Talent churn: layoffs and poaching
The tech job market is bifurcating: large layoff waves (roughly 70,000 cuts across ~80 firms in Q1) coexist with active poaching from overseas recruiters moving dozens of U.S. AI researchers to China. That means some hiring windows open while senior system, silicon and manufacturing talent remain scarce and at high retention risk. Engineering managers will face selective hiring opportunities but continued competition for cross‑disciplinary experts. (news18.com) (x.com)
More than 71,447 tech workers had already been laid off by 80 companies by April 11, according to layoffs.fyi, even as the same industry kept bidding up pay for a much smaller group of artificial intelligence and chip specialists. (layoffs.fyi) That split looks strange only if you treat “tech jobs” as one market. In practice, a company can cut a recruiting team, a support team, or a legacy software unit and still pay aggressively for one engineer who knows how to train models, design chips, or ship servers into data centers. (layoffs.fyi) Oracle, Meta, and GoPro were among the companies reported in the latest 2026 cut wave, with the public tally climbing past 70,000 in the first three months of the year. The cuts tracked by layoffs.fyi were concentrated in a period when companies were redirecting spending toward cloud infrastructure and artificial intelligence products. (news18.com) (layoffs.fyi) At the same time, Chinese tech groups were not acting like buyers in a weak market. A February 21, 2026 report said ByteDance, Baidu, Alibaba Cloud, and MiniMax were actively recruiting in San Jose, Seattle, Sunnyvale, and San Francisco for artificial intelligence and semiconductor roles. (scmp.com) ByteDance alone had more than 100 artificial-intelligence-related openings posted in San Jose and Seattle, covering research scientists, engineers, and tech leads. Baidu’s Sunnyvale operation posted roles in central processing unit development, system-on-a-chip architecture, and design verification, which are the people who decide how a chip is built before a factory ever touches silicon. (scmp.com) The reason these jobs stay hot is that artificial intelligence now runs on a stack, not a single skill. You need researchers to build models, chip architects to squeeze performance from scarce hardware, and manufacturing and systems people to turn a lab result into a product that can survive in a data center. (scmp.com) China’s talent push is also backed by retention money at home. A December 30, 2025 report said ByteDance expanded its bonus pool by 35 percent, raised its pay-rise budget by 150 percent, and lifted pay floors and ceilings, while Tencent was reported to have offered some recruits as much as double their existing salaries. (scmp.com) This is happening against a much bigger pipeline shift. CNBC reported that China produced 3.57 million science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduates in 2020, compared with 820,000 in the United States, and cited researchers warning that the United States’ edge in artificial intelligence talent is narrower than its lead in advanced chips. (cnbc.com) So the hiring market is opening and closing at the same time. A midlevel software engineer from a shrinking business line may face a crowded job search, while a senior engineer who can connect model training, chip design, and large-scale deployment can still trigger a bidding war across Silicon Valley, Seattle, Shenzhen, and Beijing. (layoffs.fyi) (scmp.com 1) (scmp.com 2) For engineering managers, that means the window is selective, not broad. Layoffs create availability in generalist roles, but the people who understand systems, silicon, and manufacturing together are still rare enough that one resignation can set off the same kind of scramble as losing a star trader on Wall Street. (layoffs.fyi) (scmp.com)
