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In fact, young men with a college degree now have the same unemployment rate as young men who didn’t go to college, completely erasing the graduate employment premium. Whereas a healthy premium remains for young women.

What’s going on? At first glance, this looks like a case of the growing masses of male computer science graduates being uniquely exposed to the rapid adoption of generative AI in the tech sector, and finding jobs harder to come by than earlier cohorts.

But, plot twist: The much-discussed contraction in entry-level tech hiring appears to have *reversed* in recent months. In fact, relative to the pre-generative AI era, recent grads have secured coding jobs at the same rate as they’ve found any job, if not slightly higher.

This suggests tech’s hiring contraction of 2023-24 may not have been primarily a story of AI job displacement, but rather the downslope of the sector’s meteoric post-pandemic hiring boom, with recruitment now rebounding from that trough.

Is this data global? Because in the US, Section 174 of the tax code was removed in 2022, which meant R&D headcount was no longer tax deductible (more below). I have thought for a while now that was a large contributor to hiring issues, not necessarily AI. (174 was reinstated by Trump's Big Bill).

qz.comHow a tax code time bomb fueled mass tech layoffsA decades-old tax rule helped build America's tech economy. A quiet change under Trump helped dismantle it

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