- Tech sector employee confidence drops amid AI growth and job security fears.
- Glassdoor reports a 7.1 percentage point drop in tech employee confidence over the past year.
- AI advancements and past overhiring may be contributing to the uncertain outlook.
Employee confidence slipped again in February, and no sector is feeling worse than tech.
That’s according to Glassdoor’s latest Employee Confidence Index. Each month, the job listing and review website calculates the share of US employees who feel positive about their companies’ six-month outlooks.
The share of employees reporting a positive outlook fell to 44.3% in February, down from 45.9% in January. The report described “more weeks of winter for workers,” as confidence continues to cool despite scattered signs of improvement in the broader job market.
Among all industries tracked, technology stands out for its sour mood. Tech has experienced the largest year-over-year drop in employee confidence, with a 7.1 percentage point decline. In February, 47.8% of IT workers reported a positive outlook, down from 55% a year earlier. Confidence in the sector also fell 1.6 percentage points from January.
Glassdoor noted that despite rapidly increasing investment in AI and data centers, tech employees remain hesitant about their prospects after several years of cost cutting and layoffs. Big job cuts at Block and Amazon certainly don’t help the mood.
The sentiment downturn comes as the industry continues to adjust from what, in hindsight, appears to have been a period of massive over-hiring during the 2020 to 2022 pandemic boom.
At the same time, advances in artificial intelligence are raising fresh questions about job security. AI tools are beginning to automate portions of coding, threatening the once comfortable job prospects of some software engineers.
For now, even in a sector driving the AI revolution, workers appear to be bracing for a prolonged chill.
Sign up for BI’s Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at [email protected].
