How do you jump from “not attributable to AI“ to “must be a recession”? I think it would be true for jobs that are not separable from companies economic activity, but it isn’t true for a good portion of tech jobs. A car manufacturer can’t sell the same amount of cars while reducing a half of assembly workers, but most tech giants can maintain profitable parts of their business with a fraction of their workforce (if not indefinitely then at least for some time). Some work can be eliminated altogether, some might be outsourced to other countries, some split among existing workers. I think that’s what’s happening. Why it is happening, though? Hard to say for sure, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be a combination of tighter availability of capital, shrinking addressable market (due to deglobalization & demographics) and AI competition requiring huge capex