor Statistics [2]data by IT management consulting firm Janco found that the unemployment rate for IT professionals spiked by nearly a full percentage point last month, rising from 4.6 percent in April to 5.5 percent in May. It's the fifth month in a row that the IT unemployment rate has exceeded the national average.
Most open IT positions, Janco noted in [3]the report , involve large language models, blockchain technology, and omnichannel commerce. Outside of those areas, it's slim pickings.
[4]
"IT opportunities for IT pros will be poor except for AI implementations, which focus on improved productivity and staff reductions," Janco stated.
[5]
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Most job losses are in the telecommunications sector and in roles related to reporting, monitoring, and support. The hardest hit will be IT pros with "legacy" skills in smaller markets like Nashville and Tulsa, while pros in bigger locations like New York and Dallas will have an easier time.
As has been the case in recent months, Janco believes AI is responsible for the elimination of many entry-level IT positions, particularly in telecoms, as well as in compliance reporting and management.
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"Companies do not have the desire to hire new staff to meet mandated compliance requirements," Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis wrote in the report. "Ergo, they are focusing on AI to automate as many of those tasks as possible, especially for reporting and monitoring."
In other words, managers see these jobs as a perfect fit for the AI buzzword of the moment: Agents
They took our jobs: Agentic AI finally knocks the mask off
[8]Agents are narrowly tailored AI applications programmed to make independent decisions toward a particular goal – like a workflow on LLM-infused steroids.
According to Big Four accounting firm EY, agents herald the next step in the evolution of enterprise AI and are rapidly gaining mindshare among business leaders looking for a way to get a [9]return on their AI investments .
In survey [10]results released last month, EY found that 48 percent of business leaders were adopting, or had already adopted, agentic AI in their organizations. A full 81 percent of respondents expressed optimism about AI's potential to help them meet their goals in the next year, and 92 percent said they expect to increase their AI spending in the next 12 months.
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"Our survey shows reaffirmations in ambitious AI spending and a move from pilots to production," EY noted. "That said, despite the optimism they're feeling, there's still tremendous pressure for these technology leaders to demonstrate return on investment now through measurement and tangible top-line and bottom-line results."
[12]Workday erases 8.5% of workforce because of ... AI
[13]IT pros are caught between an AI rock and an economic hard place
[14]Anthropic CEO frets about 20% unemployment from AI, but economists are doubtful
[15]Tech hiring stalls as AI hype, layoffs, tariffs, economic uncertainty, more collide
EY reports that the workplace impact of agentic AI adoption will be "mixed," with most respondents saying they would need to hire people with AI management skills, while also admitting that "a rebalancing of the workforce is still happening."
Indeed, employer job postings related to AI are up 117 percent year to date, CompTIA [16]noted in its latest jobs report for the month.
Meanwhile, Janco predicts that the slowdown will continue throughout the year due to economic uncertainty, and is predicting the third consecutive year of overall IT job shrinkage. In other words, if you're considering a career in IT, you'd better know how to babysit bots. ®
Get our [17]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/14/more-than-60percent-of-ceos-expect-a-recession-in-the-next-6-months-survey-says.html
[2] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
[3] https://itmanager.substack.com/p/it-unemployment-rate-jumps-to-55
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aEdZaoOb-PiwZXnJL856JQAAAE4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aEdZaoOb-PiwZXnJL856JQAAAE4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aEdZaoOb-PiwZXnJL856JQAAAE4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aEdZaoOb-PiwZXnJL856JQAAAE4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/23/agentic_ai_rsac/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/22/genai_roi_appen/
[10] https://www.ey.com/en_us/newsroom/2025/05/ey-survey-reveals-that-technology-companies-are-setting-the-pace-of-agentic-ai-will-others-follow-suit
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/aiml&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aEdZaoOb-PiwZXnJL856JQAAAE4&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/05/workday_restructure_job_cuts/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/05/between_the_ai_rock_and/
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2025/05/29/anthropic_ceo_ai_job_threat/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/09/it_hiring_slows/
[16] http://prnewswire.com/news-releases/uneven-tech-jobs-report-clouded-by-a-confluence-of-factors-comptia-finds-302475502.html
[17] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
If they had working backups
They wouldn't need to "recover" from ransomware, just wipe and restore.
Right you are!
I was made redundant in March, and nothing so far, nada. I will say I have more rejection replies at this time than I did before my previous job. Over 50% said "Soz old chap". AI, is that you answering my applications?
Babysitting
The IT job market isn’t collapsing - it’s being ritually harvested.
For years, companies sold the dream: tech was the future, code was the new literacy, and IT was the engine of innovation. What they didn’t mention was that the real job description was glorified babysitting.
You babysit the flaky infrastructure nobody budgeted to maintain. You babysit the CI/CD pipeline that breaks every other Tuesday because someone pushed a “quick fix.” You babysit project managers who’ve never seen a shell prompt but confidently assign you 3 sprints of work in one. You babysit product owners who change requirements mid-demo, and junior devs who commit .env files to GitHub. You babysit the printers, the coffee machine, the Slack channel, the passive-aggressive Notion board, and every piece of tech duct-taped into this Kafkaesque tower of false productivity.
And now, the corporations - bloated with buzzwords and allergic to wages - are replacing even that with AI “agents.” Not because they work better. Not because they’re safe. But because they don’t ask for a salary. Or parental leave. Or respect.
The irony? These agents won’t eliminate busywork. They’ll generate more of it - endless synthetic noise, half-broken automations, phantom tickets and hallucinated reports that still need a human to untangle them. But that’s fine, because the only thing cheaper than AI is the contractor you’ll offshore (and then onshore to keep an eye on them! - they also make a nice commercial property filler to keep the value of assets inflated) to fix the mess it made.
What’s left of IT isn’t a profession anymore. It’s a containment zone - a slow, quiet collapse buried under motivational posters, dead Jira tickets, and a CEO’s LinkedIn post about “embracing disruption” while laying off the last person who understood cron jobs.
Re: Babysitting
Two down votes shows you hit a nerve.
Have my upvote. Every word is a fact. The small percentage of the sheltered lucky ones who down-vote you can enjoy their luck while it lasts.
Re: Babysitting
These agents won’t eliminate busywork. They’ll generate more of it - endless synthetic noise, half-broken automations, phantom tickets and hallucinated reports
Sounds like how network monitoring was sold starting the late 90s. Free your staff to work on proactive projects, because they won't need to babysit systems any longer. The network monitoring tools would do that and generate a ticket telling you exactly what's wrong and where so it can be corrected without having to waste time looking for the source of the problem. Would have been fabulous if true.
I never once saw an organization that worked like that. Instead the IT staff was overwhelmed with junk tickets they spent most of their time in service desk tools instead of doing real work. I actually had a nine month consulting gig once at a big three automaker where my only task was to try to reduce the flood of tickets overwhelming the helpdesk and second level IT staff. I'd never done something remotely like that but like all my gigs it was via someone I knew from previous work and she was able to get me a rate I couldn't pass up. I just sorted tickets to find the biggest "problems" and attacked the top 20, finding root causes of things that had been popping tickets for years that no one bothered to dig deep enough to properly fix (probably because they were evaluated on metrics like ticket closures, which I advised the PHBs to stop doing) or just disabling the monitors in the case of those that were truly noise without meaning.
The total number of tickets went down by 90%, and I trained a couple of people on what I'd done at the end so they could keep attacking the new top 20. But in that last week I also caught wind that they were replacing their old monitoring solution with a new one next year. I always wondered whether a bunch of new tickets started flooding to them via misconfiguration or noise, and if they ended up back where they were when I started.
Re: Babysitting
Oh how I can relate to every word.
Have we worked at the same companies? Oh wait, it's everywhere.
There should be jobs in ransomware recovery.