IT firing spree: Shrinking job market looks even worse after BLS revisions
- Reference: 1754325774
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/08/04/it_job_market_july/
- Source link:
The Bureau of Labor Statistics [1]reported relatively flat job growth last month, but unimpressive payroll growth numbers hid an even deeper reason to be worried: Most of the job growth reported (across all employment sectors) in May and June was incorrect.
According to the BLS, May needed to be revised down by 125,000 jobs to just 19,000 added jobs; June had to be revised down by even more, with 133,000 erroneous new jobs added to company payrolls that month. That meant just 14,000 new jobs were added in June.
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"Adjustments at those levels of magnitude are not acceptable from any organization," IT management consulting firm Janco said of the May and June modifications. Janco [3]blamed the modifications on "poor data capture, poor infrastructure, incompetence, or political gerrymandering," but regardless of the cause, it means that the IT job market is looking decidedly less healthy than it did a month ago.
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"According to the latest revised data by the BLS, the IT Job Market shrank by 26,500 YTD," Janco CEO Victor Janulaitis said of the latest data. "That is after adjusting the May data down by 4,300, June data down by 7,800 jobs, and reporting that 10,300 jobs were lost in July."
For those keeping count, that's 20,300 more than the 6,200-job shortfall at the same point in 2024, and we're now in what tends to be the worst half of the year for layoffs.
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The current year to date IT jobs market losses compared to 2024 - Click to enlarge
US President Trump [7]fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer shortly after the publication of the report, alleging BLS had rigged the data to make him look weak.
Uncertainty hurts
Janco, which for a long time has relied exclusively on BLS data for its monthly jobs report that focuses on IT employment, said that it plans to diversify its data sources because of the massive revisions.
Against that backdrop, Janco reports that BLS data peg the IT-sector unemployment rate at 5.5 percent in July - well above the national rate of 4.2 percent. Meanwhile, the broader tech occupation unemployment rate was just 2.9 percent, as [8]reported by CompTIA.
[9]Former and current Microsofties react to the latest round of layoffs
[10]Laid-off AWS employee describes cuts as 'cold and soulless'
[11]Intel swings the axe again as it looks to lose 5,000 staff
[12]Microsoft kicks off new fiscal year with more layoffs
Janulaitis blamed economic uncertainty for continuing to drag down IT hiring - a sentiment CompTIA agreed on, though the firm noted that there were still some bright spots of demand.
CompTIA stated that, while staffing reductions were made in IT, custom software services, cloud infrastructure and telecom, other roles such as developers and software engineers, system architects, support specialists, and cybersecurity mavens are among those in demand. Janco said that unfilled IT-specific roles tend to be related to AI, LLMs, Blockchain, and OmniCommerce technologies.
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For all that uncertainty, CompTIA noted that it did find some solid evidence of job growth in the AI space, though not for AI-exclusive roles, which haven't grown over the past two months. Instead, CompTIA said that roles with AI competency are where it's at.
"CompTIA's AI Hiring Index indicates relatively higher growth in hiring demand for the broad range of positions where employers require some type of AI skill to perform effectively in the job role," the certification firm said.
In other words, amid economic instability and AI inflation, landing a good IT job is tougher than ever unless you know how to engineer a good prompt. ®
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[1] https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aJEtaD419fmMafz2_HNJBgAAAAk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://itmanager.substack.com/p/bls-data-is-suspect?utm_campaign=email-post&r=4t6ypo&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aJEtaD419fmMafz2_HNJBgAAAAk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aJEtaD419fmMafz2_HNJBgAAAAk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/08/04/july-it-jobs-market-tyd.jpg
[7] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/economy/trump-orders-firing-bls-commissioner-weak-jobs-report-rcna222531
[8] https://www.comptia.org/en-us/about-us/news/press-releases/Latest-tech-employment-data-elicits-more-questions-while-answer-clarity-remains-elusive-CompTIA-analysis-finds/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/04/former_and_current_microsofties_react_layoffs/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/18/aws_sheds_jobs/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/17/intel_layoffs/
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2025/07/02/microsoft_layoffs/
[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aJEtaD419fmMafz2_HNJBgAAAAk&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[14] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: the future will be bright
i'm assuming the next set will be on a big bit of card and written with a sharpie
+1 for the tears reference!
Love the blade runner reference! But I can say the numbers aren't off. I've only worked 6 months out of the last 3 years, not working ATM. 40% of the technical staff at my last gig got the axe due to realignment\restructuring...Adding AI??? I'm not confident that it will change anytime soon. IT no longer pays the bills, I'm probably going to have to use skills from my previous career and strike out on my own.
This has been an ongoing problem.
While Trump is angry for all the wrong reasons (he didn't mind at all when the numbers were wrong in directions that favored him) the problems with BLS numbers being massively off and requiring significant adjustment are over a generation old. The methodology is an ancient joke. BLS doesn't count jobs. They do surveys then adjust the survey data in many different ways, some of them fairly subjective and open to political gaming. Of course there will be accusations.
Now imagine if some private organization produces numbers that move markets, drive political policy, shape investment and hiring / firing procesesses, and those numbers were consistently not just wrong, but wrong by multiples and sometimes an order of magnitude. Nobody would tolerate this. They'd be sued, regulated, imprisoned, or all of the above. But BLS (and many other government statistics bureaus) do this all the time and everyone just shrugs their shoulders like whatever.
ADP, the largest payroll processing company in the US, releases job statistics data on a regular basis and it's based on exact payroll counts. They're basically running a database query. This is far more vaulable than anything BLS shits out. The IRS (US tax processing agency) has mountains of payroll data sent to them on a weekly and monthly basis. Hard data exists, in massive quantieis. We've had computers that can do useful stuff with hard data for three quarters of a century now, and we put up with an agency that gives us a giant pile of guesswork. But government agencies don't want to change because they wouldn't need an office building or ten full of people playing spreadsheet games (during the 90 minutes a day that they might actually spend working), and politicians don't want to change a system that allows the numbers to be gamed.
Re: This has been an ongoing problem.
You are Donald Trump, and I claim my $5.
In a perfect world, yes there would be reliable hard data, available each month. In practice there's so many things that don't have hard data that it is essential to use estimates. To give one example, all of the smaller businesses and one or two man bands that don't have ERP software. There's 56m Americans employed by small businesses, that's a lot of people who aren't covered by gravy-train corporates that have a fancy ERP, HR dweebs to query it, and IT professionals to keep it working.
Re: This has been an ongoing problem.
I've owned a couple of small businesses in the US. Virtually nobody does their own payroll processing, because keeping track of the laws and regulations is major job and the penalties for noncompliance are severe - for small businesses they can be big enough to wipe you out. Not just that, employees want to be paid by direct deposit which is a pain (and expensive) to manage yourself at a small scale. Even large companies don't want to deal with this stuff. Pretty much everyone outsources to specialist companies, and so, yes, there is a lot of hard data concentrated in maybe two dozen companies covering 90+% of the workforce that's not being paid under the table.
Dogeing the path of a hurricane
"poor data capture, poor infrastructure"
You may call it that; Trump's donors call it efficiency savings. Accurate statistics cost too many of their tax dollars. More efficient to write made up numbers on a card with a sharpie.
If they want to keep their jobs...
...those revised stats will be happy stats that support Glorious Leader.
America is in a state of war with everyone, including its allies, and that is why King Donald has taken complete control. Only an enemy of the people would produce poor stats at such a time. Do you want to be paid at the end of the month or sent off to prison in South America on (data) corruption charges?
the future will be bright
wait for the next set of figures , they will be proper (fiddled) by Trump himself if he doesn't like it. That's it give 'em what they want to hear , everyone's happy.? hmm maybe not but the illusion of things going well for trump voters is enough to make them happy that it is. Dumb asses