The tech market shed over 130,000 jobs in 2025 while hiring jumped 25% year over year. For engineering hiring managers, both trends are real — and together they create a problem that requires a new playbook.
More than 130,000 tech workers lost jobs in 2025. In the same period, hiring across all industries climbed 25% year over year. Both figures describe the same labor market — and together they explain why engineering hiring managers keep running into the same frustrating experience: a flood of applicants and a shortage of the right ones.
This is not a contradiction. It is the defining feature of a bifurcated talent market, and navigating it requires a strategy that most teams have not fully updated.
The Numbers Behind the Paradox
The scale of 2025's tech displacement is hard to overstate. Data compiled by FinalRoundAI puts the tally at 130,981 tech workers cut across 434 distinct layoff events through late July 2025. The companies driving those numbers include some of the most recognizable names in the industry: Microsoft eliminated more than 23,000 positions across three separate rounds since May, Intel announced plans to remove roughly 24,000 to 25,000 people — approximately 15% of its entire global workforce — and Intuit cut around 4,800 employees, with its CEO explicitly citing AI investment as the destination for the freed-up capital.
At the same time, Challenger, Gray & Christmas data shows that hiring across all industries is running 25% ahead of last year's pace. July 2025 job cuts across the broader economy totaled 33,429 — the lowest single-month figure since July of the prior year — suggesting the pace of displacement is slowing even as its accumulated effects remain large.
The table below shows why the
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